A new employee encounters your operating model before attending their first real meeting. The right laptop should arrive, accounts should be ready, and the manager should know what has been arranged. Current instructions should explain which meetings to attend and where to find what happens next. A new hire spending the week before starting coordinating HR, IT, shipping, and their future manager is being asked to finish designing the onboarding process.
For technical roles, a delivered laptop is only one part of readiness. Check that the person has the software licenses, group memberships, and instructions needed for the work they will do. Confirm that the instructions reached them and that they can sign in; an email marked sent is not the same as a working setup.
Handing someone hardware that cannot reasonably do the work you hired them for is an operational design problem. Your new employee should not be the QA department discovering it for you. Give the people advising clients on employee experience the authority and time to fix your own onboarding.
This post is part of my 25 lessons from 25 years in consulting series, exploring what it takes to build a consulting firm that delivers for clients and supports the people doing the work.
From leadership and employee experience to sales and delivery, the series comes back to one idea: a consulting company should be its own best client.
Have a lesson of your own? Share what has worked, what hasn’t, or what you wish more consulting firms understood in the comments.