Onboarding

Improving Our Orientation Process

MGMT: 4113 Human Resource Management

November 22, 2015

Dear Mr. Smith,

I am writing you today to give you my insight on our orientation program. I believe we can make this process more enjoyable for each new employee. As of right now, the orientation program is four and a half hours long, and it is filled with more information than the average person can remember long term. I would like you to consider three things: renaming the process to onboarding, splitting the information into a two-day process, and adding more activities for the new employees. I will be explaining in further detail each of these three things, and I am hopeful that this will make the onboarding process more enjoyable for new and current employees alike.

“Orientation program – it’s training designed to prepare employees to perform their job effectively, learn about the organization, and establish work relations” (Noe, Hollenbeck and Gerhart 224). To prepare an employee to enter a new workplace, you need to give them the opportunity to succeed. As of right now, I think our organization is not doing a good enough job in the orientation process. It is overloaded with information that has a lot to do with our background, the policies of the company, and what the owner sees in our future.

If we took orientation, and we reinvented it, we could possibly have one of the best programs in the nation. That is why we should stop calling it an orientation, and start calling it onboarding. The reason why I chose onboarding is that it says a lot more than orientation. I believe it gives the new employee something to look forward to simply because it is different.

Onboarding takes the orientation process to the next level. “Your organization needs to implement a robust onboarding program that can get new employees up to speed from day one” (Ferri-Reed 2). Think of it this way, we are splitting information into a two-day process so the new employee does not get...