Page 117 - Successful Onboarding

106 • Successful Onboarding

outline seven other “aspects of our culture,” some of which—“high per-
formance, freedom and responsibility, context not control, highly aligned,
loosely coupled”—are essentially performance values. Under “high per-
formance,” for instance, the CEO outlines Netflix’s assumption that every
employee will be a “star” in his or her position, or they won’t work here
(how is that for frank talk?). As part of this performance value, the firm
promotes honest assessments of performance, counseling new hires to col-
lect frank feedback: “To avoid surprises, you should periodically ask your
manager: ‘If I told you I were leaving, how hard would you work to change
my mind to stay at Netflix?’” The CEO also goes on to explain his busi-
ness rationale for valuing all-star performance above things like hard work
or loyalty, arguing that in creative work such as that performed by Netflix’s
workers, high-performing colleagues are “ten times more effective than
the average employee—a far greater spread than in procedural work.”
High performance workers have an especially big impact, which is why
the firm is “so manic on high performance.”
We are not endorsing Netflix’s opinions or values per se. What is more
important is how clearly Netflix communicates what it expects from new
hires. The Netflix example suggests a few “best principles” of onboarding
messaging as it relates to culture. To achieve maximum impact, designers
of an onboarding program should not merely communicate the unvar-
nished truth about their cultures and firm performance values; there is
more. To this end, we have our own list of ten best principles. These
should serve as guidelines as you begin to design your onboarding pro-
gram and its inherent message. Here are our first four best principles:

Best Principle #1: Use simple language that new hires can
understand.
Best Principle #2: Go beyond lofty rhetoric to provide specific
examples of how the performance values might play out in
everyday life.
Best Principle #3: Make some effort to explain the business
rationale behind the values.
Best Principle #4: Express the culture in passionate terms while
also invoking the authority of company leadership.