Most of us are familiar with test-driven development but may be less familiar with the concept applied to new-hire onboarding. Enter retention-driven development, where you design your new-hire onboarding using the same principles as TDD.
It’s typical for company onboarding to gloss over the team-specific and technical information you need to truly get started in a new role. It’s challenging to divert time and resources away from the backlog and feature requests to build a technical onboarding program. More often than not, a new hire is given a list of people to talk to and not much else. This kind of onboarding isn’t incredibly effective; it’s more trial-and-error than not and often leads to imposter syndrome, slow time to productivity, and duplication of work. On top of all these frustrations, bad onboarding is a waste of time and money when you can’t retain your new hires.
Kristen Gallagher explores retention-driven development. You’ll discover that a retention-focused perspective is both light on effort and perfect for onboarding in a busy, rapidly changing environment as you rethink how to approach the new hire experience, the manager lift, and the documentation needed to effectively onboard someone.
Kristen Gallagher is an organizational strategies and learning designer with over a decade of learning and development and business partnership. She’s the founder and CEO of Edify, a consultancy that builds technical onboarding programs for high-growth teams. She has architected and delivered onboarding programs for companies adding from one person a quarter to over 100 people a quarter and from one office to more than 13 global offices. Her range of expertise in the science of adult learning, business strategy, knowledge management, and organizational development means that Kristen architects programs that are designed to evolve and scale with rapid changes. She’s on the board of Business for a Better Portland and serves as a curriculum developer and instructor for XXcelerate Fund.
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