We don’t take the orientation process nearly as seriously as we should. And even when we take it seriously, we tend to focus on administrative details. We make sure people have the HR forms and employee manuals. That’s all good, but does it help the new employee really own her job?
If you want ownership behavior (critical to open organizations, as we argue in Humanize), then you need to make sure everyone in your organization really knows what drives success and how things work. The HR forms don’t really do that.
In this article that I wrote for our publisher, Pearson, I give some suggestions for how to change your orientation process so that it is more effective.