The Onboarding Process 1

[Sparweb]

I recently changed jobs. The new employer gave me a series of training sessions they called "Onboarding" which lasted almost 2 days. I thought I would write about it and ask if others have had similar experiences, what they though about it, whether it seemed effective or not, etc. I have worked at several other companies, and none of them did things this way. I'm wondering if this is common or not. Note that this is a regional airline operator with a number of maintenance & overhaul facilities sprinkled across North America.

The onboarding training started with a series of online courses:
[ul][li]WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Materials Information Systems)[/li]
[li]Human Factors in the Workplace (getting along with people different from you)[/li]
[li]Safety Management System (Federal workplace safety)[/li]
[li]Company organizational structure[/li]
[li]Company safety & Hazard reporting system (anonymous computer portal)[/li]
[li]Airport restricted access[/li][/ul]
All of the above training sessions were delivered online (I sat at a computer and watched) and each had a test at the end (I couldn't sleep through it). They each had a lot of material and this took more than a day to complete.

In addition to that online training, I was given two tours: one by an operations manager who showed me all of the building's exits and safety features (eg. fire extinguishers) and introduced me to several key personnel in a number of departments, then another tour by a co-worker who had several hours set aside just to show me where everything is in our own department (engineering).

Not done yet: then it was off to the IT department who was setting up my computer. They showed me where to access numerous things like payroll statements, help desk items, and other routine things on the network. Last stop was HR to finish paperwork. The whole process took nearly 2 days, before I

I was pretty impressed. There were several other new-hires with me and they seemed to agree. The training was tailored a bit for each of us; the guy going into shipping didn't get the airport security stuff, and two new pilots skipped the WHMIS but got some extra stuff about the operations center that I didn't see. Setting aside my boredom sitting through yet another WHMIS session (which I've already done before) I couldn't help think that this is an efficient way to get new employees up to speed about how their new employer works and cut down on the lost time wandering around needing hand-holding. I wish my previous employer had done this, but they didn't. I made a number of mistakes as a result, there.

Like I said above, it's the first time I've been given this kind of welcome, but at this place it seems normal to "onboard" all their employees this way.
Is this common? Have others been brought on board companies (~500 people) that dedicated as much time to giving them orientation?

STF

 

[rotw]

Yes. My former employer did that.
Onboarding process including training, ethics, etc etc. HR forms, presentation, etc etc. Company had approx. 350 employees, headquartered in US.
To me the value of that is not zero but mostly it is corporate BS (sorry Sparweb dont want to damage your enthusiasm but I must be candid about it).
The effectiveness of the onboarding process contains a spectral signature that the laid off offboarding will be going at speed of light...

 

[GregLocock]

Yes, that's quite common in Australia.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[MikeHalloran]

First employer onboarding: "Every day, we send out 14 boxcars, stuffed full of axles, driveshafts, spindles and some other parts. If, for any reason, one of those boxcars is not full, and it's your fault, or you could have done something about it and didn't, we will lock you in the boxcar, and when it opens a couple days later, in California, New Jersey, or Georgia, and you are still alive, you can explain to the forklift driver and the guy in a tie standing next to the forklift with steam coming out of his ears, where their parts are."

Second employer onboarding comprised two hours of lecture, in person, every day for several weeks, all about how the shipyard worked, what went on in each building, PPE and such, nuclear safety issues, and more. We were spared the tests that angered prior classes, but dozing off was dealt with loudly and instantly.
It also included a special lecture from the comptroller, for which all women were quietly removed from the room before he entered. His lecture was about being assertive; in his words, "You gotta have BRASS BALLS." I tried that, and it didn't go well, but in retrospect, I think I wasn't assertive enough to be really scary, like the comproller was.
My behavior did get noticed at high levels, though; at my exit interview, I got a trip that resulted in an offer to go to the other coast and insert myself between two senior managers who didn't get along with each other. I declined, because I think of myself as a gentle person, and because I was suspicious because everyone I met on the other coast was smiling.

No other, of too many, employers had any sort of formal process.
Most of them could have used it, but were too busy fighting fires to get organized to that extent.











Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[MacGyverS2000]

I've had it to varying degrees at multiple jobs. Sounds like you got a really good one, Spar... those are somewhat rare.

Dan - Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[drawoh]

SparWeb,

I got something similar for my new job last year. I spent a lot of time on online courses learning how the company product works, on their document control, on their CAD practise, and on laser safety.

--
JHG

 

[MikeHalloran]

At one place, when I was new, I told my boss I would be staying late.
He took me to the alarm panel, and said "Press this button to arm the alarm."

... which I later did. ... but the alarm would not arm.
So I went around opening and closing doors and windows,
until I discovered one interior door that had to be open
to allow an infrared beam to hit its sensor;
in my eagerness to leave things neat, I had closed it earlier.
With the door open, the alarm would arm, so I did that, and left, at 11:30pm.

Five minutes later, the facility manager and the police arrived,
in response to the second alarm system that I had set off
while trying to arm the first one.

The boss had not mentioned the existence of the second system,
but that didn't prevent the facility manager from yelling about being
awakened from a deep sleep, him being an early riser and all.

When my eventual replacement showed up, I walked him around the place and demonstrated exactly which doors needed to be open, and which could be open or closed.
That was his onboarding.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[zdas04]

My "onboarding" at my first job was my boss gave me a stack of project files (the guy I was replacing left a couple of weeks before I got there), a list of phone numbers, and "instructions" to call [a guy} and set up a meeting in Chicago next week. The numbers looked like area codes and numbers so I tried that and got someone who REALLY wanted to know where I had gotten his number. I went back and told my boss and he said those were [and internal phone network] numbers and I needed to dial [I don't remember], that was it, a stack of project files (all with tasks past due), a task I had no way to complete, and no real help in navigating the corporate waters. I am really jealous of SparWeb's onboarding.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[Sparweb]

Thanks for sharing your stories, folks. I figured the usual suspects would chime in with their horror stories, too.

One of my motivations for posting my story was because it was a source of frustration with a previous employer. Several times in the previous years, I met a new employee who didn't know where things were, how things worked, hadn't been given introductions to important people around them. It dawned on me that they weren't going to get it unless someone like me just took the initiative. I started slowly, and at first it wasn't enough. Somewhat hampered being in different cities from all of them. I did this mostly over the phone/internet and since I'd spent enough time at the other shop, I knew where they needed to go. In my last year, I made a pointed effort to walk one new employee through as much as I could, and spent maybe an hour a day for more than a week just helping the guy transition to the way things worked at our offices. I also repeatedly reported my positive results to HR, hoping they would get the hint, explaining my position that they needed to get senior engineers to mentor the juniors. I had plenty of support from my own manager doing this, but most of the new guys worked under a different manager. That guy didn't care. I got the satisfaction that this one new guy got his bearings in his first few weeks, and a few others almost as well, but the lack of action from HR and his direct manager were symptoms of the factors in my decision to leave.

STF

 

[JohnRBaker]

When I was hired full-time in my first job as an engineer, I had already worked several years for the company as a summer hire (back in those days, late 60's - early 70's, there were no real formal co-op programs) working as a draftsmen/designer so there was no need for any sort of formal 'onboarding' since I pretty much knew what the story was. Granted, there were some issues, such as office polices and practices, since when I started full-time I was no longer being paid hourly as I was now salaried, which did impact some corporate policies, like liability insurance (salaried people are covered 24/7 while hourly only when they were working their shift) and how one was compensated when traveling for the company (in this case it was the hourly that made-out better).

However, 11 years later, when I changed jobs and joined the Automation division of McDonnell Douglas, I was tossed into the deep-end with virtually no introduction or probation period. In fact, the day I reported to the job I learned that the guy who hired me was NOT going to be my boss, contrary to I had been lead to believe during the interview process, as they had had a reorg during the interim and had not yet assigned a new manager for my group (he transferred in a couple of weeks later). I was joining a commercial sales organization as a technical support engineer and while I immediately started to make sales-calls with our salespeople, I didn't officially report up their chain-of-command. Again, basic HR issues were taken care of, but department policies and job expectations were left to your immediately manager, but since that slot wasn't filled yet, it was sort of touch and go for awhile. I had several co-workers in the group who played similar roles to my own and they had been there a couple of years, under the now-obsolete org-chart, but they helped keep me from going too far off the rails until the new boss took over and of course, he had his own ideas how things were going to work, so all of us had to sort of start from scratch, as it were.

As far as training goes, it only became an issue when they promoted me to a supervisory position a few years later, but in those days, the mid-80's, there was no such thing as on-line training so everything was done in the classroom, and in our case, it was all back in St. Louis, at corporate headquarters (at the time I was working in SoCal). But there were also differences for the rank-and-file in our division. The so-called technical sales people were almost always engineers with 5-10 years of real world engineering experience. We never hired anyone fresh out of school. However, for the actual salespeople, it was the opposite, virtually all of them were entry-level hires and they went through a very formal 12-week 'boot camp' learning not only what our products were, but how to sell them and what was expected of them in terms of sales quotas and compensation, as they were being paid based on explicit performance (i.e. sales) goals, while the technical staff were being compensated as professionals, with very little of our compensation packages being based on overall sales performance, often less than 10%.

Granted, the last 10 years or so, virtually all 'continuing education', such as mandatory compliance, security and diversity training, was done on-line and by then, new-hires were integrated into that process immediately.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[berkshire]

I remember going to a new job, the "onboarding" process was to lock me in a small office with a copy of the company handbook . The HR person said knock on the door when you have finished reading that. The book was an inch and a half thick. When I was done with that, the general manager took me on a tour of the plant and said " Oh it will probably take you about a week to find out where the bathrooms are , but we would like you to be up to speed in about two weeks". , good luck. At which point he left and handed me back to HR.
B.E.

You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.

 

[zdas04]

Before reading this thread I had never heard the term "onboarding". This morning I got an ad for an online seminar called "The Seven "C's" of Onboarding". In case you are wondering, the are:
[ul]
[li]Contact: What will prospective candidates find as they research your organization?[/li]
[li]Candidate Experience: Does your interview process make an impression that matches your employer brand?[/li]
[li]Compliance: Does your hiring process meet the most basic requirements?[/li]
[li]Connection: What will it take for your new hires to build trust in their new colleagues?[/li]
[li]Culture: Does your organization express and live by its values?[/li]
[li]Clarification: How do you communicate with your new hire to uncover and resolve misunderstandings?[/li]
[li]Consistency: Does the day-to-day reality of your organization match the impression you set when bringing on new candidates?[/li]
[/ul]

Looks to me like the flavor of the week, but maybe it will have a longer life than the 3000 flavors of the week I've seen in my career.


[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[epoisses_]

I thought they used that term because the company is an airline operator?

Sure onboarding implies getting off again a few hours later... If your luggage is not already offloaded before you can even get on

 

[CWB1]

Yes, good companies use online onboarding tools and training today to avoid the usual day or more of boredom listening to HR drone repeat the usual info. One employer of mine not only had online onboarding but also had extensive online training for dam near every system, process, and tool the company used. It sure beat the heck out of waiting for someone to teach a class when you need training or even a refresher on a system you havent used in years.

 

[casseopeia]

One of the worst companies I worked for had the best on-boarding process that included presentations from several people to explain many things including file-naming and email protocols. And in case you forgot what was presented, there was an on-line manual and videos that you could review. That was the company I ended up suing for wrongful termination and won. Go figure.

If you are offended by the things I say, imagine the stuff I hold back.

 

[btrueblood]

Cass, they probably had a procedure titled "How to Screw Over Your Employees and Get Away With It". Now it's title is "How to Screw Over Your Employees and (Almost) Get Away With It"

 

[Sparweb]

I remember your trouble. They should have had a video "Covering Up Your Coworkers' or Subcontractors' Mistakes" and "Lying to Customers" which would have set you off on the right foot, eh?

STF

 

[Maui]

From employer "onboarding" to "waterboarding". I can almost see how the Dilbert cartoon would look.

 

[Tunalover]

Much material presented are legal CYA material by HR. HR's job: to look out for management and the the corporation. Present the information to employees that is required by law so the corporation doesn't get sued by someone. The employees are the last of their concerns. So why, when people go to college to learn how to do HR, do they include courses like psychology that teach them the best ways to treat employees? Are the college faculties and administrations that disconnected from reality that they include courses that have no bearing on what is done in the real world?

ElectroMechanical Product Development
(Electronics Packaging)
UMD 1984
UCF 1993

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

 

[drawoh]

Tunalover,

When the company I worked for was taken over by a large corporation, they brought in a series of systematic annual training sessions. One of these was on ethics. When the first session finished, I Googled the large corporation, and I found out why they were obsessed with ethics. Sometimes, there is history.

--
JHG