How Our Organizational Culture Impacts Onboarding

Having just worked through how an effective onboarding process can get results, I believe it would serve all well to have a solid understanding of what absolutely must be in place for any piece of information we cover during that onboarding process to have a lasting impact. So what could possibly be that important? 

Our CULTURE!!!

While the things we cover as we bring a new team member up to speed definitely matters in the scope of earning their initial buy-in, what they experience every single day moving forward has a far bigger (and longer lasting) impact! The onboarding script is all fine and good but our organizational culture shows whether or not it was all talk!

I recently found a Forbes.com article that shared these three things regarding how important onboarding is to maintaining a great company culture:

• Corporate culture is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage;
• Poor fit with the culture is the no. 1 cause of new hire failure;
• Executive onboarding is the key to accelerating success and reducing risk in a new job. 

As critical as those things are to maintaining a great culture within our team, ensuring the culture we say we have during the onboarding process truly matches the culture a new team member experiences on a daily basis is just as important! We can pitch how amazing it is to be part of our team with every word that comes out of our mouth but what someone new to our team experiences as their boots hit the group with us by their side will be what really sticks! I’ve heard John Maxwell say that “culture eats mission for lunch!” If you believe that to be true, and I certainly do, even the best onboarding process serves as little more than an appetizer in that overall meal!

So how can we make sure everything we invest into building an effective onboarding process makes the long term impact we need? We absolutely have to work on building a great organizational culture EVERY SINGLE DAY! Moving forward, we’ll work through some steps we can all take to make that a simple process. Before then though, we need to have a clear understanding of the complete importance of the culture we create in our organization - and we’ll do that next time!