How a Cultural Audit Can Elevate the Onboarding Process

The Protocall Group

by Lilith Christiansen

Only 44 percent of employees believe their employer does a good job bringing new talent into the organization. Strategic onboarding seeks to solve that issue by moving beyond automating paperwork. Instead, it delivers a personalized journey that transforms new hires into fully functioning, integrated members of the team. Today’s onboarding approaches should provide clear expectations in terms of behavior and interaction with management, customers, and other employees.

Strategic onboarding is made up of four pillars: cultural mastery, interpersonal network development, early career support, and strategy immersion and direction.

Cultural mastery is a critical component, but one that often gets overlooked. Providing employees with a sense of formal and informal norms and how to thrive within them enables new hires to fit in quickly. New hires need to understand the ins and outs of company culture in honest and authentic ways, or else businesses risk losing them.

The challenge for many organizations is defining their culture. There are a few questions that can help start the process: What’s the “real and true” story? What’s changing as the organization grows and evolves? Are there any hidden perceptions that need to be unearthed? Are there any old traditions that need to be carried forward? Is the organization aspiring to build a different culture than exists today?

To find out the answers to these questions, organizations can execute a cultural audit. At its core, a cultural audit is a simple, three-step process that includes asking, documenting, and analyzing. Each of these three steps plays a critical role in understanding and establishing an organization’s culture.