Culture is Critical
It Starts With Hiring and Onboarding
The entire hiring and onboarding process reflects to prospects and new hires how seriously you take them as people and how your culture is represented by you and embraced by your people.
Onboarding is important for new hires because it integrates them into your business, potentially boosting their productivity, educating them about their roles and expectations, helping them to assimilate and feel accepted. When done well, it creates a friendly, collaborative, and efficient environment. Long term, proper onboarding can improve retention and job satisfaction. It also helps the recruitment of new people as your process will stand out among your competitors.
A great example of onboarding best practices comes from John Deere.
John Deere Case - Onboarding a New Employee
An Example of Design Thinking
(from the NY Times Bestseller “The Power of Moments” by Chip and Dan Heath)
Shortly after you accept the offer letter from John Deere, you get an email from a John Deere Friend. Let’s call her Anika. She introduces herself and shares some of the basics: where to park, what the dress norms are, and so forth. She also tells you that she’ll be waiting to greet you in the lobby at 9am on your first day.
When your first day comes, you park in the right place and make your way to the lobby, and there’s Anika! You recognize her from her photo. She points to the flat-screen monitor in the lobby – it features a giant headline: “Welcome, Arjun!”
Anika shows you to your cubicle. There’s a six-foot-tall banner set up next to it – it rises above the cubes to alert people that there’s a new hire. People stop by over the course of the day to say hello to you….
You notice you’ve already received your first email. It’s from Sam Allen, the CEO of John Deere. In a short video, he talks a little bit about the company’s mission: “to provide the food, shelter, and infrastructure that will be needed by the world’s growing population.” He closes by saying, “Enjoy the rest of your first day, and I hope you’ll enjoy a long, successful, fulfilling career as part of the John Deere team….”
Now you notice there’s a gift on your desk. It’s a stainless steel replica of John Deere’s original “self-polishing plow,” created in 1837. An accompanying card explains why farmers loved it.
At midday, Anika collects you for lunch off-site with a small group. They ask about your background and tell you about some of the projects they’re working on. Later in the day, the department manager (your boss’s boss) comes over and makes plans to have lunch with you the next week.
You leave the office that day thinking, I belong here. The work we’re doing matters.
And I matter to them.
Onwards, and Upwards,
Marc Weiss - Co-founder, Management One