I’ve worked here 18 years. New people make me nervous.
How am I going to help a new hire understand our business and be as productive as possible, adding value to us and our customers when I’m still trying to figure out how to do that myself?! AND apparently it’s also important a new person ENJOY the work they’re doing.
Who comes up with this stuff?! I blame Oprah.
Well, Oprah, we’re listening. I’m no HR professional, but I know a thing or two about product innovation and technology management. And I like that my work at Tideworks always feels interesting and new. So, a little over a year ago we said, “Sure, let’s see if we can’t better assist our new hires by developing a new program those in the human resource world refer to as Onboarding.”
The term “onboarding” came into existence in the 1970s, but for reasons not even a quick check of the Dilbert cartoon database could explain to me, the term onboarding only really gained popularity in business circles over the last decade. It started being used when companies began putting more and more emphasis on preliminary, sustained training for new hires.
Onboarding goes beyond orientation into incorporation of your new hires into the company culture. It’s a first impression you need for the new hire to discover what is true and lasting at your company. It’s expensive for us to recruit and bring on new people. So we want to make sure we keep the good ones, even if that means we have to increase our upfront investment.
This process used to be known as new employee orientation. But onboarding is more about retaining talent than getting people settled in their new office cubicle. And because the end goal is employee retention, especially retaining potential key performers, it’s also about getting them engaged as quickly and intelligently as we can now and over the long run.
The rich onboarding program we’ve developed across all Tideworks functional groups gets new hires in front of our customers and their particular business domains, onsite and over Webex, as soon as we can. There’s a big difference between 40 ft Dry Full containers as data on your computer screen compared to stepping, carefully with eyes wide open, onto a marine or rail facility. Watch a new hire from the high tech industry the first time they see the size, scope and speed of terminal operations up close and personal. They are almost giddy. I know…that’s still me at every customer visit.
We’re not just crunching numbers more and more creatively at a Fortune 500 company or making the universe safe from Angry Birds and brain-eating Zombies, we’re helping to keep the world’s commerce in motion. That’s pretty cool, and it’s particularly fun to instill that value and opportunity into our new folks.
We’re not a perfect company. We lose some of the good ones to some pretty amazing technology companies and logistics providers in the Seattle area and beyond. Our neighbors like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Starbucks hold great appeal to innovative, critical thinkers. But then we look around here and see folks with incredible Tideworks tenures. Lots and lots of folks at our offices have been here even longer than me. Some days I feel like a fortunate college professor. Look at the experience and learned history around me, surrounded by fresh, anything is possible new faces. It’s a great mix.
At Tideworks we often say people are our greatest asset. It’s true. Some of them are just so new, they don’t know it yet.
With innovative new programs like the TW101 Sessions taught by myself and my onboarding partner, Harvey Bauer, we’re always working to retain good, smart new employees…so that someday, they will know what they mean to us and our marketplace.
And with a little luck and a lot of effort, it won’t be long before our customers and their customers get to know the value our new hires bring into our partnership with them, too.