It’s Onboarding Time!
Written by Harish Suri of Westminster Consulting.
Harish.Suri@westminsterconsulting.ca
Finally the interviews are done, hiring targets have been met, offer letters have been rolled out, accepted and joining dates confirmed by the selected candidates – all systems are a go – countdown initiated…in 3, 2, 1…HR ignition ON – Onboarding is in progress – we have visual of new employees.
Many in HR, especially folks who are responsible for the onboarding process of new employees will have no apprehension in describing how stressful of a time it is for them to coordinate the arrival of new employees into the organization. Lining up schedules of the onboarding sessions/training/mentoring programs over the day/week/months which follow after the rush of excited and eager employees settle in.
Okay, it may not be as chaotic as a large crowd of shopaholics waiting since 3:00 am for the doors of Walmart to open on Black Friday. The look on both the staff and the customers says it all. You get the picture! As essential as it is, the onboarding process is indeed a time consuming exercise and exhausting for all involved.
During the onboarding process, the organization’s objective is to maximize the success of making the new employees feel welcome fast and prepare them for their new jobs in the shortest time, getting them to quickly start contributing to meet business goals. It’s a leap to comprehend the most in the shortest time. Stressful!
A few years ago, many large organizations realized that the traditional ways of executing the onboarding process is really expensive and not the best way going forward. It is not feasible to transport new hires to headquarters, book conference rooms and hire instructors to welcome new employees to their orientation classes. It’s a really expensive exercise to conduct and a drain of resources.
Like in most chaotic scenarios within organizations, concerned stakeholders wish for a super solution to take care of everything. In this case, the super solution or super hero in whichever way you wish to visualize is Learning and Development.
Organizations who adapt to current learning technologies/solutions early have the advantage to leverage on their Learning and Development capabilities and provide various engaging and effective learning experiences to their employees, new and current. The approach will help cut travel costs drastically or eliminate them completely. For example, introducing professionals to instructor led online training classes that are flexible offers freedom to learn from anywhere thus eliminating travel completely.
Embracing a blend of technology based learning and instructor led learning is a must in today’s flat world work models. Organizations need to capitalize on learning technologies and strategies which enable attainability, flexibility, trackability, scalability and most importantly the distribution of information and knowledge in a quick and timely manner regardless of geographies. This helps in adjusting the social and performance aspects of new jobs for new employees quickly and smoothly and is in turn, a win-win mantra for cutting down organizational overheads and achieving maximum success.
To put it in some kind of a tangible solution package, the organizational business objectives of the four building blocks of successful onboarding are Compliance, Clarification, Culture and Connection. The four C’s, as they are called, need to be analyzed in detail, mapped to appropriate blended learning strategies and accordingly onboarding learning maps designed and implemented to mutually maximize success.