Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time

CHAPTER 11

Speed Development of Important Working Relationships

Enable and Inspire

“Introduce” is a transitive action verb meaning, among other things, to cause to be acquainted. Just giving someone a list of people to meet and hoping something happens is not enough to cause that person to be acquainted with anyone.

Take the joining in/assimilation challenge off the table for your new employee. You didn’t hire him or her for strengths in assimilating. You hired him or her for what he or she can do and get others to do. However, no one gets anything valuable done without productive working relationships with others. So do anything and everything you can to make your new employee’s assimilation as easy as possible.

Assimilation is a big deal. Doing it well makes things far easier for everyone. Getting it wrong triggers relationship risks, which increase delivery risks. There are some basic steps that make a huge difference. We suggest you set up meaningful, productive onboarding conversations for your new employees with members of their formal and informal /shadow networks and tap into opportunities and events than can help them strengthen their networks. We also suggest that you do periodic check-ins with those networks. If issues arise, you want to know about them early so you can help your new employee adjust.

TIME - SAVER

Assimilation, or speeding up the development of important ...