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Onboarding: How To Make People Care About It and Do It Right
It’s very important to how employees perceive your organization.
The “Big Issues” Series
Do people seem to care about onboarding as a topic?
Ah, on-boarding. (Or is it “onboarding?”) The process of a new employee’s first day/days/weeks/months. It’s something every company should have a plan for, but almost none ever seem to. People view it as a transactional thing: meeting with your boss, walk-through with HR, lunch with your boss, set up your cube, and then go home. On Day 2, your boss FWDs along some project you’ll be “spear-heading,” and you hit the ground running. The next time you have a conversation with HR will be about insurance when you can opt-in, and the next time you have a convo with your boss will be whenever they have time; after all, there’s not even time on the ol’ Outlook calendar to respect you.
Onboarding is near and dear to my heart, even though I’ve never worked in the HR space officially. Think about it: this is someone’s first impression of your internal culture. And yet every company gives approximately zero shits about it. Why is that? Isn’t that kind of backwards? Shouldn’t we be setting big, hairy, ambitious goals on Days 1–5? Shouldn’t we be talking about you at your best and what that looks like? Why does no one care about this at all? (Is it because “we’ve always done it that way?”)
Anyway, mini-rant aside … Harvard Business Review did a little write-up on onboarding processes and failures earlier today. Some of the stuff is sobering.
