Onboarding: getting your new employees cleared for takeoff

Sam Lawrence asked this question on Twitter today:

How long does it take your company to onboard new employees?

The answers ranged from around 90 days to 6 months, to “it depends on the person” to “it depends on the person’s understanding of what they’re working on”, etc. Sacha Chua also wrote about this last year, and termed it relational onboarding.

Please fasten your seatbelts

The term “onboarding” got me thinking that the process of getting new employees up to speed is remarkably similar to boarding an airplane. You, the passenger, are the new employee, and the airline is the organization. They need to get you – and everyone else – on the plane, in your seat, baggage stowed, seatbelt buckled, and ready for takeoff. Only then can the flight commence.

The airline needs to communicate a certain amount of information to you and all the other passengers to get everyone working together toward the same goal: taking off on time. In the same vein, your organization needs to communicate a certain amount of information to new employees to get everyone working together toward the same goal: meeting the organization’s goals.

The airline can do this with a PA system, since all the passengers are in an enclosed space, in close proximity both at the gate and on the plane. In an organization, people might be spread around a building, a city, country, or the world, so a PA system isn’t going to do it. Something else is needed – something that can communicate to people both as a group and individually, and be available wherever the organization does its work in the world.

We are cleared for takeoff!

This is where a wiki comes in. When an organization has a wiki at the center of its operations, people can gather and share the kind of information that others need – including everything from projects, products, initiatives, strategies, and other pieces of the big picture, to the everyday: how to process an expense report, access the office WiFi network, get business cards printed, or reserve a meeting room.

On a wiki, this information can be gathered by the small efforts of many. One person might add a page to explain the process for filling out an expense report, another might attach the blank report template, and a third might add some detail to the procedure. That’s a lot more efficient than a static page about expense reports that only directs employees to contact the accounting office, and doesn’t give either instructions or the downloadable template.

Without the wiki, a new employee would have to email that office to ask how to prepare an expense report, then wait for the file and instructions. That means an employee in the accounting office has to spend time replying to that email, and all the others asking for the same thing = inefficient.

But what’s really important about the wiki is not just that one example of the expense report, or even that the report itself is available on the wiki. It’s the idea that employees are working together to put the information they’re carrying around in their heads on the wiki, where others can more easily access it, use it, edit it, and improve it. That builds a culture where new employees can get up to speed faster, and become contributors – both to the goals of the organization, and the store of information about how to reach those goals.