The Onboarding Monitor
Re-thinking the integration of new employeesTraditional Onboarding…
Maybe it’s time for a re-think?
Onboarding
Onboarding for many organisations is all about new hires with little attention to the onboarding of internal job changers. In spite of the fact that 25% of a working population undergoes some type of career transition, each year and 40% of those employees venturing into a new organisational role, fail during their first 18 months.
Impact on the bottomline
Many organisations are stuck with traditional orientation programmes that fail to assimilate new hires and internal job changers and offer little impact on the bottomline.
Traditional onboarding approaches
For most, traditional onboarding programmes only focus on the entering phase of new hires, lasting one week and in some cases only one day. These short-term strategies fail to improve areas such as retention, productivity, and work engagement.
Optimising functioning
Organisations have one year to optimise the functioning of new hires and six months for internal job changers, but unfortunately, most do not take advantage of this long-term opportunity.
The Afriforte Onboarding Monitor (OBM)
It is time for a fresh, proactive, and supportive approach!
A research team, consisting of researchers from the WorkWell Research Unit at NWU (Potchefstroom Campus) and Afriforte (the commercial arm of the research unit) has been investigating onboarding concepts and practices since October 2012 and realised the lack of onboarding monitoring in industry.
Organisational onboarding tactics and efforts entail traditional first impression management and induction, but understanding whether the onboarding process was successful or not, is based on very little evidence; usually the exit or retention of a “new” employee is used as an indicator. In addition, the onboarding monitoring of internal job changers receives very little attention.
The research team’s efforts entailed the following:
Conceptualising onboarding theoretical frameworks.
Establishing a norm for successful onboarding; the norm is all about understanding when an employee is successfully integrated in order to compare the onboarding progress of newcomers and internal job changers.
Developing a validated and standardised onboarding monitoring instrument supported by sound psychometric principles.
Developing an online tool for onboarding monitoring that reports at an individual, and HR level in real time.
The Afriforte OBM Instrument
Onboarding Monitoring tool for new employees and internal job changers!
The challenges for employees in a new work environment are to mobilise job resources, to successfully deal with job demands and the requirements of the new job, and to become productive and an accepted “insider” as soon as possible.
The Afriforte OBM monitors the following workplace adjustment indicators for proactive follow-up:
Employee Functional outcomes: Burnout risk, Intention to Stay, Work Engagement, and Organisational Commitment
Performance proficiency levels in terms of Job Demands
Progress in terms of Job Resources mobilisation
Work-Related perceptions, such as person-job fit and occupational self-efficacy
Additional for NEW HIRES: Familiarity with company language, history, functioning as well as organisation-fit perceptions
The OBM Personal Report
A comprehensive guideline to help with the onboarding process
Shown below is an extract of the OBM personal report. This shows the employee in which areas of the onboarding process they are excelling and in which areas they need to pay more attention. The complete report is a comprehensive guideline for the onboarding process.