Onboarding a Culture

Can a culture be onboarded? Does onboarding and learning through a brief or extended period of time about the underlying beliefs, expectations of conduct, and values translate into adoption of the organizational culture? What role should onboarding play in disseminating an organizational culture to new employees?

Some of these are difficult questions for sure.  I will at least give one answer to each of these, though there may be many other opinions and thoughts that others have about these questions and answers to them. 

First, I want to get the "cop out" answer out of the way.  The easiest answer is that every organization is different so there will inevitably be a different answer for each question based on the specific organization.   While this answer may be true, I am seeking something more substantial in this investigation even if not applicable to all organizations.

Can culture be onboarded?
- Yes, I believe culture can be onboarded, at least to an extent and that extent is worth the effort that it takes in preparation and planning for the onboarding.  If an organization has a distinctive culture, I believe that it can be onboarded to new employees.  If an organization thoroughly lives their culture, this may be easier in some instances because they would likely hire people who are more receptive to their culture.  One of the fun examples that I found is in this employee handbook...yes, I said employee handbook but I think that this definitely an example of how a new employee could gather insight about a culture while being onboarded with a very formal technique such as a handbook.  And in that example from Valve Software, I would be confident that the talent that they attract is open to this culture. After seeing the video about their handbook and reading some of the employee info from their webpage seems to confirm this.

Does onboarding and learning translate into adoption of the organizational culture? 
- Yes, it can translate into adoption of the culture.  Avoiding another cop out answer of "it depends" or "not for everyone," I do believe it can help lead to adoption.  Something that can be helpful for all employees is to get networked throughout the organization and the earlier the better possibly in an onboarding.  In this article about leadership positively impacting culture in the point about networking creating "smoking rooms" may be something to incorporate into an onboarding experience that could further cultural adoption. Of course there are other examples and ways to spread a culture such as this example of building a sense of ownership in the company that is mostly distinct and separate from onboarding. 

What role should onboarding play in disseminating a culture to new employees?
- I will posit that social learning in an employee onboarding should play a role in sharing the culture of an organization.  Though there are intricacies within this.  What is social learning? There is a definition here and another here. Using the definition from Tony Bingham in the first of those links, the final piece of his definition are the words "information sharing, collaboration and co-creation."  While this article has a few examples of some more formal examples, they are not strictly formal such as a classroom or handbook and the spirit of these examples definitely move further in the direction toward social learning.

So are all of these answers self-serving? Perhaps to continue this blog the answers to the questions had to be affirmative, though I believe that these are true and yet would still need massaging to apply to any given organization.