Onboarding Teaches the Company. Nobody Teaches the Job.

Role-specific onboarding is the part of onboarding that teaches how one particular job is actually done: its recurring deadlines, its real approval routes, its open problems and the judgment calls that come up in the first weeks. Most onboarding programmes do not cover it. The person who knew it best has usually already left.

A new hire's first week is well organised in most companies. The laptop works. The policies have been read. There was a welcome lunch. Then on Wednesday of week two the first real question arrives, the one about how this job works, and nobody in the building can answer it.

What onboarding programmes actually cover

The most widely used model of onboarding comes from Talya Bauer's guide for the SHRM Foundation, Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success (2010). It splits onboarding into four building blocks:

• Compliance: the basic legal and policy rules.

• Clarification: making sure new employees understand their new job and what is expected of them.

• Culture: the organisation's norms, formal and informal.

• Connection: the relationships and information networks a new employee needs.

Three of the four are about the company. Only clarification is about the job. Bauer's own estimate at the time was that about 30 percent of organisations covered compliance and some clarification and stopped there, and only about 20 percent formally covered all four.

The results show. Gallup found in 2018 that only 12 percent of employees strongly agree their organisation does a great job onboarding new employees. Its 2019 report Creating an Exceptional Onboarding Journey for New Employees puts the time a new employee needs to reach full performance at around 12 months.

A company can run an excellent programme on the first, third and fourth blocks and still hand a new person an empty job.

The person who knew the job has already left

Clarification is normally handed to the manager. The manager knows what the role is supposed to produce. That is different from knowing how the previous person produced it.

The method sits with the predecessor. Who to call when the supplier is late. Which report finance reads and which one nobody opens. The customer who needs a phone call before any price change. The deadline that is in one person's calendar and nowhere else.

And the timing works against the successor. Offboarding ends on the leaver's last day. Onboarding starts on the new person's first day. In between there is usually a vacancy of weeks or months, and the two processes are run by different people who rarely compare notes. If a handover document exists, it was written for a file. It was not written for someone's second week.

What a new person in a vacated role needs in the first four weeks

Most of it is small, specific and impossible to guess:

• The recurring deadlines nobody else has in a calendar. The quarterly return, the annual renewal, the report that is due the day after a public holiday.

• Who actually approves what. The formal route and the real one are often different, and the real one was usually agreed in a conversation. More on that in why your SOPs miss what actually matters.

• The three documents worth reading first. Out of the hundreds in the shared drive.

• The decisions that will come up this month, and how they were made before. Stated as a rule with an exception: accept the rush order if the line is under 80 percent load that week, otherwise check with planning before promising a date.

• What is open right now. Promises made, problems half-solved, the email thread that needs an answer on Friday.

• Who to meet in week one, and why each of them matters to this role. The reason is what makes the introduction useful.

None of this appears in a company onboarding programme, because none of it is about the company.

Build the onboarding from the handover

The fix is to treat the handover and the onboarding as one piece of work with two ends.

Ask the leaver the questions the successor will need answered. An exit interview asks why someone is leaving. It does not ask what they know. A knowledge transfer interview does, and these 42 questions are grouped so the answers map onto the list above: procedures, people, judgment and context.

Organise the answers by situation. A successor does not need a description of the job. They need to know what to do when the supplier is late, when the month-end numbers do not reconcile, when a customer asks for an exception. Write it the way they will look for it.

Turn it into weeks. Week one is people and open items. Week two is the recurring work and its deadlines. Weeks three and four are the judgment calls, once the new person has seen enough to recognise them.

If the predecessor has already gone, ask the people around the role. The manager, the colleague who covered the gap, and the two or three people who dealt with the role most. After two weeks, ask the new person what is missing. They will know exactly.

What it is worth

Recruitment is the cheap part of losing someone. Oxford Economics estimated the cost of replacing an employee at £30,614, of which £25,181 was lost output while the new person got up to speed, and put the time to optimum productivity at between 15 and 52 weeks depending on the kind of hire. The figures and their limits are set out in every knowledge loss statistic, with the sources checked.

That lost output is the ramp. Recruitment fills the seat. Only role knowledge shortens the time it takes the new person to do the job. The invisible costs of every resignation looks at where the rest of that cost lands.

Frequently asked questions

What is role-specific onboarding? Onboarding that teaches how one particular job is done, as opposed to how the company works. It covers the role's recurring work, its real approval routes, its open items and the judgment calls it involves.

How is it different from a handover? A handover captures what the leaving person knows. Role-specific onboarding delivers it to the person who starts. They are two ends of the same piece of work and most companies run them separately.

What if the previous person has already left? Interview the people who worked most closely with the role, and ask the new person after two weeks what they still cannot find out. The gaps they name are the onboarding.

Who should own it? The manager of the role. HR can own the company onboarding, but only the role's manager can make sure the job itself is handed over.

Rinto interviews the people who leave and turns what they know into a role sheet and an onboarding journey for the person who starts.

Sources

• Talya N. Bauer, Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success, SHRM Foundation, 2010.

• Gallup, Why the Onboarding Experience Is Key for Retention, 16 May 2018.

• Gallup, Creating an Exceptional Onboarding Journey for New Employees, 2019.

• Oxford Economics for Unum, The Cost of Brain Drain: Understanding the financial impact of staff turnover, 2014.