Is your “onboarding” content a giant block of granite, a monument to “the way we have always done it”? Even if you are just now developing your message to new employees, providing basic orientation and explaining essential values and processes of your organization to new hires, it is all too easy to stay at the “big picture” level when a more granular or modular approach—working in smaller bits and pieces—could dramatically increase your impact.

Your company wants to run as lean as possible, which means getting new employees up to speed quickly. And efficiency means avoiding the most costly approach of all—having to redo training and communications around topics that don’t “stick” the first time.

Take that massive pile of information for new hires and cut it down into modules, along these lines:

• Break the content into the smallest units possible, each one focused on a single idea that new hires need to understand. If you’re having a hard time tackling your existing “syllabus,” start with the schedule and cut it into one-hour, or even half-hour, blocks that will help you see the components of your message.
• Associate each unit with an outcome. What will an employee who completes that unit do differently than one who doesn’t? How will that contribute to the organization’s success?
• Identify units with weak outcomes, or no outcomes and eliminate them! Sometimes you have to be brave about this. Take that wonderful half-hour on the beloved founders of the company. If that unit directly connects their early experiences to values or practices in the company today, perhaps it is valuable. If that unit is just a sentimental tribute to the past, consider dumping it.
• Rank order the remaining outcomes, starting with the ones that make the greatest contribution to the company’s success. In second place, put the units that are “prerequisites” to the highest ranking outcomes, units you have to understand to tackle the units that deliver the biggest payoffs.
• Design a communication/training module at the level of each unit. Remember that delivery is a design issue, and put effectiveness before efficiency for the highest ranking outcomes. If a content unit makes a big contribution to your organization’s success, more live, personal approaches to training may do more to produce the behaviors you are looking for, from your new hires, than will self-study or online training. Don’t sacrifice impact to saving a few bucks on delivery, where the outcome is truly important. Save your most efficient delivery for outcomes that are less crucial to the company’s bottom line.
• Identify units that absolutely must be delivered exactly the same way, every time, everywhere. For example, training that helps you avoid lawsuits, regulatory action, ethical problems or public relations crises often depends on a fairly precise understanding of “the rules of the game.” For those units, a combination of “canned units” (online, printed manuals, podcast/video recordings) that ensure consistent delivery with a strong, personal endorsement from the leadership can be your best option.

Effective onboarding is a delicate (and constantly changing) balance, a balance between impact and efficiency, a balance between crucial content and other subjects that are helpful, but less essential. A key step in achieving the right balance, and in eliminating wasted time and effort that few companies can afford to lavish on new hires, is to cut the content into sufficiently “granular” units to allow you to assemble the pieces, not into the biggest, most complete picture of the organization, but into the optimal picture to drive results.

How do you turn new hires into long-term, valuable employees? Getting off to a good start can make a big difference and whether you call it orientation, a core curriculum, onboarding or something else, that first round of communication and training can make a significant contribution to the company’s bottom line.

Why, then, do I often see programs of this kind being cobbled together without the detailed attention, the serious application of professional resources, the rigorous evaluation and improvement, which is routine for other training provided by the organization?

That first round of training is often neither efficient nor effective. That’s always a concern, but it is particularly worrisome when the economy is down and resources are tight. What’s missing from many onboarding initiatives?

• Clear, Modular Objectives: Look at post-onboarding training for specific functions within an organization and you’ll usually find a nice list of clearly defined desired outcomes, along with plans for objective measurement of the results. Does your onboarding scheme boast the same? More often than not, objectives for this crucial initial communication are very broad, if they exist at all. Not only do you need tighter goals for your onboarding efforts, you need to break the content down into smaller units and develop objectives at a much more granular level. (I’ll have more to say about that in my next post.)

• Investment Perspective: For most training, we look at ROI in terms of higher productivity, fewer errors and similar factors, all translated (when possible) into more tangible benefits for the organization. Those returns apply to breaking in new employees, but don’t leave the retention benefit out of the equation. In making budget decisions about the components of an onboarding program, don’t just compare what employees will know, or what they will be able to do, with or without a particular training module. Compare the investment in initial training and communication with the cost of finding, recruiting and hiring replacements! Helping your new employees fit into the way the company works more comfortably, smoothly and rapidly pays significant dividends when you factor in higher retention and lower turnover.

• Shared Responsibility: Don’t let that essential first step with the new employee become solely a human resources responsibility. HR and training staff should play a professional role in helping the leadership team and department/function heads make sure that employees know “how we do things around here,” not do it all themselves. Without the ongoing involvement of functional units of the organization, the transfer of knowledge and skills from your onboarding programs to actual job performance is going to be greatly reduced.

• Balance Between Efficiency and Effectiveness: In most orientations or introductory curricula I see, some chunks of information should be delivered more efficiently and some should sacrifice efficiency to maximize effectiveness. Key company values (ethics, compliance, respect for other employees, customer service) must take root from the first days of employment. Often the personal touch can make all the difference in modeling these values and helping new employees to embrace them, having an impact that even the best constructed online courses or reading assignments aren’t likely to equal.

In the eyes of your new employees, the first round of training they experience sets their expectations, their standards, for the more specific training they are bound to take later. How many rave reviews do you get for that first training all employees receive when they are hired? How many cheers do you get from management for the results your initial efforts produce from new hires?

Make sure your organization applies the highest possible standards to the quality and impact of this initial experience, equal to anything you do in any other training activities you offer.