I recently read an interesting article on organizational wellness and, as I do more and more often, I tried to immediately understand the points of contact between my experience and what I had read: in this article I want to write about continuous onboarding, what I call re-onboarding of people.
I was reminded of some great success stories related to organizational wellness and identified some behaviors that I would now like to share with you:
1. Being sensitive and willing to pick up on weak signals
It is a matter of picking up small, if not almost imperceptible, signs of discomfort and suffering. Maybe we notice the other person’s irritated behavior, responses and discussions that are less positive than usual: the chemistry tells us that something is wrong. The difficulty of reading what we observe and feel subtly suggests that we wait a little longer to “understand” better. Too bad that, like a dam, a small crack can be quickly repaired, while the gash, once opened, becomes uncontainable.
2. Make the monitoring of organizational wellbeing a core activity
It is a managerial activity that is as important as sticking to a budget or keeping commitments made in performance reviews with your boss. In reality, many people look at these activities with a certain smirk, amusing themselves by defining them as those things that do no harm, as long as they don’t waste time and, above all, don’t take up space in the control room where, instead, you have to talk about numbers, results, crises, extraordinary plans: in short, it’s all about who has the longest and most complicated number.
The same people, with the same smirk, always with their numbers in their heads, come to our meetings to address issues of engagement. Sometimes you wonder for what strange game of fate they are there. The great satisfaction then comes from seeing how an important percentage of them soon understand the usefulness of also working on a less developed part, which consists of managerial skills. It is, alas, much sadder to see the less positive results of those who continue not to care about engagement.
3. Managing onboarding every day: the re-onboarding
On the level of emotion and feeling, the asymmetry between those who are uncomfortable and those who try to help can become truly remarkable. For the leader, grasping discomfort means being willing, perhaps for the umpteenth time, to feel this discontent.
However, it is not always the case that one is willing to confront the effects of this discomfort. For the employee, the discomfort is all there, it appears that the astral quadrature is absolutely inauspicious, the employee does not want to talk about it, but all the pores are talking about it. It has been shown that a high percentage of CVs are sent to Head Hunters at these times.
That’s why I smile when I think about the fact that, often, the only onboarding we can conceive of is a series of activities attributable to the early days of a new hire.
But if onboarding means getting on board, on the engagement level and on the role level, a boss should be dealing with onboarding every day.
Because the most important task of a boss is to have with him/her the most engaged and the most prepared resources, in order to together with them succeed in what the organization expects and also, why not, to surprise it a little.
This for me is re-onboarding.
