Human Capital Management (HCM) magazine (May/June 2008) has an interesting article on the 'onboarding' (induction) processes used by US firms. This is taken from work conducted by the Aberdeen Group.
Some of the key points are predictable:
- Employees who form a negative opinion of their new work environment produce sub-standard work and may leave.
- Increasing competition for talent is putting more pressure on organisations to improve retention rates of new hires.
Equally, there are some very interesting insights !
- many end their induction process prematurely - best practice being to assign new employees (including new leaders) a mentor for the first six months
- best-in-class organisations concentrate on the 'human' element of induction and include socialisation as a primary focus.
In my view, L&D Colleagues can play a key role in implementing the above current best-practices
As the authors (Kevin Martin & Jayson Saba) state:
"Employee induction is not a nice-to-have, but rather a need-to-have. Organisations spend large amounts of time and money to fill job vacancies - and competition for human capital talent does not go away with an accepted job offer"
