Whether it’s an internal job change or a role at a new company, no one comes into a new position knowing exactly how everything works—not even senior executives. Yet, when it comes to employee onboarding, senior executives are most often left to figure it all out for themselves. According to the latest survey, most executives said they received no formal workplace onboarding in their most recent roles. In fact, only 36 percent of US respondents said their companies had a formal executive onboarding process. There continues to be a glaring disconnect between the onboarding programs most businesses provide and the onboarding support that new executives need and expect.

Executive Onboarding Best Practices

Here are three ideas for capturing information, expertise, and institutional know-how to better onboard your new executives:

• Teach senior leaders what there is to know. Onboarding senior leaders is less about teaching how to do something and more about teaching what there is to know in the shortest time possible. As L&D teams look to provide new executive onboarding materials, the focus should be on casting a wide net for potentially valuable information.

• Capture knowledge from departing executives. The best resource for most new executives will be their predecessor. Of course, most executives entering a new role will never have the opportunity to meet with the person they’re replacing. L&D teams can help smooth the transition by establishing formal processes intended to preserve as much of the outgoing executive’s institutional knowledge as possible before that person leaves the company. Recorded video interviews with outgoing executives can capture details about their daily work, the status of existing and proposed projects, and organizational hurdles for which the incoming leader may want to plan.

• Subject matter expert downloads. While most senior executives won’t need to become experts themselves on day-to-day operations, systems, and services for each team, access to this information will nonetheless be quite valuable. This is why more and more L&D teams are now tapping in-house subject matter experts (SMEs) to help in onboarding new executives and give new leaders an informed look into the inner workings of the business. But scheduling in-person meetings with many different SMEs can take months, and the detailed information exchanged in these face-to-face meetings is all too easy for a busy executive to forget amid all the other things they’ll be learning during onboarding. It is crucial for L&D teams to ask SMEs to capture their knowledge in informational videos for new business leaders to watch on-demand as needed or as they work through executive onboarding tasks.

Rapid Executive Onboarding With On-Demand Video

Most executive onboarding is an informal combination of meetings, handbooks, and hope. But L&D teams are beginning to apply the same concepts and tools they already use for more traditional employee onboarding in order to implement structured onboarding programs designed specifically for new executives. Video captures more details more efficiently. Emails and text transcripts from interviews with departing executives and soon-to-be colleagues can often be impossibly long—a simple 30-minute conversation may yield 20 pages or more of text. Yet trimming those documents down means that some important detail will be lost, rendering the exercise useless. Video, however, makes recording all that detail simple—the interviewee can simply turn on a webcam or use their smartphone and press “record.” But using video for onboarding and training can be challenging without the right technology. To see how a video platform can make it possible for your organization, contact our team today to start your free trial of Panopto here.