Page 111 - Successful Onboarding

100 • Successful Onboarding

competition throughout its workforce, and in response so does
Gimbels. Employees deliberately cultivate new skills and capacities, such
as an awareness of customer needs and desires and extensive knowledge
about the offers available at other stores. Contrary to Hollywood depic-
tions of it, the transformation of employee behavior in real life does not
always happen right away. But of great import for the conception of your
onboarding initiative—unlike veteran employees, new hires actually rep-
resent an easier group of employees to adapt to the new company direc-
tion and can be a great lever to drive organizational transformation.
If true organizational transformation reaches deep into the daily life of a
workplace, it is not enough for firms to take a one-off or haphazard approach
to cultural change. In a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled
“Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail,” noted management
thinker John Kotter cited eight common errors, including “not anchoring
4
changes in the corporation’s culture.” As Kotter relates, the firm must make
repeated efforts to “show people how the new approaches, behaviors, and
attitudes have helped improve performance.” Doing this might involve tak-
ing time out at every meeting to assess why performance was improving or
running articles in a company newspaper linking performance and cultural
change. At Home Depot, cultural change in the early 2000s actually went
well beyond these techniques, including the establishment of five-day learn-
ing sessions for almost 2,000 district and store managers at the retail chain.
The firm has also institutionalized the new culture by offering ongoing
training programs, including its Future Leaders Program. 5
Given that the average large organization renews as much as 30% of its
workforce in three years (12% attrition gets you there pretty quick), formally
enrolling new hires in the organization’s change efforts can prove an
immense help in getting the job done. To understand what enrolling
new hires in change might mean, just think of General Electric. For a 15 -
year period, the company’s entire operating strategy centered on a six-sigma
initiative to drive continuous improvement, elimination of waste, and quar-
ter-to-quarter earnings improvement. By the late 1990s, the culture found
itself in a difficult position when six-sigma began delivering diminishing
returns. The company became more and more reliant on a single operat-
ing unit—GE Finance—to deliver enterprise-wide financial returns, which
itself began to stress. In 2000, with the appointment of CEO Jeff Immelt,
the company began to remake itself as an innovation leader. Instead of