What is On Boarding?

On-boarding is essential to all companies. But what is it? Well, put simply, its the process by which you turn a new employee or recruit, into an effective, engaged and (hopefully) soon-to-be profitable employee.

There are a couple of different techniques. The one most often used in the consulting world should be known as swim or die. Essentially young consultants are thrown into the water in near impossible situations and told to fight their way out or through. This method can be infective but as you would guess there is a high rate of attrition i.e. those who "die." Those who survive however can quickly be relied upon and will in due time become sharks who will eventually kill or simply swim off. They've been raised in a situation of extreme competition, I can't say that I blame them.

Another technique should be known as sit on the porch and learn. The "porch" is usually the term referring to that time period when you do not have a project to work on. If you're of sufficient rank, you should probably be working on sales or thought leadership but if you're not then you're told to sit in your cubicle in read 100+ iterations of the same (or strikingly similar) consultant Decks. Decks: The consultant term for a power point presentation, typically long, filled with too much information and jargon. Highly loved by consultants and highly despised by the executives we pitch them to.

Another option, and you'll likely tell from my tone the one I prefer is called Quick On-boarding. I can't claim that I thought of the name or the concept but I will do my best to provide a synopsis of the principles. First, get new people activated. Put them to work on something that challenges them to step outside of their typical roles, as an MBA student to research some company history, ask a Political Science major to do some Stat analysis. Get them working on something that is in the news. One of the things I did recently is asked an intern to research everything he could about Dow Jones and Rupert Murdoch (this was about 2 days into the buyout.) He did and he quickly was reporting to myself, a manager and an executive about all the work he had done. Pretty soon he was thrilled to be working on it and began working on ways that our company could help either party. It worked beautifully and it served as a mechanism to get the new-guy to talk to a number of people in our group, to prove that he could do something valuable and learn about our work and where he could fit in.

To find out more about the "Getting New Hires Up to Speed Quickly" method refer to an MITSloan Management Review article from the Winter 2005 edition (Vol. 46. No 2.) You wont be disappointed.