Here is a little context underlying this blogging exercise. I am currently engaged in an effort to revamp and enhance the new employee experience including the initial day 1 experience as well as work to develop a cohesive onboarding plan for new employees in a multi-site region. Several of the sites and their employees joined the company through acquisitions in the last few years and haven't assimilated well into the larger culture.
While I have begun to engage and change some of the aspects of the day 1 new employee experience, the real work to develop an onboarding plan hasn't yet begun in earnest. Some of the day 1 changes thus far include moving orientation to a new central building and having a company employee rather than a vendor facilitate new employee orientation to better share perspectives and stories. Additional work is being started in communication with new hires directly before and during day 1.
Going forward, several of the posts in this blog have given me ideas that will be brought into the discussions we will begin having around onboarding in the coming weeks. For me, it was helpful to define what I was talking about, especially around terms that may be ambiguous. Building off of this, a couple of the posts and links from those posts have begun to catalog specific methods, actions and uses for connecting employees in their initial employment period.
In Connected Products, it was interesting for me to see an organization with a similar culture and how their products and strong historical industry experience influenced the culture. This is an area that I can definitely continue to explore including how the products and services in our region of the company impact and influence our culture and the employees that we attract.
I have gained further insight around cultural acquisition both by employees and through organizational mergers and acquisitions that lead to a shared or adoption of a new culture by one or both employee groups involved in the transaction. This is of particular relevance to me because of how several of our small groups in the region have become employees of the larger organization. I have even learned that when those transactions occurred, the new employees joining the company didn't even have an employee orientation.
Now as I transition from enhancing employee orientation to working on development of an onboarding plan for new employees (as well as further engage current employees) I have begun to formulate a plan that includes insights around how to onboard a culture. There were many great ideas that I found while researching and reading around social onboarding, too many to share in that post, yet I have saved many of those that may be applicable in my organization.
Overall, I will say that this has been a valuable experience and through my wandering posts up to this point, I have been able to explore multiple areas that I will now begin to bring together in a more cohesive way forward. Since I have already built this forum to share learning and explore new areas, I will attempt to post from time to time about successes and failures that I experience related to this topic and my ongoing work on this project.
