Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time

CHAPTER 1

Understand the Organization-Wide Benefits of a Total Onboarding Program: An Executive Summary

A Total Onboarding Program can dramatically improve the performance, fit, and readiness for the job of every person who takes on a new role—both new hires and internal recruits. Onboarding helps to build, sustain, and perpetuate high-performing teams. More important, an organization-wide onboarding program for new employees, promotions, role shifts, and other transitions can be a culture-shaping sustainable competitive advantage.

Onboarding is the process of acquiring, accommodating, assimilating, and accelerating new team members, whether they come from outside or inside the organization. The prerequisite to successful onboarding is getting your organization aligned around the need and the role.

• Align: Make sure your organization agrees on the need for a new team member and the delineation of the role you seek to fill.

• Acquire: Identify, recruit, select, and get people to join the team.

• Accommodate: Give new team members the tools they need to do the work.

• Assimilate: Help them join with others so they can do the work together.

• Accelerate: Help them and their team deliver better results faster.

Effective onboarding of new team members is one of the most important contributions any hiring manager or human resources (HR) professional can make to the long-term success of his or her team or organization. Effective onboarding drives new employee productivity, accelerates delivery ...