Creating Your Onboarding Program:

The But How-To Guide

Effectively onboarding your developing leaders not only ensures their long-term traction and success but is an investment in your organization’s bottom line and success. 

But how do you do it effectively when the seminal assimilation literature out there isn’t digestible enough to promote action; when the current tech onboarding solutions, though plentiful, don’t focus on new managers; and when leadership coaches are expensive, not scalable, and typically reserved for executives.

Should you consider designing your own robust onboarding program and implementing it? But how?

To reduce the rigorous planning and to ease the heavy investment of resources and time that it takes to create an onboarding solution, we’ve put together a list of questions to consider and guide your process:

• Who will create the onboarding, integration, and assimilation program?

• Will the same person or department own it? Will they deploy it, monitor it, and assess it?

• After your offer is accepted by a new hire, which HR onboarding tasks need to be completed, what integration activities will be facilitated, and how will assimilation be achieved?

• Would the approach be different for leaders vs. individual contributors?

• What would you like the protocol to include and how would it flow?

• Should your journey be self-led? Will you offer check-ins? Who will do this and what will the cadence be?

• Will the new hire’s boss be involved? To what extent?

• What are potential roadblocks on the user’s experience? How will you repair them?

• How will you measure the success of the user? How will you measure the success of the program?

• Could you benefit from outsourcing an existing solution?

Already have an onboarding system in place? You can certainly use these same questions as QC.

However you plan to onboard, integrate, assimilate your newly hired or newly promoted managers, make sure it is scalable and sustainable.