A common and obvious extension of traditional new hire onboarding is the onboarding requirements when two organizations merge (and more common when one is subsumed into another) as a result of an acquisition. Today’s New York Times has a great story on the challenges with the merger of BusinessWeek (sold by McGraw-Hill) into Bloomberg News. Everything is new for these veteran ex-BusinessWeek employees — culture, process, strategy, etc. — and they also have all of the “survive, let alone thrive” stress of becoming a staff member at a different organization.

What do you believe Bloomberg should do beyond what is outlined in this article? Do you know of anyone on either side of this merger? Any insights to share?

“An Uneasy Marriage of the Cultish and the Rumpled”: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/business/media/26bizweek.html

We are excited to recognize one of our clients, Booz Allen, for winning a 2010 Bersin & Associates Learning Leader Award for “Learning and Talent Initiative Excellence” (http://bersin.com/leaders/2010_winners.asp).    Booz Allen won this award for the recent redesign of its new hire onboarding program.

In the award announcement, Bersin & Associates commended Booz Allen for “improved job readiness of new hires” as well the “efficiency gains, stronger employee affiliation with the firm, and reduced attrition” that have resulted from Booz Allen’s onboarding program improvements.    As a key partner in Booz Allen’s onboarding redesign effort, we are extremely proud of the program’s success and the industry recognition that it has received.

For more information regarding Booz Allen’s onboarding redesign effort, you can refer to Chapter 9 of our book, Successful Onboarding.   Chapter 9 discusses…

The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) has awarded Kaiser Associates a 2009 “Excellence in Practice” citation for our role in the design and development of a formal, year-long onboarding program for our client, Booz Allen.

ASTD writes of the enhanced Booz Allen program: “The onboarding program promotes accountability while creating value for new hires and the firm.  Immediate results include reported improvements in new hire job readiness and time-to-productivity, as well as efficiency gains from the elimination of duplicative processes.”

Kaiser Associates is honored to receive an “Excellent in Practice” citation from ASTD.   For more detail regarding this ASTD recognition, please refer to the 2009 ASTD Awards Packet (Page 16): (http://www.astd.org/NR/rdonlyres/1079E047-4A25-4A63-A39F-1DAEF1C69808/0/AwardsBookletfor2009Awards.pdf).

Today’s (May 25, 2010) Wall Street Journal has an article titled “More Workers Start to Quit.”

This article highlights an incredible trend — when considered in light of the current unemployment figures — the trend being: for the first time since October 2008, the number of people who quit their jobs in March 2010 exceeded the number of people who were laid off in the month. Most concerning, for those of us who worry about retaining talent, is that the monthly figure of those who quit is still about 500,000 less than its traditional average and about half of what it was in periods between 2005 and 2007. We should quite reasonably expect this figure to increase significantly— for all of the reasons outlined by the Journal. Unless we are hit with a double dip recession, the…

We wanted to bring to your attention an article published in the Wall Street Journal on April 18, 2010, entitled, “Ten Things Human Resources Won’t Tell You”.  While much of the article serves as advice for the employee in maximizing their experience with HR, the Journal also speaks to the need for HR to take on a more active role in driving company performance – something that we certainly endorse.

The author, Jim Rendon, points out the fact that in recent years, HR departments have been under increasing pressure to justify their resources and impact the company’s bottom line.  As evidence, Jim cites a study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) where head count for the average HR department fell from 13 employees in 2007 to 9 employees in 2008 – we are sure partially driven by the economic and labor market (i.e., recruiting downturn).

Given our experience, we…

We are excited to formally introduce, and widely share, highlights of some important work that we have been doing on the Onboarding front. These include a new website, our new book, lots of underlying research and framework development as part of our book (Successful Onboarding, McGraw-Hill release date of June 26, 2010).

When we started the book development exercise we reexamined many of our frameworks and tools.  We discovered that while large portions of our original frameworks held up well, there were some pieces that had become a bit dated and some critically important pieces of the solutions that we were bringing to our clients were left out altogether.  Today we are beginning to formally share many specific developments of this work with our onboarding friends.  We invite you to read a lot more than we can reasonably include in this message at our new website www.onboardingmargin.com.

As you…