Onboarding Is Not Just Orientation
Strategic onboarding is essential to the success of both new employees and organizations.
By designing an experience that is strategic and memorable, you are more likely to develop deep engagement and loyalty before their first day on the job, resulting in improved retention and positive brand awareness.
Onboarding, interestingly, should actually start before any selection process begins.
Great onboarding answers the question, “once here, how will we introduce them to our culture, their team, their job?”
Onboarding is NOT Orientation
Many times, organizations confuse their one-time, new employee orientation event with onboarding. It’s NOT!
Orientation is where new employees fill-out forms, receive checklists and focus on the many transactional items. Many companies stop there leaving the leader and others to figure things out for themselves. This ignores onboarding as the strategic process and series of events it needs to be.
When onboarding has a strategic business focus, the process becomes further integrated with the selection process. Onboarding can now serve as a conduit between the selection process and empower new employees and leaders to become fully productive, understanding how their work contributes to the overall organization.
Fundamentally, as with a selection process, onboarding should be consistent across the organization, with slight variations depending on the size and scope of the role.
Get a Fast Start for Leaders
Successful organizations onboard leaders using a process that is consistent and replicable across the organization, varying only slightly for location, role, or status. In these cases, employers enjoy higher levels of morale and lower levels of turnover.
Whether you’re onboarding new leaders from within or from another organization, you need a tool that will help your leader get to know their team quickly and demonstrate their ability to build relationships and lead their team.
Becoming an effective leader, though, requires a deep understanding of the things and people outside themselves – not only their direct reports but colleagues, managers, senior leaders and support staff, as well as how the organization functions, its culture and structure, its strategic goals and how the leader fits, and its place within the industry it operates.
How do you put such a task into a replicable process? Download the full Getting a Fast Start – New Manager Onboarding Guide on our home page and find out!
You put the time into selecting the right leader. You want them to be successful. We can help. Download the Onboarding Guide today and share it with your leaders.
