Page 201 - Successful Onboarding

“Limited Upside in Flying Blind”: Driving Strategic Insight • 185

How do you transform an organization that had provided very low levels
of satisfying customer care into one that takes as its daily mission provid-
ing superior service to customers? This is where onboarding can play a
huge role.
Companies that have been doing business a certain way for a long time
tend to have employees conditioned to do things the old way. By contrast,
organizations interested in change can hire new employees primed and
ready to behave in a new way. What this “new blood” requires is infor-
mation about the transformation and how their role fits in. They also need
the strong support of leadership that sees this incoming class for what they
are: Brand-new and expensive capital investments with great potential.
New hires need to understand that they are change agents; otherwise, they
will not know how to relate to veteran workers they’ll encounter on the
job. If you can provide these things, you’ll find that new hires can push
transformation farther on account of their open-mindedness and willing-
ness to listen, their motivation to perform and prove themselves (they
just got the job after all), and the knowledge about best practices, trends,
and technology they bring from prior experiences.
Strategic knowledge empowers new hires to make proactive choices in
support of the new strategy. It is easy to see the importance of indoctri-
nating a newly hired executive into the strategy of a transforming com-
pany—typically, strategy becomes central to the discussion and evaluation
during the recruiting process. What is less obvious to management is the
benefit that comes from indoctrinating an average new hire. Strategy ori-
entation allows the typical employee to be more connected to the strategy
and therefore further it through his or her everyday activities. No longer
is the job transactional; with understanding of the strategy under his or her
belt, a new hire is on a mission.
If your company’s strategy is to be your industry’s lowest cost provider,
then it might make great sense to reduce working capital needs, minimize
interest expense from all bank lines of credit, eliminate any cost that is not
necessary and minimize all others, and go to market with the lowest pos-
sible price. If your organization can explain this strategy and the impor-
tance of a given tactic—e.g., lowering interest expense by reducing your
line of credit to your new employees in the collections department—then
new hires might help push the strategy forward by leaning on customers
to pay their bills quickly.