Page 190 - Successful Onboarding

174 • Successful Onboarding

presentation tends to contain short statements that amount to watered
down “good citizenship” statements—proclamations of how committed
the company is to providing opportunity to employees, caring for the envi-
ronment, delivering profit for shareholders, and “being the best we can
be.” If a company does provide some level of indoctrination into strategy,
it is usually delivered informally and through one-on-one conversations
with peers, and mostly this is reserved for executives.
As we argue in this chapter, all new hires should get at least some sub-
stantive education about strategy as applied to the company, business unit,
function, and role, with links forged between these piece parts. Like exec-
utive hires, new front-line employees can perform at much higher levels
when they understand how their day-to-day work contributes to the firm’s
overall success, and when they are bought into the actual “action plan.”
By immersing all new hires into organizational strategies, you can moti-
vate and inspire your evolving workforce, in the process driving key oper-
ating metrics such as engagement, job satisfaction, loyalty, productivity,
growth, and profit. You can also go further and drive organizational trans-
formation in support of key strategic initiatives.
This last point is an important one. Managers seeking to drive enter-
prise transformation should help workers understand how their specific
actions connect to the strategy. Our greatest aspiration is that this discus-
sion will serve as something of a wake-up call: Driving change is not just
about attention-getting measures, like a big investment in new technology
or merging with another company. It can and should be about mobiliz-
ing the workforce to approach their daily work differently, with new goals
in mind. By taking relatively simple steps to communicate strategy better
to a key audience—new hires—you can enroll these agents of change and
put your firm on the path to real, profound transformation.

Defining Strategy

Although many employees do not understand a firm’s strategy, the words
“strategy” and “strategic” do get thrown around a lot, to the point where
their meaning becomes unclear. What is strategy exactly? What specific
topics should companies strive to communicate to new hires when talking
about strategy? We like the definition of strategy offered by Gerry Johnson,