Accountability for onboarding; how to measure local delivery

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Accountability for onboarding can change as the new hire progresses through the process but measuring local acocuntability can be a challenge. You also need to know the following: How well are your new hires faring in their first few months at your organization? Are they getting everything they need from their onboarding experience? Are your managers and team leaders giving them the support they need?

These are all questions that an effective, streamlined onboarding experience can answer. In this blog, as part of our ongoing onboarding blog series, we’ll address how you can share and track the transfer of learning during your new hires onboarding experience.

First, here’s a quick recap of what effective onboarding involves.

The 4 pillars of effective onboarding

  1. enrollment administration: what your new hires need to be remunerated and operate in your organization
  2. cultural orientation: getting to know the values of your organization and how things work within it
  3. belonging: helping your new hires feel valued and supported
  4. role effectiveness: ensuring your new hires have the necessary skills, knowledge and tools to do their jobs.

Across each of these pillars, it’s essential to put your new hires in the ‘driving seat’ by providing them with clarity regarding required documentation as well as tasks and activities that encourage networking and experiential learning. Collectively this provokes feedback and grows their capability.

 So what do you need to do to build these pillars?

Practical steps to perfect your onboarding experience

  1. Set short-term operational goals for your new hire, which their team and leader can relate to and that, when met, build confidence quickly.
  2. Build a development path around these operational goals and focus development on each goal in turn, rather than trying to build broad understanding which risks being forgotten.
  3. Define and allocate accountability for stakeholders across the range of administrative and development activities and then track stakeholder actions to ensure the new hire is being supported effectively.
  4. Share onboarding best practice and provide experiential learning activities which encourage the new hire to produce evidence of their application of learning. E.g. when a new hire is shadowing colleagues, invite them to document reflections of their learning and share these with their manager for review and feedback.
  5. Monitor new hire progress, stakeholder engagement and validate that the program is being followed.
  6. Follow-up validation with evaluation, in other words, is it effective? Bring your business metrics and development metrics together to assess the impact of the program and seek out opportunities to improve the experience.

All of this sounds great in theory but in practice, many stakeholders find it difficult to coordinate all the different contributions to a new hire’s onboarding experience when onboarding accountability is unclear.

Onboarding in pieces

Coordinating the onboarding experience is challenging when different departments are tasked with responsibility for different elements of the process. A common set-up involves:

Your new hire may, therefore, need to deal with 4 or 5 departments in their first 90 days which illustrates the potential for confusion and frustration if the overall process is not mapped out and clearly understood by each party.

How to create a cohesive onboarding experience

In our experience, there are many platforms in use that cater for onboarding, including many LMS platforms and hiring platforms. What we see with these is that they are typically engineered from an administrator perspective.

So, for those administering the hiring and induction/orientation experience or managing the development component, there are separate tools that do each of these roles admirably.

However, from the new hire perspective, they have to transition from one platform to another to receive all of the elements required.

We have developed a platform which puts the new hire at the center of the experience: On.Board.

Onboarding with On.Board

On.Board provides a means through which new hires can navigate tasks, experiential learning activities and admin requirements of their onboarding program.

However, it also enables the allocation of accountability for onboarding to different stakeholders for different tasks and notifies them when their involvement is required to drive engagement and a new hire-centric experience.

On.Board enables users to maximize experiential learning using modern mobile device features to support evidence production through photo, video, and screenshot capture, with the added convenience of mobility and notifications.

Finally, while our reporting dashboard provides all the typical data regarding new hire digital learning and development, it also includes visibility of what those with onboarding accountability have been doing.

This means that  accountability for onboarding can be measured by leaders, giving a more complete picture when new hires fail to progress and highlighting the onboarding champions. This additional layer of data can help ensure that valuable new hires receive the support and feedback required to optimize their speed to competence.

Discover how On.Board can help you

If you would like to discuss your onboarding requirements and how On.Board can measure accountability for onboarding, track completion of experiential learning and provide a cohesive onboarding journey for your new hires, please do get in touch by mailing us at


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