Making an effective onboarding

By “onboarding” I don’t mean the first day or week or month you start a new job and complete paperwork, learn where the bathroom is, and how to file expense reports.

I mean the process of discovering how to be effective in your job.

To do that, you need a continually evolving process.

So, what is effective onboarding?

Indoctrination into the culture

It’s important that new employees get a feel for the culture and their place in it.

Ideally, employees would review culture with prospects before they take a position with the company, ensuring the proper fit.

Formal learning

Many companies offer no formal learning opportunities and depending on the industry and organizational culture, this may be ok.

In larger organizations and those in regulated industries, for example, formal training may be necessary.

But even those industries recognize that formal training is only about 20 percent of the training an employee needs to be successful.

Social learning is far more important and long lasting.

Social learning

For many, social learning is the key to employee satisfaction.

Can the employee find the tools they need to do their job?

In most successful organizations, there is a software solution behind this – preferably one that is not simply a repository of documents, but one that allows for collaboration, sharing of information, learning series development, simple Q&A, gamification (to help maintain engagement), and more.

And it must ensure that the materials included in the system remain relevant – allowing the administrators of the software easy access to data and analytics around which are most and least used and most and least successful.

Clear expectations

Each employee must have an understanding of what is expected and what they need to achieve in a given timeframe.

Strong communication

The more employees can communicate and collaborate, the more likely they will be to excel.

Tools can support this, but company culture needs to foster collaboration as well.

If you have had a positive experience in a new job, you likely discovered that the company addressed many of these issues.

I argue that they are integral not only to the employee but to the health of the organization itself, with a particular emphasis on the social learning necessary for all employees – new and long-standing – to be successful.