Onboarding

[Note that a lot of thinking in this topic is drawn from my new book, Onboarding¸ which started shipping in August 2009.]

Onboarding is the process of acquiring, accommodating, assimilating and accelerating new team members, whether they come from outside or inside the organization. Acquire: Identify, recruit, select and get people to join the team. Accommodate: Give new team members the tools they need to do work. Assimilate: Help them join with others so they can do work together. Accelerate: Help them (and their team) deliver better results faster.

It's important to keep two perspectives on onboarding going at the same time: those of the hiring organization and of the new employee.

Onboarding from the perspective of the hiring manager or organization

Effective onboarding of new team members is one of the most important contributions any hiring manager or HR professional can make to long-term success. Onboarding done right drives new employee productivity, accelerates results, and significantly improves talent retention. Yet few organizations manage the pieces of onboarding well. Even fewer organizations use a strategic, integrated and consistent approach like the one described in this article.

Why? Because onboarding is not something you do every day, it’s hard to get good at. With deliberate practice, however, you can accumulate best practices onboarding expertise. This article (and the book of the same title) shows you the way, step-by-step.

Total Onboarding Program (TOP)

A Total Onboarding Program will take your organization to a new level of effectiveness by improving and integrating the disconnected experiences and messages new employees get during the recruiting and on-the-job learning process. This is a powerful, vulnerable time in the life of an employee. It represents the most important “teachable moment” your organization will ever have. If you can plan and use onboarding to put each new employee and the organization in full alignment, you will make a material difference in your business results over time.

A Total Onboarding Program is not about re-inventing the wheel. Most people understand or can navigate through the basics of acquiring, accommodating, assimilating and accelerating new employees. Our premise is that things work better when all efforts point in the same direction. When onboarding efforts align you get more done in less time by:

• Compressing recruiting, hiring and assimilation time.
• Reducing hiring mistakes by making everyone, including prospective hires, fully aware of what the job requires - from the employee and from the organization.
• Reducing new employee buyers remorse to greatly improve retention.
• Aligning new employees with critical business strategies.

Total Onboarding Program Steps

PREPARE FOR YOUR NEW EMPLOYEE’S SUCCESS BEFORE YOU RECRUIT

1. Understand the organization-wide benefits of a Total Onboarding Program.

2. Clarify your destination, write a recruiting brief, and craft your messages to the candidate and the organization.

Start by stopping to reconfirm your organization’s purpose, priorities and desired results. How will your new employee contribute? Think through what went well and less well when you and/or your organization onboarded new employees in the past. Map out clear, simple messages about this onboarding: your message to stakeholders, your message to candidates, and your message to your new employee.

3. Craft your onboarding plan, and align your stakeholders.

Start by crafting a plan that builds on your recruiting brief, and a Total Onboarding Program timeline. Share your thinking with others. Get input. Align important players around your plan. Investment of time here makes everything else more effective and efficient.

RECRUIT IN A WAY THAT REINFORCES YOUR MESSAGES

4. Create a powerful slate of potential candidates.

Take charge of the employee acquisition process by creating and executing a new employee plan. Start with your target. Layout where you will “fish”, with what tools, timelines and milestones. Live your employment brand every step of the way. Create options by assembling a deep slate of strong candidates all at the same time. With options, you won’t feel you have to close the sale with your lead candidate if it’s not 100% right for everyone.

5. Evaluate candidates against the recruiting brief while pre-selling and pre-boarding.

While candidates can focus on getting the offer, and then take a step back to evaluate the opportunity, you have to buy and sell at the same time. We use a strengths-focused, targeted selection/behavioral approach to interviewing with good success. Complete the interviewing process with formal post interview de-briefs, additional information gathering, and post interview follow-ups with candidates to learn even more (and set up closing the sale later).

6. Make the right offer. Close the right sale - the right way.

You know your organization is awesome. Just remember that a potential new employee may need to be convinced. So treat the offer as just one part of a strategic sale. The way you handle the offer and support your offeree’s due diligence efforts will impact the way he or she feels about you and your organization, with implications far beyond whether the answer is “yes” or “no.” You want offerees to say yes if taking the job is the right move for them, their supporters, and the organization over time. You want a “no, thanks” if it’s not.

GIVE YOUR NEW EMPLOYEE A BIG HEAD START BEFORE DAY ONE

7. Co-create a personal onboarding plan with your new employee.

Co-creating a personal onboarding plan starts your working relationship. Listen, and demonstrate how much you value your new employee. Work together to think through the job, and its deliverables, stakeholders, message, pre-start and Day One plans. Document a 100-day action plan, and clarify who will do what next.

8. Manage the announcement to set your new employee up for success.

How you make the announcement is one of the most important ways you influence how welcome, valued and valuable your new employee feels. Think through and implement these steps:

• Map stakeholders.
• Clarify messages.
• Lock into the timing and wording of the official announcement.
• Map out whom to talk to before the announcement, when and how.
• Map out whom to talk to after the announcement, but before the new employee starts.
• Implement, track and adjust as appropriate.

9. Do what it takes to make your new employee ready, eager and able to do real work on Day One.

Total Onboarding requires the hiring manager to lead each new employee’s onboarding experience from start to finish. If you are a hiring manager, start by creating the overall TOP plan. Get people aligned around your TOP onboarding plan and its importance. Take primary responsibility for execution of your TOP onboarding plan across people and functions. If you are the HR manager, help your hiring managers create and execute their TOP onboarding plans.

• Accommodate work needs (desk, phone, computer, ID, payroll, forms, etc.)
• Accommodate personal needs. (family move, housing, schools, etc.)

ENABLE & INSPIRE YOUR EMPLOYEE TO DELIVER BETTER RESULTS FASTER

10. Make positive first impressions both ways.

Mind the details to prepare a first day that is in line with the opportunity/shared purpose and to put your new employee in a position to do real work starting Day One. Everything communicates. Pay attention to what people hear, see and believe. Pay attention to the impact your organization makes on the new employee. Pay attention to the impact your new employee makes on the organization. Design the Day One experience as you would a customer experience. Don’t leave first impressions to chance, because while people don’t always remember what others did or said, they always remember how they felt.

11. Speed development of important working relationships.

Assimilation is a big deal. Doing it well makes things far easier. Getting it wrong triggers relationship risks. There are a couple of things beyond basic orientation that can make a huge difference. We suggest you set up onboarding conversations for your new employee with members of his or her formal and informal/shadow networks. Do periodic check-ins with those networks. If there are issues, you want to know about them early, so you can help your new employee adjust.

12. Provide resources, support and follow-through.

The first step in giving your new employee the resources and support he or she needs is confirming your own requirement and appetite for change. If all you need is for your new employee to assimilate into the existing culture, you can probably mentor him/her yourself or with an internal coach. However, if achieving the desired results requires your new employee to assimilate into and transform the team, you will need to bring in external assistance. (If insiders could transform your culture, they would have done so already.)

Make sure your new employee garners needed resources and establishes the building blocks of a high performing team, as appropriate to his or her position :

• What most needs to be accomplished (in place by day 30)
• Clarity around what’s getting done, when, by whom (by day 45)
• 1-2 strongly symbolic early wins (identified by day 60, delivered by month six)
• The right people in the right roles with the right support (by day 70)
• A communication plan implemented on an ongoing basis.

Leadership is about inspiring and enabling others. How you handle the acquisition, accommodation, assimilation and acceleration of new employees communicates volumes to everyone. In many ways, this is one of the acid tests of leadership. With the help of the Total Onboarding Program, you will demonstrate consistent, exemplary leadership.

(These ideas are from drawn from Onboarding - How to get your new employees up to speed in half the time - Bradt and Vonnegut, Wiley, 2009^<1>)

Onboarding from the perspective of a new leader

Three main ideas for a leader going into a new role are:

1. Get a head start before the start. Day One is a critical pivot point for people joining from outside the company. The same is true for the formal announcement of someone getting promoted from within. In both situations, you can accelerate progress by getting a head start and hitting the ground running. A little early momentum goes a long way.

2. Take control of your message. Everything communicates. People read things into everything you say and do, and everything you don’t say and don’t do. Thus you’re far better off choosing and controlling what they see and hear, and when they see and hear it, than in letting others make those choices for you, or letting them happen by chance.

3. Build a high-performing team. The first 100 days are the best time to put in place the basic building blocks of a high-performing team. You will fail if you try to do everything yourself, without the support and buy-in of your team. As a team leader, your own success is inextricably linked to the success of the team as a whole.

These ideas inform 14 things to keep in mind when moving into a new leadership role grouped into three main buckets:

• Create your new leadership role
• Take control of your own start
• Your 100-Day action plan

CREATE YOUR NEW LEADERSHIP ROLE

1: Position Yourself for a New Leadership Role or Promotion

Positioning yourself for a leadership role is about connecting values with goals, and crossing strengths and communication. You must supplement your talent with learning and practice to build your knowledge and sharpen your skills over the short, mid, and long term. Then, when you’re ready, you need to communicate those strengths to secure the promotion or new leadership role you deserve.

2: Sell before You Buy: Answer the Only Three Interview Questions

You cannot turn down a job you have not been offered. So first put your energy into getting the job offer. Remember that there are only three fundamental interview questions and be prepared to talk about your (1) strengths, (2) motivation, and (3) fit with the organization and the position. Remember also that interviews are not about you. They are about what you can do for those doing the interviewing. Selling is about positioning your strengths, motivation, and fit characteristics in terms of their needs.

3: Map and Avoid the Most Common Land Mines

In general, you’ll want to mitigate organization, role and personal land mines before accepting a job, and jump-start relationships and learning even before Day One so you can concentrate on successful delivery and adjustment after you start.

4: Do your Due Diligence on the Organization, Role, and Fit

The ability and willingness to assess and deal with risk is often a critical differentiator between success and failure. Once you’ve been offered the job—and only after you’ve been offered the job—make sure it is right for you. This involves choosing between options and mitigating risks by answering three questions:

What is the organizations sustainable competitive advantage?

Did anyone have concerns about this role; and, if so, what was done to mitigate them?

What, specifically, about me, led to your offering me the job?

5: Act Differently When You Are Promoted from Within

While joining an organization from the outside involves positioning yourself for the first time, getting promoted from within often requires repositioning yourself to people who already know you. There are three key differences when you are promoted from within versus joining from the outside:

1. You can’t control the context, so prepare in advance and be ready to adjust as required in planned, unplanned, or interim changes, securing resources and support along the way.
2. It is hard to make a clean break, so take control of your own transition by managing the internal announcement cascade and how key stakeholders learn about your promotion, securing your base and managing first impressions in the new role.
3. There is no honeymoon, so quickly accelerate team progress after the start by evolving the stated and de facto strategies, improving operations, and strengthening the organization.

6: Embrace the Fuzzy Front End and Make It Work for You before You Start

The time between acceptance and start is a gift you can use to rest and relax or to get a head start on your new role. Our experience has shown that those who use this fuzzy front end to put a plan in place, complete their prestart preparation, and jump-start learning and relationships are far more likely to deliver better results faster than those who choose to rest and relax. Here are the five key steps:

1. Identify key stakeholders up, across, and down.
2. Plan your message, fuzzy front end, and first 100 days.
3. Manage personal setup so you have less to worry about after you start.
4. Conduct pre-start meetings and phone calls to jump-start key relationships.
5. Gather information and learning in advance to jump-start learning.

7: Decide How to Engage the New Culture: Assimilate, Converge, and Evolve, or Shock

Be careful about how you engage with the organization’s existing culture, using an ACES model to determine whether you want to Assimilate, Converge, and Evolve, or Shock it at the start. You need to make this choice early on because it will determine your approach to your fuzzy front end, Day One, and first 100 Days. Culture is hard to assess in advance, but you can build at least the start of a good working model by looking carefully at the “Be–Do–Say” of an organization:

• Be: The underpinning of culture (and integrity) is what people really are, their core assumptions, beliefs and intentions.
• Do: These are things that can be seen, felt, or heard such as behavioral, attitudinal, and communication norms, signs, and symbols.
• Say: What people say about their culture can be found in things like mission statements and creeds. As Edgar Schein points out,6 these get at the professed culture.

8: Drive Action with an Ongoing Communication Campaign Everything communicates. You can either make choices in advance about what and how you’re going to communicate or react to what others do. It is important to craft your own communication plan and be clear on your platform for change, your vision, and your call to action before you start trying to inspire others. It will evolve as you learn, but you can’t lead unless you have a starting point to help focus those learning plans.

• Platform for change: Why it’s necessary to do anything differently
• Vision of a brighter future: How people see themselves fitting into that future
• Call to Action: What the audience should do next to be part of the solution

Leadership is personal. Your message is the key that unlocks personal connections. The greater the congruence between your own values, intentions, actions, and words, the stronger those connections will be. This is why the best messages aren’t crafted; they emerge. This is why great leaders live their messages not because they can, but because they must. “Here I stand, I can do no other.”7

9: Take Control of Day One: Make a Powerful First Impression Everything is magnified on Day One, whether it’s your first day in a new company or the day your promotion is announced. Everyone is looking for hints about what you think and what you’re going to do. This is why it’s so important to control your message by paying particular attention to all the signs, symbols, and stories you deploy, and the order in which you deploy them. Make sure people are seeing and hearing things that will lead them to believe what you want them to believe about you and about themselves in relation to the future of the organization.

YOUR 100-DAY ACTION PLAN

10: Embed a Strong Burning Imperative by Day 30

The burning imperative is a sharply defined, intensely shared, and purposefully urgent understanding from each of the team members of what they are “supposed to do, now,” and how this works with the larger aspirations of the team and the organization. While mission, vision, and values are often components of the burning imperative, the critical piece is the rallying cry that every one understands and can act on. Get this created and bought into early on—even if it’s only 90 percent right. You, and the team, will adjust and improve along the way. Don’t let anything distract you from getting this in place and shared—in your first 30 days!

11: Exploit Key Milestones to Drive Team Performance: Day 45

The real test of a high-performing team’s tactical capacity lies in the formal and informal practices that are at work across team members, particularly around clarifying decision rights and information flows.8 The real job of a high-performing team’s leader is to inspire and enable others to do their absolute best, together. These leaders spend more time integrating across than managing down. The milestone tool is straightforward and focuses on mapping and tracking and what is getting done by when by whom. High-performing team leaders take that basic tool to a whole new level, exploiting it to inspire and enable people to work together as a team!

12: Over-invest in Early Wins to Build Team Confidence: Day 60

Early wins are all about credibility and confidence. People have more faith in people who have delivered. You want your boss to have confidence in you. You want team members to have confidence in you, in themselves, and in the plan for change that has emerged. Early wins fuel that confidence. To that end, identify potential early wins by day 60 and overinvest to deliver them by the end of your first six months—as a team!

13: Secure ADEPT People in the Right Roles with the Right Support by Day 70

Make your organization ever more ADEPT by Acquiring, Developing, Encouraging, Planning, and Transitioning talent:

• Acquire: Recruit, attract, and onboard the right people
• Develop: Assess and build skills and knowledge
• Encourage: Direct, support, recognize, and reward
• Plan: Monitor, assess, plan career moves over time
• Transition: Migrate to different roles as appropriate

This is one of the most important things you do. Jump-start this by getting the right people in the right roles with the right support to build the team!

14: Evolve People, Plans, and Practices to Capitalize on Changing Circumstances

By the end of your first 100 Days, you should have made significant steps toward aligning your people, plans, and practices around a shared purpose. Remember, this is not a one-time event but, instead, something that will require constant, ongoing management and improvement.

• Manage your organization (people) by deploying the ADEPT tool for ongoing talent development. You don’t have to use this tool. But you do have to have a complete and disciplined way to strengthen your organization on a continuous basis over time.
• Manage your strategy (plans) as a cycle, ensuring you are looking at your situation, customers, collaborators, capabilities, competitors, and conditions on a regular basis and reflecting changes in them in your ever-evolving strategies and plans.
• Manage your operations (practices) by continually tracking, updating, and adding milestones. Disciplined, integrated execution doesn’t happen unless you demand it, monitor it, and reinforce it over and over again.

Monitor the situation over time. Identify and classify the impact of surprises as major or minor, enduring or temporary, and be ready to react as appropriate. For major, temporary events, follow the basic flow of prepare—understand—plan—implement—revise or prepare. For major, enduring changes, redeploy or restart with relentless control of the message throughout.

(This is mostly excerpted and partly adapted from the revised edition of The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan - Bradt, Check & Pedraza, Wiley, 2009^<2>)

The Stages of Onboarding

It helpful to think about onboarding in stages divided by first contact, offer, acceptance and start date.

Attribution

stages of onboarding graphic

Before the first contact:

Hiring Manager: Get alignment around Recruiting Brief and Total Onboarding Plan

Candidate: Think through own ideal job criteria and long-term goals.

Before the offer:

Hiring Manager: Pre-sell while buying (build slate; evaluate; set up conversion)

Candidate: Sell (strengths, motivation, fit)

Before accepting:

Hiring Manager: Strategic selling (convert or move on – fast)

Candidate: Mitigate organization, role and personal landmines.

Before the start:

Hiring Manager: Communicate message, encourage & enable relationships, provide help

New employee: 100-Day Action Plan, pre-boarding conversations, get help

After the start:

• Take control of DAY ONE and initial impressions

• Get buy in to the one burning IMPERATIVE by day 30

• Use key MILESTONES to drive team performance by day 45

• Select and invest in EARLY WINS to build team confidence by day 60

• Plan to get ADEPT people in the right ROLES with the right support by day 70

• Shape the team CULTURE with an on-going communication campaign throughout