Practical Onboarding: Developing High Performing, Engaged Employees
Onboarding can and should be one of the most exciting, dynamic and defining moments in an employee’s career. The most effective onboarding is about creating a strong emotional connection between the employee and employer. To establish a positive, long-term relationship, new employees learn about the company’s history and leadership, core values and future direction. During this process, they should be immersed in the company’s business and industry, so they have a clear understanding of how the enterprise creates value and differentiates itself from competitors. Most importantly, new employees should strongly recognize their role in the business.
The BTS Onboarding Experience: The Formula for Success
BTS has created successful onboarding learning and execution journeys for dozens of leading corporations, including AT&T, CCE, Humana, Microsoft, Teva Pharmaceuticals and UPS. The foundation of a successful onboarding program includes:
- Engaging employees early on in their employment, ideally on or even before their first day
- Providing a structured approach to accelerate assimilation into new roles and company culture
- Providing a framework for managers to create and manage position-specific onboarding plans to accelerate job effectiveness
- Fostering basic business acumen around how the company operates, makes money and helping each employee connect specific job responsibilities to higher organizational goals and business outcomes
Pre-event activities set the stage for learning; post-event activities reinforce that learning through rapid application on the job.
While each BTS program is unique, the flow generally involves a series of engaging, blended learning experiences with leader involvement throughout the process. The following is an example of a 12-week process:
1. Preparation: Leader Engagement; Portal and Online Community: It is mission critical that the manager of the new hire is involved in the onboarding process, providing context, coaching and follow-up support. Through our Advantage Way process, we provide tools to facilitate leader learner engagement. A learning portal houses the tools and provides an important online community for the new hire.
2. Core Orientation Workshop: One- or two-day classroom experience leveraging Engage Maps accelerates the new hire’s assimilation into the company, business and culture as follows:
Our history: The company’s industry, history and unique values
Our current reality: The company’s core processes that create value for customers
Our exciting future: The company’s vision and strategy, and individual action planning on how to align with company’s priorities throughout the onboarding experience
3. Online Know-the-Business Program: Important Learning of the Company’s Finances, Strategic Priorities, Customer Value Drivers and More: In the month following the core program, participants gain access to two or three online Know-the-Business Programs that can be completed by individuals or teams of learners. The programs build financial acumen and strategic thinking in context of the company’s business and strategic priorities. Each module is customized to the client’s business and takes approximately two hours to complete. These modules are highly interactive and provide community for new hires to share experiences and best practices.
4. Company Business Simulation: Approximately eight weeks after completion of the core program and after the Know-the-Business Modules, participants reconvene for a half-, one- or one-and-a-half-day Board Simulation program to build business acumen and strategic thinking. This program leverages the BTS Custom Business Simulation and Company Presentations.
5. Ongoing Leader/Manager Meetings: Post-program, participants meet with their leader to share action plans and receive ongoing coaching to ensure successful execution back on the job. Tools available on the portal and online community support this process.
Onboarding Can Drive Value at Any Organization
Successful onboarding leads to accelerated productivity, improved retention and deeper bench strength, higher employee satisfaction, and engaged employees who execute on the organization’s strategic objectives and deliver results. Hiring new employees is an investment and establishing a formal onboarding process is essential. Whether the company has 100 people or 100,000, the lessons are the same. By coupling necessary skills with an emotional commitment to sustaining the company and its culture, onboarding builds short- and long-term company value.
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