City & Guilds Kineo highlight the importance of an onboarding and induction programme, and what organisations can do to add empathy to their onboaridng.
We’ve written a detailed guide that sets out some theory and recommendations around onboarding. Today, we’re going to share some of the insights from that, and also share some examples from work we’ve done with some of our clients to help show how some of the ideas can be put into practice. If you want to know more, you can come and collect a guide at the end, ask us questions at the end of this talk or come and find us at our stand.
For now, let’s crack on with our talk.
Sometimes called ‘Organisational socialisation’ onboarding is about enabling someone to acquire the knowledge, skills and behaviours to become effective members of an organisation. The word member is a great one, as to be a member implies being an active part in something, a part of the whole. I also like the fact that behaviour is included in here, as it’s a lot more than just knowledge about processes and procedures, or role-based technical skills. So whether you call it induction, orientation or onboarding, this is what we’re talking about today.
Ok to kick off, here’s a quick question for you. Any one got any ideas, or perhaps a loud voice?
OK thanks. Well, one in three people leave voluntarily or involuntarily before the end of their first year, on average.
It’s also the case that one in five leave in their first six weeks.
Now the cost of this isn’t something to be taken lightly.
Anyone got a clue as to how much it costs businesses on average? Shout out if you’ve got an idea.
On average, it costs three times a person’s salary to lose someone in their first year. And according to PWC, it costs £42 billion a year across UK businesses.
Ouch.
These are obviously averages. Do you a sense for how this relates to your organisation? Does it ring true for you? Perhaps you’re doing something that others aren’t.Since losing people is costly it’s absolutely in all our interests to nurture and retain employees, particularly in that all-important FIRST year. The fact that so many people leave, especially in those first six weeks indicates that something’s not right.
It can cost up 3 times their salary to lose someone within their first year. PWC state that even when calculated on the cost of 1 x an average salary, the UK loses £42billion a year through losing people in their first year.
These are obviously averages, but they are eyewatering. But losing people isn’t just about money, it obviously also affects team morale, culture, and an organisations ability to meet objectives, loss of innovation etc.
You might be sitting there thinking, this rings true for my organisation or you might be thinking, well, we don’t lose that many people. That’s great, and perhaps you’re doing something others might not be.
Here’s the difference that onboarding can make to retention (according to Aberdeen Consulting in the US).
Those who do it really well retain 91% of their staff, compared with only 30% when organisations have below average programs.
Crucially, evidence also shows that those who do it and do it well also meet their performance targets much quicker. – a win win.
So, whilst we’re not saying it’s the only solution to retention and meeting performance targets, there’s certainly a strong case for not only doing onboarding, and doing it well.
You might be surprised to know that only about a third of organisations in the UK invest in formal onboarding programs. Half of those last less than one month, with many lasting a week or even a day. So knowing the difference onboarding can make, and that wobbly period of the first six weeks where many leave, we say that onboarding is a must and ideally should last around 100 days. But it’s got to be good to be effective. EDIT GRAPHIC
So with a business case laid out, what is good onboarding?
Good is obviously a subjective term. But when it comes to learning or performance support, we would normally talk about the goals or needs the program is trying to meet. If it meets them, it’s done well. One of the reasons that onboarding can appear challenging or doesn’t quite hit the mark may be because we arent thinking through the needs it’s trying to meet well enough. We’re going to weigh up two sides of the coin: organisation’s needs and those of the new hire .
Good is obviously a subjective term. But when it comes to learning or performance support programs, we would normally talk about ‘good’ in relation to whether it’s met the goals or needs it’s meant to.
One of the reasons that onboarding can appear challenging or doesn’t always hit the mark may be because we aren’t thinking through the needs it’s trying to meet well enough or from the right perspectives. So, we’re going to weigh up two sides of the coin: organisation’s needs and those of the new hire .
We’ll start with the organisation’s needs.
If we were to try to make a Maslow-like hierachy of needs for organisations, it might look something like this. Along the bottom we have two core needs. You hire someone for a reason right? To do a job. So for most organisations they have two core needs when it comes to new starters: one is competency, the other compliance. You need to get new recruits up to speed as soon as possible applying the right technical skills, using any necessary tools, processes or procedures, and working effectively as part of their team. You probably also want to get them to a place where they can function without day to day support too – because that’s costly right? The second core need is probably compliance. You need them to work safely and within any required laws, legislations and policies.
And of course, organisations also want and need new recruits to embrace company values and work towards common goals, leading up to having a sense of belonging and having effective relationships within the workplace. It’s also true that organisations are interested in people’s potential and growing their skills and abilities. But at its roots, onboarding often focuses on this foundation level, and why wouldn’t it?
Build them up. Click through speech bubbles. GRAPHICS
Everyone wants to do a good job right, and when you start with a new company, you don’t want to be a fool. But are competence and compliance really the top of a new hires list?
Build them up. Click through speech bubbles. GRAPHICS
Everyone wants to do a good job right, and when you start with a new company, you don’t want to be a fool. But are competence and compliance really the top of a new hires list?
Surely after someone’s first day what we’d really like to hear are some of these things – People are really friendly. Or I really like the feel of it.
What we think people really need on their first day, week, month are Feelings.
Feelings of being welcomed, feelings of connection - with people and culture; feelings of belonging. We can’t underestimate the F word when it comes to new recruits. And people are often at the heart of that. If we were to draw the needs of new recruits, it might look something like this. All the peopley feely stuff is core to everything else. It sounds obvious, but it’s so often overlooked.
Feelings and connection need to underpin everything. But as someone moves through their onboarding program, they will also want to know what’s expected of them, feel supported getting there and look for performance development, and in say their first month or so, we’d look for them to start feeling satisfied with their job and feel valued doing it Value doesn’t necessarily mean achieving targets though. For me, it would be as much about being listened to and appreciated for what I bring as a person.
So, it seems there’s a potential conflict. On the one hand organisations need an efficient solution to get new recruits up to speed quickly, which often means that swathes of information gets pushed onto a new recruit in the hope that it will speed things up.
On the other, new recruits crave that F word – feelings of connection and belonging. A major reason why people leave organisations is a fairly to connect with colleagues – managers in particular. And yet they often don’t feature (enough) in onboarding programs. We also often hire people for their ideas and new blood, and yet kind of forget about it when we onboard them, and instead accidentally transfuse the new blood for the ‘company’ way. Losing out on fresh perspectives, as well as a chance to show that we value that person.
So, on the one side you could say we have a need for efficiency. We know organisations need to get people compliant and competent systematically and fast. On the other, empathy – empathy for the individual’s needs. Onboarding programs are much more successful if they are more about the person than the company.
So can we be efficient and empathetic at the same time? Of course. It doesn’t have to be a sum zero game. It just too often is.
Explain framework (and reference Charles Leadbeater) Efficiency akin to having elearning in a blend vs. face to face or one on one coaching etc. You could roughly align this to cost per head in that elearning reaches many with the same package, whereas one to one coaching reaches, well, one. Somewhere in the middle are workshops and virtual classrooms. Remember this scale is purely efficiency, not effectiveness.
Empathy is about getting under the skin of the audience and like a merketeer, understand what they need, desire, want. At the high empathy side, a learner will receive some personalise training or rather experience. Something that they can connect with and that reflects and meets their needs.
For those who’ve worked with us to develop a blended program, we would look to profile the audience and pull together a picture of not only what the organisation wants of them, but what they might want of themselves within that organisation, and what might make them tick. We would then also weigh up where it makes most sense to invest the budget. Each item on a framework like this has to be justifiable and have a business case behind it, normally related to the performance or business objective it will meet, if it’s going to become part of a program.
So the types of onboarding experiences and interventions that might appear in the high empathy and low efficiency quadrant includes….
In our guide, you’ll see a spread of objects across this framework, with some floating on the edges of the quadrants.
Ideally, we would urge there to be more high empathy interventions in onboarding programs. So a heat map of a blend might have at least half the items towards the right hand side. We’d love 100% of items to be over here, but we recognise that practical limitations such as budget, time, people’s time, and so on limit what’s possible, and there will always be parts of onboarding programs which are ‘knowledge’ or a little bit more passive by their very nature.
Explain each quadrant
In your guide we have a version of this framework populated with some example components that you can look at.
Bottom left is the area you should question the most
It’s a case of creating a blend of these options. When we work with clients, we look at the business case for each object – need to be able to justify it’s worth against the value it will bring. It’s likely you’ll need some of the lower efficiency but highly empathetic options, such as coaching, mentoring or job shadowing because we know they bring real value and the F factor. But you’ll also need some higher efficiency options such as online learning, mobile apps, downloads, and more passive materials.
So the question is, what might a sample blend look like. We know that the tricky part of onboarding is often how you pull all the info and learning into a meaningful structure. Nina’s going to talk you through a model blend as an example, and then dive into some real examples of components we’ve produced for some of our clients.
Build a visual of the present
Subject
Delivery Mechanism
Duration etc.
Explore and learn about different delivery mechanisms
Mentorship
Elearning
Face to face
Build a visual of the future
Examine the Persona’s/Learner Type – This is after all about creating a programme of high efficiency that meets the needs of the business and high empathy meeting the needs of the learner
Now that we understand the subjects, delivery mechanisms and the audiences we are delivering too – we design the blended onboarding programme that meets the needs of the empathy, efficiency framework.
We can create a personalised empathetic journey through
Understanding the learner type of the learner
In turn creating a high efficiency programme through
Effective learning technology
Appropriate offline activity
A journey tailored to the way the learner likes to learn
Creating a faster more effective uptake of knowledge through
Learning your way
A sense of belonging and being cared for
Knowing what you need to know when you need to know
So what might that look like?
We recognise that each onboarding blend needs to be different and you may need more than one to cater for roles and persona’s
You blend will also be effected by
Location
Access to technology
Work patterns and much more
To help you visualise what this might look like we have created a sample blend from our blend design workshop