Onboarding is an important process to let new employees adjust themselves and improve their work efficiency. In fact, I do not have much experience on offering an onboarding program, because I have never have a full-time job. Yet, I obtained some clues from student associations in my undergraduate school. As I mentioned in previous weeks, I was the secretary of department of students’ right when I was a junior. I did not realize that I should provide a formal and elaborate onboarding process back then. However, I had a different policy on new members, such as showing a little higher tolerance to their inefficient work, introduce the history, mission, and commitment of the section and the association, and provide more training programs.
As a matter of fact, it is harder to motivate new members in a student association than in a company, because neither salary and other favored profits nor severe punishment can be applied. Therefore, the only approach to motivate them is to fulfill their sense of accomplishment and ownership, but when there were no large-scale activities, new members can be frustrated my trivially routine work.
After this week’s reading, I realized that I should have been scheduled an elaborate onboarding process and also included building up social network within the association as well. Because I overlooked the importance of building up relationship network for new members, they may feel anxious and hard to develop sense of ownership. A good relationship network is critical not only because it can improve efficiency of members’ work, more importantly, but also because it is a source of joy in their work. In addition, bad relationship network with others in the company may lead more conflicts and misunderstandings, which have negative impact on employees’ performance.
Similarly, when I first came to the U.S., I was eager to build up connections with others, because a sophisticate social network enables me to get involve into the local culture and to get accustomed to the life style in the U.S., which can calm me down and enable me to concentrate on my study.
Another aspect of onboarding that I would like to emphasize is the time limit or speed of improvement of new employees. According to Bauer’s article, employees have only about 90 days to adjust and improve themselves to be competence on their position and prove themselves. Therefore, supervisors have to let “new hires feel welcome and prepared” as soon as possible to accelerate the process of adjustment. From my experience, if the new members were not able to adjust themselves in first 90 days, their future potential of efficiency may be reduced. From my perspective, this may be caused by lack of passion and the unimportance that new employees feel.
Reference:
Bauer, T. N. Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success. Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org/about/foundation/products/Documents/Onboarding%20EPG-%20FINAL.pdf