Onboarding New IT Staff

Dateline: April 26, 2013

Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.

In preparing for a client engagement, I ran across a blog about how social tools can change the employee onboarding process.  The blog, Social Tools Can Improve Employee Onboarding,  was written by Karie Willyerd,  the coauthor of The 2020 Workplace and  Vice President of Learning and Social Adoption at SuccessFactors, an SAP company.  In it she suggests,

Every day in 2013, 10,000 Baby Boomers will turn 65, and about 80% of those will exit the workplace by that age. Even if revenue growth is modest, it’s likely that you will be hiring to replace for turnover or retirement. If you want to enable those new hires to make a difference as soon as possible and fit into the culture of the company, go social: give them the kinds of communication tools they are already using outside work.

Social tools can help the new employee orient faster to their new role, improving and speeding up their onboarding experience.  She explains,

Once new hires have system access, the ability to join online communities of practice, enabled by social tools, will give them access to people working in the same kinds of jobs or tackling the same kinds of problems, no matter where they are physically located. The community of practice can house the collective intelligence of hundreds of people gathered over time, allowing a rich repository of knowledge for the new hire to access — acronym wikis, collaborative documents, project status updates, and so on.

Social tools can also change the onboarding process itself.

The more cross-functional a workflow, the more it can benefit from social tools. If there is one place that everyone involved in the process can instantly view the status of each new hire, it’s less likely that a step will be dropped because of miscommunication…Today’s corporate social tools can allow simultaneous completion and status update of tasks.

IT organizations are impacted by these same issues.  How might your organization improve the onboarding process for your future hires?

That’s a WRAP.  Have a great weekend.

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