Page 199 - Successful Onboarding

“Limited Upside in Flying Blind”: Driving Strategic Insight • 183

to deliver an onboarding experience worthy of their needs; this manager’s
lack of appreciation of strategic education caused her to actually resist
when an entrepreneurial new hire brought the need for it to her attention.
Some of our clients have found strategic orientation a valuable means
to prevent anticipated declines in motivation. One of our clients, a tech-
nology company, traditionally gave most employees an assigned workspace
in the corporate office. Over the last several years, as their business model
changed, they found that more of their staff were spending a greater major-
ity of their time working on-site at customer locations and other transient
locations outside the office. This transition, coupled with growth demands,
was putting pressure on the company’s real estate needs. There was no
more space to grow at their current location, yet the average staff member
only used their offices one-third of the time.
Our client decided to merge a business strategy—providing better ser-
vice to its customers by working more closely with them at their locations—
with an operational strategy of transitioning the headquarters workspaces
into “hotel-ing” sites. Employees wouldn’t occupy permanent workstations;
rather they’d have a “locker” of sorts for storage when in the office as well
as a workstation reserved for the duration of their stay. As you can imag-
ine, this change might have aroused dissatisfaction among employees, who
generally enjoyed being able to come back home to personalized work-
spaces. However, with careful articulation of the strategy, the company was
able to win over employees and prevent major disillusionment around this
strategic move. Employees saw that the move made sense, for it would
enable the company to serve its clients better and grow without much
additional capital investment.

New Blood
Another important way strategic orientation benefits a company is by oper-
ating as a driving force in support of either a newly determined “business
transformation” (initiatives in which entirely new business strategies and/or
outcomes are pursued) or “organizational transformation” (initiatives to
change how a company thinks or behaves). Farmers Insurance, for
instance, wanted to focus the attention of field employees on customers.
To affect that strategic change, the company revised its training program