Page 202 - Successful Onboarding

186 • Successful Onboarding

Alternatively, if your company is pursuing a strategy of premium ser-
vice and premium pricing, then you can imagine how important it might
be to communicate that strategy to your collections department. Although
collections remain critically important, greater customer accommodation
on payment terms is likely far more appropriate than it would have been
in the first scenario. Not providing this context will very likely impede the
company’s chance to deliver on its strategic plan—and this is true even
when new hires perform functions that at first glance do not seem most
relevant to the strategy.
In speaking of strategy immersion’s impact on change, or indeed, in
speaking to any of the benefits that such initiation might bring a company,
it’s important to acknowledge that some new hires might not care about
strategy at first. Perhaps they don’t feel incentivized enough to care, or per-
haps nobody has gotten them to care about strategy in the past. It is the
job of onboarding (the collective whole of the onboarding stakeholders)
to give them the motivation and incentive they need to care. If you talk
about strategy with the employees, some will get it and will be moved by
it. Guess what? You just activated drive and ambition. You have also just
given new hires—even those with low-level, hourly wage jobs—reason to
believe that their employer is a company at which they can build a career
(or if nothing else, keep their job, as this employer may actually have a
business plan that will result in job growth). If only a small number of new
hires—say, 5%—get the strategy and run with it, you will see a big payoff
in terms of “aha” moments, higher productivity, and an organization more
aligned with its strategy of transformation. You will realize a bump in your
Onboarding Margin, and you should be proud of its impact.

Making New Hires Strategic

Now that we’ve established how powerful strategy immersion can be, let’s
consider how a company should incorporate this orientation as part of a
state-of-the-art, strategic onboarding program. In other chapters, we’ve pro-
vided “best principles” drawn from our experiences working with and
researching best-in-class onboarding companies. In this case, since few if
any companies have incorporated it as part of onboarding (one more rea-
son why it constitutes a golden opportunity for a firm interested in gaining
competitive advantage), what we offer here are our “best principles” for