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New employee onboarding takes "next steps"

One of the teams at ITD's Leadership Summit last fall tackled the issue of new employee onboarding. There were a few sections of ITD where onboarding was occurring, but the majority of ITD had little or no formal onboarding process for new employees.

With 25% of employees being new since January 2016, there is a need to standardize the experience of those first few formative months.

"This involves supervisors making sure you have all the necessary accesses and equipment, that you feel comfortable and valued at work, and that you have access to someone who can help you along the way (a peer-leader)," said District 4's Technical Records Specialist, Lisa Kidd, a member of the onboarding team.

Onboarding differs from traditional New Employee Orientation in several significant ways. Employee orientation generally takes place on Day One and often includes routine paperwork. Onboarding, on the other hand, is an experience that occurs from before employment even begins, all the way through the employee's first 6-18 months. New employee onboarding not only focuses on the development of good employees, but also retention.

The onboarding group won last fall's problem-solving title, and hasn't slowed down since. The team has requested and received feedback from divisions and districts across ITD. Some of the groups are already implementing the materials.

Some of the steps taken recently have been significant, like the introduction of an "Intro to ITD" video in new employee onboarding materials, while others are more systemic (working on organizational changes that are built into ITD's architecture).

They have also used the SharePoint site as the repository for everything related to onboarding.

"It has all of our materials, videos, and a discussion board to provide real-time feedback,' said Kyle Monson, a member of the onboarding implementation team. "We're asking everyone with critiques/ideas to post on there or email me so we can continue to refine the program." All of the videos are posted on the right side of the page.

The team has also done a WebEx (the recording of which is available here) in which Kyle provided an overview of the program/materials and answered questions, presented to the Board, and created a training video posted on the Learning Hub.