Onboarding
Onboarding is one of those frequently used, ill defined bits of HR Jargon. It’s slightly more business-y that ‘having issues around xxx’ but less tangible than succession planning. It’s one of the top 5 HR buzzwords of the great recession.
When software vendors use the term, it can mean anything from ‘managing and tracking all of the necessary actions and forms‘ to ‘automatically having all of the necessary forms filled out in advance’ to ‘having a data bundle ready for the HRIS system to import’. When Learning and OD people use it, it means a range of things that look a lot like an orientation. Onboarding consultants will insist that the term means something much more than the traditional orientation.
The best way to think of onboarding is that it is everything required to bring a new employee up to optimum performance.
In practice, the degree to which companies invest in cultural alignment activities varies widely. The primary argument, that early investment in employee performance pays off handsomely over time is an old one. Busy managers hire new people because they are, well, busy. As smart as an early intense orientation might be, hiring often happens in an environment where that isn’t possible.
Introducing onboarding, which probably does improve retention and net productivity, usually requires breaking a pretty difficult cycle. As we shrank our organizations, they became increasingly swamped. Onboarding assumes a level of clarity about vision and direction that isn’t widely available.
It may be the case that the decision to embrace onboarding in a determined and comprehensive way signals a company’s decision to move beyond simply reacting to the market. Gaining a strategic footing ought to be a primary concern as the relentless downward economic pressure starts to abate (or at least the level of pressure is stabilizing).
Reactive operations fail. Proactive organizations flourish. It’s that simple.
Pretty obviously, the optimal effort involved in onboarding depends on the organization, the employee and the complexity of the task. Entry level players take less time to reach productivity than senior leadership. People who have lots of responsibility and little authority (producers and program managers, for example) have lengthy acclimation horizons.
It’s onboarding week at the HR Examiner. In the coming days, we’ll interview a couple of amazing onboarding experts and have the dean of onboarding offer a view of their story. This week’s In The Know is devoted to onboarding resources.
