Page 228 - Successful Onboarding

212 • Successful Onboarding

Starbuck’s Employer Branding team reflects the firm’s recognition of
the significant retention value of appearing as a “best-in-class” employer.
Employer branding establishes a sense of prestige that motivates individ-
uals not merely to work at the company, but to stay there. As you think
about governance of your employer brand, consider the segmented
audiences that exist. You will need to maintain an overall umbrella
employer brand and also have the opportunity to engineer unique brands
for important new hire segments (e.g., front line hires, campus hires, man-
ager hires, executive hires, etc.).

Measuring Onboarding Success
Beyond implementing a proper structure of oversight and accountability,
governing an onboarding program entails mobilizing measurement tools
and processes to determine if program elements are performing as desired
(effective against the objectives and at the expected pace). If your firm
judges it critical to have a certain program element, and if all new hires
participate in this part of the program, then you need to measure the pro-
gram’s performance by department, geography, and level. Otherwise, you
have no way of knowing what needs improvement, nor can you determine
the shortfall’s underlying cause. Even if your company is realizing desired
results, you need to confirm that the program element has produced the
benefit as opposed to some other factor. It is a completely inappropriate
use of resources to continue investing in something if it isn’t creating the
desired outcome.
In designing measurement systems, we advise measuring performance
levels in ways that reflect the new hire’s perspective and that of the hiring
manager (and for senior managers and executives, that of their peers).
Again, companies only hire people to help managers get a job done. If hir-
ing managers do not see greater new hire effectiveness, then onboarding
is not working. We might be offering new hires a more attractive employer-
employee compact, but fundamentally, we’re not doing onboarding to
make people happy—we are doing it to improve enterprise performance.
If we do not see improved enterprise performance, then there’s no
improvement and no reason to do onboarding.