You're going to keep struggling until you have a great onboarding program
Without great onboarding, new joiners will take too long to make an impact. A fantastic onboarding and enablement program is easy to build. Here’s a template.
A great onboarding program sets a new joiner up for success, but it also sets the team up to succeed. Having a productive, well-integrated team member from the outset makes all the difference.
I remember my first experience joining Accenture (they hired me twice). It felt, more or less, like getting thrown into shark-infested waters and being told, “just paddle, you’ll figure it out.” Accenture is a massive organization. The first time I joined the company, they were “only” about 400,000 employees (today they are pushing toward double that). My first six months I felt like I was trying not to drown in Accenture’s organization: Ways of working, systems and processes, delivery methods, project overhead, operational policies, and so much more. It was a lot to take in. There wasn’t a good onboarding program. There were lots of different policies, procedures, and trainings to attend. There were sessions on policies, setting up my computer, and security. At one point I was shipped off to Master Technology Architect school for two weeks, where I was deluged with a lot of valuable information — but through it all, I had a hard time figuring out where I fit in, how all these skills I learned would be used, what I could do to succeed in the company, and how I could contribute productively.
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I remember how chaotic it was, how long it took to be a truly contributing member, and how much time was wasted — that’s why I insist on having a good onboarding program.
As CTO at WCS North America, one of my team pulled me aside after a couple of months. He told me his onboarding has been incredibly smooth, and that the connection he’d built with the team really made him feel at home. His 6 month onboarding journey included long-term enablement and personal career goals that we were just starting to talk about — all of which made him feel integral to the team, knowing what he was contributing and why. He had a clear roadmap from day one, knew what tools to pick up, where to apply his talents, and who to connect with. He was part of the team.
It’s quite a contrast. The good news is, having a fabulous onboarding program is pretty easy. In this article, we’ll talk about the critical elements of a good onboarding program, how to execute it and stay on top of progress, and we’ll walk through a template you can use as a starting point.
Why onboarding matters
Reflecting on my early time at Accenture, I can say first-hand effective onboarding makes a tremendous difference for a new employee. It builds confidence and accelerates integration into the team and company. If we peel back the covers on a successful onboarding program, we’ll find a lot more benefits:
It introduces new joiners to their team and other employees so they don’t feel like outsiders.
It builds an internal network, connecting with other’s core competencies, so new joiners know who to turn to for help.
New joiners learn how to navigate the organization so they don’t feel lost or frustrated.
It unfolds a deeper understanding of the company, its products and mission statement — which helps align with intended outcomes.
It provides guided learning and enablement, directing the new joiner toward new skills and expanding their capabilities in a structured way.
It creates a safety net by constantly reconnecting with teammates, mentors or “buddies,” and it gives structure and purpose to initial goals.
It establishes clear career objectives and sets up performance metrics that new joiners and supervisors touch base on regularly.
The new joiner has a roadmap to follow, and an index of resources to turn to, so overall onboarding isn’t confusing or daunting.
Structuring your onboarding program
Having the right structure for your onboarding program is important. You don’t want to dump a ton of resources on your new joiner with no guidance or roadmap — that’s just going to make the situation worse.
My favorite approach breaks the onboarding process into five different segments, starting with “day one” activities that help the new joiner settle in and ending with long term training and career-crafting actions. We’ll walk through an onboarding template that follows this approach.
You can use a variety of tools for your onboarding. There are good products out there that focus entirely on the onboarding experience, or you can craft your own. Whichever approach you take, make sure the tool supports the program:
You need to be able to sequence things clearly, so it’s obvious what to work on now, and what to work on later.
It’s got to support some basic task assignment. For the most part, the tasks will be assigned to the new joiner, and the new joiner’s boss.
It should be easy to use, and should allow the new joiner to customize. For instance, they may want to add their own to-do items or take notes.
We want to focus on developing the employee and getting them productive quickly. With that in mind, there are six categories we’ll include in the onboarding program:
Day to day communications and tools
The team and coworkers
Building a good relationship with your team and your boss
Developing and nurturing long-term career goals
Getting an in-depth understanding of the company and team’s “ways of working”
Developing new skills
It’s also important that we don’t try to do too much, too fast. The point is to make a new joiner’s onboarding period easier and more enjoyable — not to add stress. The onboarding program should be a welcome resource that makes their daily job that much more enjoyable.
Building your onboarding plan
All of these goals and outcomes may seem a bit overwhelming — a lot of information to gather, to collate, and to put into some consumable form.
The template we’ll work through has already done a lot of this work for you. It’s a complete onboarding program built in Trello. You can quickly copy the template to get up and running. Each card in the Trello board has detailed actions, checklists, and narratives to build on. You just tailor the cards to fit your purpose — adding, editing, or deleting where needed.
For example, here’s the “Day 1-30 To-Dos” card, which outlines actions your new joiner will likely need to finish early on. Once you’ve copied the template, you can quickly add, change or delete anything you like:
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