The Value of Creating an Onboarding Process
Onboarding new employees effectively is hard – no bones about it. Furthermore, there are a lot of excuses to not having on onboarding process for small or young companies. For small companies, a ready excuse is that everyone is already an expert in the company’s processes and will be able to effectively balance the load of onboarding a new employee. For young companies, an easy argument is that they don’t have processes at all or that the processes change so rapidly that there is no point in documenting for the purpose of onboarding. Both of these excuses are detrimental to the company if not balanced by an honest discussion around what value an onboarding process should bring. On top of the value add to the company, great onboarding is essential to make new employees confident and happy to work in their new job.
Value 1 – Why things are done the way they are
The first value add of creating an onboarding process has nothing to do with adding a new employee, and has everything to do with an honest evaluation of the impromptu processes that have been created. The majority of the time, those processes have been created by employees or managers for very good reasons and work great. However rarely is everyone on the same page with given “great” method. Documenting it to onboard new employees gives current employees a reference for best practices within the company. Giving all employees access to best practices is not just beneficial to the company from a performance standpoint, it’s also empowers employees to perform their job better. An employee feeling confident and effective in their responsibilities is one of those soft value-adds that manifests in the company’s long-term performance.
Value 2 – What should change?
Reviewing current processes will undoubtedly bring to light some very stupid processes that most likely manifested with the best intentions. These stupid processes are usually referred to as “workarounds.” Workarounds are things done at every level in the organization so that an employee is able to get their job done despite roadblocks ore constraints making their job more difficult. Workarounds waste time and are not scalable unless adopted by the rest of the organization. The discovery of workarounds when creating an onboarding process is gold for two reasons.
- Leadership will find the ways they can better remove roadblocks for their employees which boosts employee effectiveness.
- Some processes will help the whole company with efficiency, quality, and sales if scaled throughout.
Value 3 – Embracing living documents
The last value-add of creating an onboarding document is that it brings to light that things change and should! In creating an onboarding process it should become abundantly clear that processes within the company have changed over time and that there is value in implementing new and innovative solutions to the challenges they face. There is still abundant value in any documents and processes created in this first exercise, however every document and process should have built in flexibility to accommodate changes down the road.
Onboarding is a team effort
Let’s take this moment to very clearly state that onboarding is a team effort, and the onboarding process needs to be built by the whole team! Everyone is expected to help get a new employee up to speed on who the company is, what it does, and how it does it. This means the whole team needs to support the processes in place and understand why they are there. With this understanding, they gain the confidence to challenge the status quo when they see gaps or inconsistencies within the company. It my sound inflammatory, but employees that have the confidence to call out questionable aspects of a company is crucial to the long-term health of the company. Those same questions will point out weaknesses in customer service, wasted funds on capital and operational expenses, and missed market opportunities. All of these topics materially affect a company’s top and bottom line.
Thanks for reading! To learn more about topics related to Nevada’s Innovation Ecosystem, I encourage you to subscribe to my blog or reach out to me directly via Linked LinkedIn or Twitter. I am always happy to chat about team development in companies since I think it is so vital to both individual employees and organizational health.
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