Culture Fit Is the First Step to Successful Onboarding [infographic] – Friday Distraction
If you haven’t seen it, there’s an interesting article over on the Harvard Business Review blog titled, “Don’t Let Your Company Culture Just Happen.” My big takeaway from the article was that in order for employees to be engaged, they have to fit with the culture. Meaning that cultural fit needs to be an important part of the recruiting process.
There are lots of companies that do this – hire for attitude and fit, train for skills. But for some organizations, this can be a real shift in recruiting philosophy.
Our friends at SilkRoad recently released a report on “The Who, How, and Why of Onboarding.” I found it interesting because it used a term I hadn’t heard before but immediately fell in love with – cultureboarding. It’s when the onboarding process focuses on instilling workplace culture. And it’s not limited to regular full-time workers. Cultureboarding includes contingent workers and strategic partners.
One data point in the infographic that caught my attention was on measuring the impact of onboarding. The reason it caught my eye was not because of the methods being used to gather the data, but that all three methods were at less than 50 percent. If engagement is predicated on cultural fit, and the way employees learn about culture is through activities like cultureboarding, then isn’t it essential to measure the effectiveness of onboarding? It makes me wonder what obstacles exist within organizations to measuring onboarding.
Granted cultureboarding is probably considered a subset of onboarding, just like recruiting and pre-boarding. But the distinction is important. Does the organization’s onboarding process include a culture component? Where are they in the process (before, during, after hire)? What pieces of the company culture do part-time, seasonal, freelancers, and contractors need to know in order to be successful? It’s a worthwhile conversation.
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