Onboarding: Making a Connection Beyond Orientation

By Stephenie Overman February 2005

Some first days on the job are handled so poorly that they're enough to make any new hire run home vowing never to return to their new digs. But it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, it shouldn't be that way if companies want their new employees to quickly become contributing members of their team.

Fortunately, the days of having new hires spend their first eight hours with the company filling out required paperwork could be waning. Instead, many companies are expanding or replacing traditional orientation programs with "onboarding" programs that focus on new-hire assimilation into the organization. The difference between employee orientation and onboarding is the amount of time spent connecting the new employee to the job, to the team and to the company's values. The payoff is better retention and a more fully engaged employee.

"Orientation is what happens when your new hire comes on to the premises for the first time. It's the first day or the first week," says Beverly Kaye, co-author of Love 'em or Lose 'em: Getting Good People to Stay and CEO of Career Systems International.

Orientation leads into onboarding, "which should last at least six months if not a year," Kaye says. "It's not instead of, it's beyond, orientation."

Companies use the terms in different ways, but "that's just a question of semantics," Kaye says. What's important is that during the onboarding process, the hiring manager "really connects with the new hire in a deeper way. The hiring manager has to get to know the new hire—who the new person is and what he or she wants."

To make that connection, the manager should have six critical conversations with the new hire, Kaye says. "To the degree you have these conversations is the degree to which you understand the new hire and hang on to the person. New hires come in all excited, like a charged battery, and at about the three-month mark that charge continues or dies down."

To keep a new hire charged up, at some point during the onboarding process the manager should engage in conversation about:

• Relationships. Hiring managers and their new hires should talk about how to build relationships between themselves and with other employees.
• Passion. Managers should learn what their new hires are passionate about and help channel those passions on the job.
• Challenge. Managers should learn what challenges will keep their new hires excited enough to learn, grow and stay with the company.
• Focus. New hires will be more committed if they understand what the company is trying to achieve and how they can contribute to those outcomes.
• Balance. Managers should understand what's important in their new hires' lives beyond the workplace to help the new hire maintain a healthy work/life balance.
• Intention. Managers and new hires should follow through on what they learn from these conversations to determine how they can ensure progress and results.

Long-term Payoff

"The odds are 10 to one that you will keep a new hire if you do a good job of onboarding," Kaye says. And the new hire will be more productive sooner.

The promise of the word onboarding is that the new hire—and the entire team—will be functioning more effectively, says Mike Wittenstein, president and CEO of the Marietta, Ga.-based business consultancy Storyminers. He also stresses the role of onboarding in building healthy, productive relationships.

"Good onboarding helps people feel they've made the right decision and helps them get quick feedback on how they're doing," Wittenstein says. It makes them feel connected to the company and its purpose.

Storyminers helped bring new executives and approximately 80 other employees on board at a financial services company that "wanted to maintain its small company feel while growing at a wickedly fast rate," Wittenstein says. To do that "we looked at joining the company from the employee point of view. We interviewed senior people about what they know that junior people don't know. We found out the things we could do that would save money and time"; things that would allow new hires to better understand the roles they would be playing and the people they would be interacting with most closely.

Ritz-Carlton doesn't call it onboarding, but the employee orientation offered by the two-time Malcolm Baldrige award winner is so thorough the company teaches its techniques to others. Established by Congress in 1987, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is given annually by the President of the United States to small and large businesses in the manufacturing and service industries, as well as to education and health care organizations, that apply and are judged to have attained the highest standards in quality and performance.

The first day on the job has nothing to do with filling out forms and everything to do with "who we are and how [new employees] are going to contribute," says Mandy Holloway, corporate director of training and organizational effectiveness for the company's leadership center, based in Chevy Chase, Md.

New hires have a "guest experience" on day one, according to Holloway. "They have lunch in one of the dining rooms. We have them valet park their cars. They have a tour of the property. A lot of them have never had these experiences."

Each department head takes responsibility for part of the orientation process and "orientation will not take place if the general manager is not on the property. The general manager kicks off the orientation," Holloway says.

Day two allows time for the nitty gritty of orientation, followed by 21 days of job-specific training. After the training period the new hires are brought back together to "re-energize," she says, and to give feedback.

The goal of the process is to align the new hires with the strategic plan, the standards and the credo of Ritz-Carlton. That credo is: "We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen."

"Our gold standard is what creates consistency within Ritz-Calton," says Holloway. "You can have all the wonderful business processes, but if you don't engage ladies and gentlemen from day one, how can you be sure they are living your culture? That's what you need to get engaged customers."

Stephenie Overman is a freelance writer based in Arlington, Va.

Reprinted with the permission of the Society for Human Resource Management (www.shrm.org), Alexandria, VA.