Culture Hacker

4Orientation and OnboardingYour Sink-or-Swim Strategy Is a Terrible Waste of Talent

A good first impression can work wonders.

—J. K. Rowling, author¹

Once you have decided to hire a person to join your organization, the next step in the process is to orient and onboard them. It is important that any new staff members connect emotionally with the organization and are set up for success in their first 30 days. Unfortunately this is often not the case. As a result, I believe the orientation and onboarding process is one of the most poorly managed and under-delivered cultural mechanisms for many organizations.

If you are really serious about setting your staff up for success and ensuring they have the right attitude and mindset to be successful from the beginning, you cannot continue to ignore the orientation and onboarding of your new people. We see organizations invest heavily in getting the right people hired and then fail to introduce, immerse, and train them correctly. Consider how staff members start their new jobs with you and whether or not you set them up for success. Do you do anything to connect them emotionally to your brand? Do you introduce them to your values or show them how to be successful with you? Do you have an organized and systematic approach to getting people trained in an environment where learning can happen and mistakes made? Unfortunately, most of the companies we begin working with answer no to most of these questions. As a result, they answer yes ...