Page 50 - Successful Onboarding

The Business Case for Onboarding • 39

components again prove helpful, too. As new hires become more con-
nected to what an organization does and its broader mission, they develop
a feeling of purpose and direction. They start to equate their own personal
success with that of the organization, creating a positive dynamic that ben-
efits all parties to the employment compact.
It’s interesting: Many companies today are guilty not so much of ignor-
ing employees’ needs for self-actualization, but rather of overpromising
and underdelivering against those needs. Recruiting machines at large cor-
porations often hype up the sales pitch for these firms, enticing new hires
with visions of meaningful, satisfying work that later prove too good to be
true. A service company’s recruiting video, for instance, may excessively
glamorize lower-level service positions, making the teller position look like
mission control in a space shuttle and the customer service position like
Mother Teresa. (Yes, videos like this do exist.) This company has proba-
bly delivered on the lower four levels of employee need, but the job is still
a job, and there’s a great chance that new hires will come away disillu-
sioned from this video. Other companies make similar promises and
deliver far less to employees than this company does. At these firms,
employees quickly become cynical and unhappy.
Companies with powerful and positive consumer brands need to be
especially aware and vigilant on this point (delivering against expecta-
tions), because many new employees arrive at their employer only to dis-
cover that the consumer brand is at odds with the firm’s employment and
operating brand. Apple’s consumer brand is suffused with user friendli-
ness, for instance, whereas Apple’s headquarters and development culture
is known to be quite intense. To assure the best, most fulfilling workplace
experience for new hires, and maximize productivity gains for the firm,
the recruiting engine and ultimately hiring managers need to convey real-
istic information about the job, the firm’s culture, and the extent to which
employees can hope to realize self-actualization as they define it.
Even the best onboarding program will rarely assist the new hire in
achieving self-actualization during the first year on the job. But new hires
will be on quicker paths to self-actualization, and more importantly, they’ll
come to believe in the course of the first year that their new employer can
deliver far up the Maslow pyramid. As a result, employees will be more
inclined to feel that the firm is the place for them over the short and the