IN DEPTH
Onboarding in a virtual world: The myth of the lonely employee
CILIP President Paul Corney continues his series of articles talking to some of the profession’s leading lights. This month he speaks to James Robertson and Martin White and considers the value of onboarding and how we can get it right in a post-pandemic scenario.
A FEW years back I was in the Middle East on an assignment where, attracted by the offer of post-doctoral research in Germany, several key members of staff had left at short notice. Concurrently and perhaps serendipitously, I was invited to contribute a chapter, to a book written by KM practitioners, on how organisations might manage the risk of knowledge loss.
Chapter V, “When they leave their knowl- edge (and networks) leave with them”, was the outcome, informed by my experience in Iran and as a founding Trustee of a UK charity where we’d attempted to identify and share the knowledge of transient vol- unteers.
Coincidentally, Martin White (more of him later) and I had just finished preparing a Masterclass on Expertise Discovery. We’d surmised that organisations must be able to find out who knows what: when assembling client-facing teams; facing a new challenge; revisiting previous decisions and acquiring or merging with another organisation.
Onboarding is critical It’s not just departing staff organisations need to focus on though. Onboarding is also a critical issue. Once, when talking to the newly arrived General Counsel at a prominent insti- tution in the Caribbean, I asked about their process. “They told me to forget everything I know as we do things differently.” Others see the onboarding process dif- ferently and are not countenancing hybrid working, fearing its impact on aspects of the
42 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL Paul Corney is President of CILIP.
business. Here’s what Goldman Sachs’ boss David Solomon said in a recent interview:
…Mr Solomon was worried about an incoming ‘class’ of about 3,000 new recruits, who wouldn’t get the “direct mentorship” they need.
“I am very focused on the fact that I don’t want another class of young people arriving at Goldman Sachs in the summer remotely,” he said.
As we come out of lockdown and organi- sations think about shaving headcount, how much better are they today at “knowing what they know and who knows it?” As many contemplate adopting a hybrid model of dis- tributed working, how ready are they to turn virtual workarounds into changes in organisa- tional processes? Conversely, what processes might they adopt for virtual ‘onboarding’? I’ve asked Martin, who is an information scientist and ahead of most in thinking
April-May 2021
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