Leadership
Common problems with Onboarding Programmes are:
- A lack of planning for the first day, the first week and the first month of the new hire.
- No clear objectives of the Onboarding Programme.
- Information overload and business numbers that don’t make any sense to the new hires.
- Death by presentation.
- Monologues by the senior management.
- Outdated content.
- Little focus on the competencies required for the new hire.
- Generic content, with little relevance to the new employees’ role.
- No plan to map the Onboarding Programme to a 6 month/1 year journey for the new hire.
- A lack of measurement of the programme’s effectiveness.
- No follow-up; the new hires being left to fend for themselves.
- High cost of Onboarding due to a lack of standardization.
These are some steps that organizations can take to make their Onboarding Programme more effective:
- Be prepared and have an agenda for the first day that includes a mix of formal meetings and informal chats with key people in the department and the organization in general.
- Ensure that the new hire’s manager is ready for them; that they have time set aside on the first day and during the first week to discuss the role for which the hiring has been done.
- Have clear objectives for the Onboarding Programme that can be revisited and measured.
- For a group Onboarding, design a programme that speaks to all participants equally, although their roles in the organization may vary.
- Standardize and update key materials, templates and resources required to ease reproducibility.
- Train your presenters to come across as people who care for the new employee and not machines rattling off company figures from a slide-deck.
- For critical positions, have an individual Onboarding Programme that interlinks with the proposed career path for the new hire.
- Prepare a plan to engage with the new employees after the formal Onboarding is over.
- Measure the impact of the training programme through means like retention, speed to competence, learning curve assessment, and loop feedback to improve the next Onboarding.
- Create a system to upgrade the content on a regular basis.
- Seek to reduce the overall cost of the Onboarding program by streamlining and standardizing the process as far as possible.
Amandeep Grover is a Senior Consultant at Performance Development Services. He is a Dale Carnegie certified trainer with experience of developing people at all levels in organizations.
He specializes in partnering with individuals and focus-groups to help them improve behavior, break down barriers and enhance capability through sustained coaching and mentoring.
www.performancedevelopmentservices.com