Enhance Employee Onboarding with a Cultural Trainer

Remember the last time you started a new job? The oh-so-many meetings during the first couple weeks and the fire hose of critical knowledge that must be retained to survive? Scary days.

In my experience, much of the material I had to learn was not critical to day-to-day work, and the important bits were repeated several times before I was expected to know them. And the insights I really needed but did not possess — the ones that led to the biggest mistakes — related to cultural gaps that caused me to feel disconnected from my new environment. If only someone would have helped me with those!

When organizations set up onboarding programs, they provide learning modules, meetings with HR and supervisors, and sometimes even a checklist of 30/60/90-day outcomes that help employees prepare for success. But no matter how excellent the processes for helping employees with on-the-job training and for helping them understand their place in the structure and systems, cultural gaps persist. Cultural gaps are the unspoken set of rules that live between and outside of stated practices; these rules tend to have the most impact on who succeeds and who fails to “fit in”. We know these fit aspects of organizations when we experience them, but like most other cultural issues, describing cultural gaps is akin to asking a fish to describe water… hard to define the consuming context in which one lives.

Along with fit concerns, cultural gaps also pertain to developing organizational competence and to dealing with behaviors that vary from “normal.” For example, I met with a young, high-potential employee who had joined an energy company from another industry. The employee was in one of his first supervisory roles and was selected to attend the company’s leadership program. During a session early in the program, he approached me to discuss a frustration he had recently experienced — being turned down by his manager when he proposed a multimillion-dollar project opportunity. I asked him how much the company would make in year two of the project. He said, proudly, that all the money would be made in the first year. Ahhh…culture gap! We discussed the culture of energy companies (and his company specifically) pertaining to large investments and long-term returns, and how managers resist committing resources to short-term projects, no matter their returns.

Why certain behaviors exist and why these can be a surprise to new employees is inseparable from organizational culture. Culture is defined as a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterize an organization. But culture goes beyond this definition…to explain how who we are influences how we think and act; such influence is known as an organization’s “dominant logic.” Through the lens of dominant logic, decisions that can appear irrational to those outside the organization are completely rational to those inside. Failing to understand org culture and dominant logic will lead to difficulty fitting in.

Back to the young employee at the energy company: He was left to learn the cultural lesson on his own, which is the hard way, the unnecessary way, and the common way. Unfortunately, culture-fit onboarding often goes unmanaged, to the point that the cultural gap becomes like a final, unfair recruiting question: Is the new employee intrinsically right for this organization or not?

Now, one change I’ve seen, primarily in organizations that value retention (surprise: not all do), is including a person in the onboarding process who is part guide/confidant/insight-provider concerning the culture: a Cultural Trainer (CT). The cultural trainer can go by many fun names/terms, such as sherpa, chaperone, coach…Jedi master? The cultural trainer’s value may vary by organization, but generally he/she is someone employees feel comfortable asking questions that they’d prefer not to ask their supervisor or HR. The need for a cultural trainer is easily recognized by the need we all have at times — someone to ask “stupid questions” outside the normal chain of command.

There are many types of questions that can fall outside the traditional onboarding process, including:

· Am I expected to be on-camera during virtual staff meetings?

· Is there an internal resource that offers descriptions of acronyms and internal language people regularly use?

· When is it acceptable to apply for another position internally?

· I learned the corporate values, but can you give me an example of how those might impact my work?

One of the CT’s duties is to help a new employee understand how the organization’s behaviors, decision-making, practices, etc. might differ from what he/she experienced in previous organizations — and why this knowledge is important to success. For younger, smaller organizations, the CT’s role is also to share a new employee’s perspectives with leaders; with this information, leaders can be aware of how their culture may be influencing the employee and can assess whether such influence is positive or negative.

As you begin planning the onboarding process for your next employee, remember that success will likely require much more than a structured process, and understanding the culture and the logic of your organization will be challenging to someone new. Having a trusted resource outside the traditional onboarding process (a CT) to support employee integration may be the difference between replacing an employee in 1 year and celebrating her/him as a 20-year leader.