Page 200 - Successful Onboarding

184 • Successful Onboarding

to include not just experience with live customer interactions, but also
immersion in the kind of industry knowledge vital to understanding and
executing a company’s strategy. 4
Oddly, when seeking to realize a transformation, most managers have
severely underutilized their employee base to drive change. Companies
generally seek to avoid tackling organizational transformation; when they
do attempt it, they take a top-down, command and control approach with
limited results. A common approach is to acquire another company or
change leaders—options that deliver very moderate results. Given our ear-
lier reference to the Attrition Law of Thirds (because of attrition, you will
turn over a full third of your work force every three years), we hope you
can see how onboarding represents an amazing opportunity to enlist new
hires into a transformative strategy.
If your company is anything like most, this line of thinking probably
diverges starkly from how you generally view new hires. Often hiring man-
agers responsible for a strategic shift view new entrants as something of a
necessary evil. They only accept the idea of relying on new hires once they
discover that veteran employees are too busy with existing assignments and
the requirements of running the current business to participate in change-
related activities.
Let’s make this notion of onboarding as a pathway to change more con-
crete. Consider a US-based cable television company. Thirty years ago,
players in this market operated as legal and licensed local monopolies; the
cost of digging up streets and laying cable was so great that no company
would do it without an exclusive contract with the local municipality.
Once a cable company obtained this contract, no great impetus existed
for it to provide superior customer service or innovate the product. As local
cable operators started to merge with one another and achieve greater
scale, they gained negotiating leverage over suppliers (content providers)
and spread the other operating costs across more households.
By the 1990s, new forms of competition—satellite television, DVDs,
the Internet, gaming consoles, fiberoptic competition from Verizon and
AT&T, direct to consumer distribution models such as Apple’s iTunes,
among many others—slowly but surely chipped away at the exclusive
domain that cable companies enjoyed for so long. This new reality
has forced cable operators to become much more concerned with cus-
tomer service. But how do you improve customer service dramatically?