Page 239 - Successful Onboarding

220 • Successful Onboarding

change one thing about the onboarding experience during your first year,
what would you change?” Tenured employees might be asked, “In your
experience, how prepared have new hires been for their jobs?” and “What
could be done to better prepare new hires for a job in your department?”
To quantify performance, you should structure questions for scoring along
a low to high answer set spectrum, you should render sample sizes large
enough to cover each employee segment in a statistically significant way,
and you should take measures on a regular basis, allowing for compara-
tive results and trend analysis.

Using feedback to measure success
Best-in-class onboarding firms have developed innovative techniques
for gaining regular and actionable feedback data. Starbucks promotes
open, employee-initiated communication about onboarding; new hires
can provide feedback, express concerns, or request new programs through
Starbucks’ Mission Review System, which guarantees employees a
response. Similarly, any new hire can write the CEO and receive a guar-
anteed response. Starbucks invests in this form of feedback on the belief
that employees who feel they can express their beliefs will prove less likely
to become frustrated and quit. “We realized that as we grew we increas-
ingly needed to hire different types of employees, mainly corporate
employees,” one Starbucks program manager told us, “and we found that
these communication tools were some of the best ways to ensure that their
needs were being met.” Use of employee-initiated feedback helps uncover
process improvements by tapping the ideas and feedback of all new hires.
It also helps boost Starbucks’ employer brand higher, since communica-
tion serves as the main driver behind such employer brand rankings.
Verizon Wireless measures individual feedback as the chief determinant
of onboarding program success. The company queries new hires before
onboarding about their expectations and then surveys them during and
upon completion of the program. The firm also uses town hall meetings
and web seminars to identify process gaps. Unlike most firms, Verizon views
onboarding process development as an organic experience that should
evolve so as not to remain stagnant. HR monitors feedback on a monthly,
quarterly, and yearly basis, using permanent feedback mechanisms to