Page 109 - Successful Onboarding

98 • Successful Onboarding

sense—vision—offers little help in deciphering the world of work you’ve just
entered. As a designer of your company’s onboarding system (or a hiring
manager), you need to consider whether your new hires are entering with
false impressions of your brand that have been affected by the consumer
brand or other influencing factors, such as significant moments in a com-
pany’s history that have developed into nearly mythical status.

New hires notice contradictions

Entering hires also have their new company’s often-unrealistic portrayal
of its organizational culture with which to contend. To the extent that
companies talk about organizational culture with new hires, they often
make matters worse by downplaying negative aspects of the culture or even
outright ignoring them in the course of presenting what is really their aspi-
ration for the culture. As consultants, we walk into the most admired com-
panies, those that make fantastic products that have changed the world
and created immense wealth, and we find that the people who work for
these companies—including their leaders—commonly lament about
“how screwed up we are.” We hear this all the time. New hires are espe-
cially primed to discover the flaws in culture, because they’re put into vul-
nerable positions that encourage defensive reactions on their part. When
management comes along with lofty and ultimately quite meaningless
rhetoric about how noble the firm is, they create an unpleasant experience
of cognitive dissonance. New hires are told the firm values innovation, yet
upon offering a suggestion they are informed in a condescending tone that
“we don’t do it that way.” They were told the firm values collaboration, yet
they have just sat through a meeting in which two functional managers
squabbled over who owned a certain process.
Left unresolved, as is so often the case, such contradictions can cause new
hires to become increasingly cynical and distanced from firms they initially
might have been quite excited about joining. It gets worse from there. New
hires are smart, sensitive people who commiserate with other new hires.
They wallow together in complaints and negativity. Instead of the excessively
positive image of the organizational culture the firm intended, new hires
feed on the frustrations of those around them, discovering more and more
about the culture they had not noticed and do not like. Imagine what this
does for the firm’s energy level, productivity, and talent retention.