Re-thinking the thinking behind corporate inductions
By Emma Reynolds, founder & CEO of e3 Reloaded, a Workforce Innovation Company
For the most part, Corporate Inductions and Onboarding suck, particularly in Asia. Do you know the percentage of new starters who get a welcome card and lunch on their first day, versus people who get a leaving card and farewell lunch on their last day? 99 per cent the latter, and only 1 per cent get the former. Shocking isn’t it. We make people feel better about leaving the company than we do when they arrive on their first day, with a certain vulnerability yet full of excitement, energy, and new ideas.
2011 is the time to totally re-think the thinking behind Corporate Inductions and Onboarding. And yes, it is so much more than a card and a team lunch on the first day — that is just the beginning. What is the business impact? Expertly designed and engineered onboarding experiences can have a huge impact:
• Significantly increases time to productivity = your new-comers are contributing to the bottom line quicker and more effectively
• Drastically Reduces risk of early attrition = your new-comers will stay longer than three months which means you don’t have to recruit over and over again.
We did a poll across Asia recently asking people what their Onboarding/Induction experience was like. Of the three possible responses (Excellent, Standard, What Induction?) 78 per cent of respondents said they didn’t go through any formal process/experience and no thought was put into how they would be welcomed and inducted properly into their role, team, division, region, company, parent company, and global operation. Add in the cultural kaleidoscope in Asia and it’s no wonder that companies are experiencing high turnover, low retention, disengagement and decreases in productivity.
In the New World of Work, employees are thinking and acting like customers. Valued employees, like customers, are free to make choices to join, to engage, to commit, to stay. To attract the right people, to encourage them to remain loyal and to perform to the best of their abilities requires a far more focused, innovative and user-centric approach than ever before.
As we enter the next decade of the 21st century we, as managers and leaders, must challenge convention, change the way we do things and re-invent our workforce practices. We no longer talk about ‘best practice’ but ‘next practice’ because the models don’t exist yet.
If you are leading a team, a division, a region, or the entire company, ask yourselves these questions to start re-thinking the thinking behind the corporate induction /onboarding:
• Is our onboarding an ‘experience’ or a ‘process’ where we tick boxes?
• What are the touchpoints and interactions during the first 90 days?
• Is our onboarding a monologue, dialogue or multi-logue?
• How are we ensuring our new-comers have exposure right across our entire operations, so they don’t get lost in the complexity?
• Do we include cultural awareness and cultural training?
• If we were to design a 90-day onboarding experience — what would it look like?