They forget to examine their orientation and onboarding process from the perspective of their new employees.

This creates two problems for employers interested in creating an onboarding process that leads to maximum employee retention and engagement:

1. They don’t realize the negative perceptions they inadvertently create through mindlessness — perceptions that can lead to employee retention problems or diminished engagement.
2. They forget how confusing, complex, and daunting things look to someone without institutional knowledge of “how things are done around here.” Because of this, processes that might seem obvious and easy to navigate if you’re an “old pro,” are anything but to the newcomer. Thus, they inadvertently dampen the new employee’s enthusiasm by adding unnecessary frustration and anxiety.

This is why you must borrow the “fresh eyes” of your new employees. They can see things you can’t.

I was reminded of this — and the impact of careless orientation and onboarding — by an interview I did recently with a former college senior, who, as part of a business class, participated in a bank’s orientation program. Here are some of his observations, along with a bit of commentary.

Since he requested anonymity, I will refer to him as “Brandon” as I share his observations.

Am I Welcome Here?

Brandon and his fellow business major classmate were told to arrive at the bank in the morning, prior to the time the bank opened for business.

They were greeted by a locked door.

“We had to call to have someone meet us. I can just imagine 10 people showing up for orientation and each having to call to be let in. That’s not a very good first impression,” observed Brandon.

I can understand why the bank would keep its doors locked if it didn’t want customers to come in at the time, but they could have either warned the employees or made some other arrangement to work around that awkward introduction.

What’s the Message?

If you’ve read my earlier articles, you might remember my mantras:

1. Everything Matters
2. Think Experience
3. What’s the Emotional Takeaway?
4. What’s the Perceptual Takeaway?

Imagine you are a new employee and you are locked out of your new place of employment. What perceptions would such a first impression create?

Perhaps:

- “This isn’t the friendliest place in the world.”
- “This is an impersonal place.”
- “You’re just a number here.”
- “This is a poorly run outfit.”

Does Your Orientation Program Shout “Second Rate” Or “Best in Class”?

Brandon went on describe the PowerPoint presentation he sat through in the orientation program:

“It didn’t leave any taste in your mouth. You’re thinking ‘OK, that was a nice PowerPoint presentation. You could have sent it to me at home and skipped that part, and I could have gotten right to work.’”

As Brandon’s comments reveal, inefficiencies and redundancies don’t go unnoticed. They also don’t create the kind of “This is a world class company” impression you need to create.

Compare Brandon’s experience with the Perceptual Takeaway created by Southwest Airlines. At Southwest, prior to new hire orientation, new employees receive an email link to a website that delivers a “pre-orientation program.” At the site, they learn more about Southwest as an employer and their unique culture.

At the site, new employees also find out what they can expect on their first day at work, helping to reduce potential anxiety.

According to Director of Onboarding Cheryl Hughey, when the company developed the online program, they wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a boring info-dump, but rather a fun experience that reflected Southwest’s fun employer brand.

Not only does it save Southwest time and money by freeing up about two hours of employee orientation program time to cover other material, but it communicates intelligence and efficiency to the new employee. It leaves the Perceptual Take Away:

“They do things right here.”

Being smart about how you conduct your orientation program is especially important with Gen X and Gen Y employees, who are more likely to cast a critical eye toward their new employer. As Lynn Desjardins, a VP at the NHHEAF Network Organizations, notes: “Just as you’re judging their performance, they are judging yours.”

Thus, the more intelligent your process — including the intelligent use of technology — the greater your “Employer Cred” with new employees. This is especially important to the type of employees you most want to attract and retain: the most talented and professional. The “cream of the crop” wants to work for an employer who is also best in class.

I Guess They Don’t Care About Employees Here

Brandon noted that there wasn’t any water available for those attending the orientation program until later in the day, nor were he and his fellow attendees asked to introduce themselves until mid-way through the program. Both made him wonder about whether this employer really cared about its employees.

You might think about his assessment: “Don’t be so picky; this is just a little oversight on your first day at work. Don’t go crazy extrapolating this to what your employer is like as a whole.”

While that argument might be rational, that’s not how human nature works.

Think of yourself. Haven’t you been treated poorly by a clerk, salesperson, or waitstaff, and generalized your feeling and impression to include the entire business? We’ve all done that. From one encounter, we surmise that “They have lousy service here.”

That’s how the human mind works. It’s designed to generalize. If that’s not bad enough, add to this our tendency to jump to conclusions in ambiguous situations. This is called “Premature Cognitive Commitment” by cognitive psychologists.

Because humans by nature need to make sense out of whatever is going on, and because we are more likely to feel anxious when we don’t, we naturally try to “figure things out” when placed in new, ambiguous situations.

Like a new job.

Because we’re hungry to make sense of our new situation — in this case our new employer and what it’s like to work for them — we’re very alert for clues. Because of premature cognitive commitment, we’re likely to come to a conclusion about our new employer that is hard to shake, despite later evidence to the contrary.

If the receptionist is friendly, we’re likely to think “This is a friendly place.” If the orientation program is run efficiently and effectively, we’re likely to think “This is a well-run outfit.”

Conversely, as in Brandon’s first day at work, if we experience thoughtlessness and carelessness, we’re likely to assume this is characteristic of the employer as a whole — whether it is or not.

Find Out What Questions They Want to Ask

In previous articles on onboarding, I discussed the importance of making it safe for new employees to ask for the information they need. Because they are likely to be more reticent about speaking up, for fear of being seen as “high maintenance” or “needy,” new hires need to get the message that questions are welcomed.

It was fascinating to hear Brandon comment on his experience with asking questions:

“I noticed a little bit of hostility from the trainer when I would ask questions. Instead of explaining, he would sound like he was defending. I was pretending I was joining their company and was thinking about what questions I would want to ask if I were going to be working here. He didn’t seem used to it. But if you don’t how to explain what’s on the screen, don’t put it up.

Myself, I’m not comfortable asking questions if I’m in a new situation, and don’t know how that question is going to be received. In this situation, though, because I wasn’t worried about what they would think, I would ask.”

While some employees ask questions and challenge people regardless of their position and status, many are reluctant to. But just because they’re not asking the questions, doesn’t mean they’re not wondering.

This is why you must interview new employees and find out:

1. What information they want most as new employees, both to do their job and to make their “new employee experience” as stress-free as possible.
2. What you can do to make it easy for them to speak up, give feedback, and get their questions answered.

So Now What?

So, now, besides asking your new hires the above questions, also ask them for feedback on each step of your orientation and onboarding process. Ask them what Emotional and Perceptual Takeaways each moment of truth left them with.

If you do, you’ll probably be quite surprised.

Do you know the impact your onboarding program has on your new employees, moment-of-truth by moment-of-truth?

Do you know what it’s like to experience your company as an employee on the first day of work? The first week? What about the week prior to that first day?

What about when your new employees meet their supervisor and their teammates? Are you managing that experience in a way that produces an excited, engaged employee? Or for new employees at your company, is it more like buyer’s remorse?

I had a humbling reminder last week of how difficult it can be to think of all the little details that shape a new employee’s experience and their subsequent perception of their employer. It reminded me how difficult, and perhaps impossible, it is to think of all the little things that affect a new employee’s thoughts and feelings because we are not a new employee.

Borrow From Customer Service, Website-Usability Pros

Employers would be wise to borrow from the fields of customer service and website usability design.

Companies known for creating customer-centric experiences get that way by finding out from their customers what it’s like to do business with them, from the first moment of truth to the last. They design their customer experience from the customer’s perspective and needs, not from their own operational convenience.

Experts in the Web usability field, like Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug (author of Don’t Make Me Think), recommend that website developers watch novice users navigating their website, without giving them any instructions or guidance. By doing this, they can witness directly the choices, and mistakes, novice users make when navigating the website. This allows the developer to redesign the website, and the user experience, from the user’s perspective, not the tech-savvy developer’s.

What is obvious and user-friendly from the developer’s perspective might be confusing and overwhelming to the first-time visitor. Thus, they need to “borrow” the novice user’s eyes. Only by getting this real-time feedback are developers able to step outside their expert’s perspective and enter the world of the first-time user.

Get a Pair of Fresh Eyes

You can apply this principle to your onboarding process by borrowing from Chip Conley, CEO of Joie De Vivre Hospitality and author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. At Joie De Vivre’s hotels, “Fresh Eyes” are an integral part of the onboarding process.

At each property, managers encourage new employees to share their perceptions about ways the hotel can improve both its customer experience and new employee experience. Conley and his team know that because their new employees have Fresh Eyes, they can see things that those who have been immersed in the environment cannot.

Doing this achieves two important objectives for the Joie De Vivre:

• It provides Joie De Vivre with useful information about how to improve both their guest experience and their new employee experience.
• It communicates to new employees from the outset: “You matter; your input matters” and “We respect you.” These are obviously important messages you want to send, since they increase employee engagement.

I Teach This Stuff and Still?

OK, back to my humbling experience?

Here’s what happened. Last week I conducted a public seminar that was hosted by a client.

As I enter their driveway, I see, as if for the first time, its two buildings set back from the road, each having their own expansive parking lot on opposite ends of each building.

As I take in this sight, this time through the eyes of a seminar participant who had never been there before, I think: “Oh, no. When I sent out email confirmations and directions, I just gave the address. I forgot that there were two buildings. I hope the seminar participants don’t get confused.”

Since I had only conducted seminars in the building on the left, the building on the right didn’t exist in my mind when I sent out the program confirmation.

Seeing it Through Their Eyes

Now, as I look at the scene laid out before me through the eyes of a seminar participant who had never been here before, I can imagine the confusion they will feel and perhaps even a bit of annoyance because if they choose the wrong parking lot, it will be a hike to the correct building.

Also, if they arrive at the last minute, this extra bit of time finding the right one could mean the awkwardness of arriving late.

What Will They Think?

When they realize an important piece of information was left out of the directions, I could imagine them thinking, and rightly so, “That wasn’t too bright.”

My oversight would likely create a mildly negative moment of truth early on in the “Attending the David Lee Seminar Experience.” To use the terms I’ve written about previously, my oversight would likely create, in some of the participants, an unwanted Emotional Take Away: the feelings of confusion and frustration.

It would also likely create an unwanted Perceptual Take Away: “That wasn’t too bright” and perhaps for the most unforgiving of seminar attendees: “He’s not terribly bright.”

You obviously don’t want your onboarding process to trigger credibility-damaging or respect-diminishing Perceptual Take Aways, especially if you want to attract and retain high-caliber people.

Being Hyper-Alert Isn’t Enough

While my oversight wasn’t earth-shattering and everybody found their way and enjoyed the program, the takeaway message from this little example shouldn’t be: “They got over it, so what’s the big deal?”

Instead, I hope it is: “Even if you’re hyper-alert about creating positive experiences for customers or new employees, because you’re so familiar with your environment and operations, it’s easy to forget what it’s like for those who are not.”

See Your Onboarding Program Through Their Eyes

That’s why I believe you must involve new employees in your efforts to improve your orientation and onboarding process, and in a specific way.

This means getting their feedback after the orientation program and then after certain milestones during the onboarding process, such as Days 1, 7, 30, 60, 90, 120, and 180. Because it’s easy for people to forget little details of an experience that were meaningful at the moment, you need to get feedback while the experiences are fresh in your new employees’ minds.

Specifics May Fade but the Cumulative Effect Sticks

The fact that your new hires will forget the millions of moment-by-moment details of their onboarding experience, if too much time elapses before you ask for their feedback, does not mean those moments of truth didn’t matter. While the specifics might disappear from memory, the cumulative Emotional and Perceptual Takeaways created by these “little” moments of truth do not.

To paraphrase Diana Oreck, vice president of Ritz Carlton’s Global Learning & Leadership Center:

People might not remember what you said or what you did, but they always remember what they felt.

Engagement and Retention Issues

Use a modified Fresh Eyes approach with all employees. Find out from their perspective how you’re doing with the many important Employee-Employer Moments of Truth that influence employee engagement and retention.

These include:

• “Getting feedback from my supervisor experience.”
• “Management institutes a change that affects our day-to-day work experience.”
• “We’re asked for our feedback in an employee satisfaction survey experience.”
• “My boss and I have a difference of opinion experience.”
• “The performance review experience.”

How your organization handles these and the many other critical Employee-Employer Moments of Truth will determine what your employees think and feel about you as an employer (e.g., the Emotional and Perceptual Takeaways you’ve created), and therefore whether they will stay or leave. And if they do stay, how hard they’ll work.

Given that Gallup’s research revealed that 55% of employees are in the ROAD Warrior category (Retired on Active Duty), finding out if you’re mishandling any key moments of truth should be on every management team’s agenda.

Thus, if you’re really serious about doing a great job with employee engagement, retention, and motivation, do this with all of your employees, not just your new hires.

Let’s Put This into Action

1. Meet with new hires at days 1, 7, 30, 60, 90, 120, and 180. Ask them for their insights and input about what you’re doing well and what can be improved upon.
2. Make sure every orientation program includes an explicit message that you want, no, you need, their input. Let them know that you realize your ability to attract and retain great employees like them means you must constantly pay attention to, and improve upon, the onboarding experience you deliver.
3. Coach your supervisors to do the same.
4. Make different communication methods available so it’s comfortable for those who are reluctant to speak up. Whether because of cultural norms, shyness, or a manager who doesn’t make it comfortable for them to do so, some employees are reluctant to give negative feedback. While I believe face-to-face, real-time conversation provides the most rich, actionable information, not everyone is comfortable doing this. Therefore, you will want to augment this with alternative modes, such as anonymous surveys, suggestion boxes, or an “input hotline.” Of course, to keep employees wanting to give input, you must let employees know what has been done with their input. Communicate what changes were made or if not, why not.
5. If you haven’t read any of my previous articles that discuss the various moments of truth and the concept of emotional and perceptual takeaways, you might want to read those next. The white paper Starting New Employees Off Right is the most thorough, but there are several shorter reads, such as 13 Questions to Maximize Your Onboarding Efforts. These will help you ask better questions.
6. If you’re interested in creating a work experience that leads to a strong employer brand, high employee engagement, and high levels of retention, expand your “Fresh Eyes” approach to include all of your employees. Since an employer’s culture has a huge impact on the success of their onboarding process, address the whole work-experience context. Whether you use one the many survey tools available or conduct a series of interviews, assess the key drivers and moments of truth that affect employee engagement and satisfaction.

At the recent onboarding conference I spoke at in Atlanta, I had the opportunity to listen to some great examples of companies that get concepts such as “It’s About the Experience” and “What’s The Emotional Take Away?”

At the conference, Diana Oreck, vice president of Ritz-Carlton’s Global Learning & Leadership Center, shared how their employee orientation program and onboarding process welcomes and inspires their new hires. She also talked about the mindset that informs how they design the experiences they deliver.

In some ways, I believe their mindset is more important for you to internalize and share with your onboarding team than are the particulars of what they do. I say this because understanding the foundational principles of effective onboarding is like understanding the fundamentals of great design: once you understand them, there’s no limit to what you can create.

Think Ritz As You Design Your Process

At Ritz-Carlton, one of the fundamental understandings that informs the guest or employee experiences it delivers, according to Oreck is, “People don’t remember what you said or what you did, but they always remember what they felt.”

This is why I believe asking, “What’s the emotional take away?” is so important when examining each step of your onboarding process.

Critical Questions in Your Orientation and Onboarding Process

Keep this in mind as you design and refine your onboarding process. For each facet of your employee orientation program and at each step of your onboarding process, ask the following:

• “What’s the emotional take-away here? What is the way we are doing this right now, and what emotions would a new employee take away from this experience?”
• “Are these the emotions we want to leave them with?” If your answer is no, then ask “What emotions would we like them to experience?” and “How can we create an experience that would naturally elicit these?”

Design Your Employee Orientation and Onboarding Process to Elicit These Emotions

Examples of emotions you want to elicit in your new employee orientation and onboarding process include welcomed; comfortable and secure; proud; excited; inspired; and confident.

Diana Oreck shared with the audience the video Ritz-Carlton plays for new employees during orientation. The video talks about what it would mean if you were in the top 1% in various fields. As images of Tiger Woods and Bill Gates and people in the top 1% of their field flash across the screen, inspiring music plays in the background with the lyrics “What have you done today to make you feel proud?”

The video then transitions into letting the new employee know that being with Ritz-Carlton means they are among the top 1% in the hospitality industry.

Even after seeing it a few times, it still gives me goose-bumps.

I can’t imagine watching that video as a new employee and not feeling pretty darn proud and excited about my new job and my new employer.

I found it interesting (and telling) that Ritz Carlton balances two important messages in their orientation program: “You are now part of an elite, best-in-class organization,” and “We’re lucky to have you.”

One message without the other is not enough. Because one of the most important human needs your new employee-orientation program should satisfy is the feeling of pride in one’s work and one’s employer, you want to extol the virtues of your company. You want new employees to feel lucky to be working for your company.

However, sending the first message without the second, “We’re lucky to have you here,” would come across as arrogant and snobbish. You’ve probably met people who worked for marquee-name companies, or even big-fish-in-small-pond companies with a regional reputation, who’ve crossed the line from proud to smug.

At Ritz-Carlton, Oreck and her colleagues tell new hires “Aren’t we blessed that you picked the Ritz Carlton for your ’second place’,” referring to the second most-important place the person inhabits each day.

The fact that Ritz Carlton achieves this gracious balance between “You’re lucky” and “We’re lucky” reflects their service philosophy of balancing elegance with warmth. Masters at creating a delightful customer experience, it recognized years ago that delivering elegance without warmth (like high-end restaurants with supercilious maitre des) projects a haughty, condescending image. By consciously blending elegance and warmth, the Ritz conveys “elite” without “elitist.”

It uses this same degree of emotional intelligence when creating new employee experiences. Think of whether you are emphasizing both messages enough and if you have a good balance between the two.

What’s Love Got To Do With Onboarding?

Love has a big connection with onboarding, especially if you’re Texas Roadhouse, a two-time member on the Forbes List of 200 Best Small Companies.

At the onboarding conference, speaker Mark Simpson of Texas Roadhouse shared two videos, including one they show new employees at their orientation. It communicated the “lovefest” that is this company. In their video, they had excerpts from a Managing Partner Conference, where store managing partners celebrate their hard work and accomplishments.

They had clips from humanitarian projects Texas Roadhouse employees participated in, including seven Habitat for Humanity projects in Mexico. It included clips from proud employees, including one memorable quote from a young man: “I’ve been working here for one year and I still eat here, so I think that says it all!”

Listening to the passion and pride as Simpson talked about their company, you can just imagine what it’s like for their new employees in orientation. I can imagine the pride they must feel, both from watching this video and from hearing Texas Roadhouse leaders share with pride about the uniqueness of their company and how they, the new employee, will help make their guest experiences “legendary.”

Their video, and their orientation program as a whole, communicates very clearly that this is a company that loves their employees, celebrates the good work that they do, and is not your average place to work.

Interspersed throughout Simpson’s presentation was the word “love,” including the guiding themes of Texas Roadhouse: “Love your people and show it!” and “If you love your people, they’ll love your customers.”

If you’re sharing this article with hard-boiled “old school” executives who are unmoved by such “touchy feely” concepts as loving your employees and loving your customers, here’s what it does for Texas Roadhouse, in the words of Simpson:

“The goal is to have ‘engaged’ employees engage your guests and build repeat business. In a 2006 attitude and usage study, 89% of the guests that visited us intended to revisit us. That the highest in our industry and 9% higher than the nearest competitor.”

Further, in a recent study by PeopleMetrics, a market research firm based in Philadelphia, involving 10,000 customers to find out which brands engaged their customers the most effectively, Texas Roadhouse scored the highest in their category, ranking third overall, right up there with such power brands as The Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton.

Onboarding with the Southwest Airlines Mindset

Southwest Airlines is another company that “gets it” about the importance of designing its employee orientation and onboarding process with the goal of creating positive emotional experiences.

Just as with Ritz Carlton, it’s not surprising that a company known for delivering a unique (and uniquely wonderful) customer experience brings this same expertise and intentionality to their new employee experience.

In a recent interview with Cheryl Hughey, Southwest’s director of onboarding, I was struck by how their awareness of what was important to accomplish in onboarding was more advanced, in my opinion, than most companies.

The fact that they showed a higher level of awareness is not surprising, given how acutely aware they are that their culture is the secret to their success. Creating a work experience that produces such a culture requires mindfulness and intention, so it’s not surprising they would bring that to their orientation and onboarding process.

Hughey noted that when their onboarding team went out and benchmarked other companies’ onboarding process, they noticed that the others seemed to focus primarily on creating logistical efficiencies that allowed the new employee to become productive more quickly.

Capturing the difference in mindset, Ms. Hughey explains:

“Here’s what it is that I think we do differently, or what we emphasize more: in a lot of companies, it seems like if there are online forms to check off and documents that get passed around from HR to the hiring manager to the new employee, they think onboarding has been accomplished. While getting those kinds of logistical things automated can help you get your new employee up to speed and productive more quickly, it won’t necessarily help you with retention.

If you want them to stay, if you want them to become engaged, you need to make sure you do the “feeling” part of the process, and you do that by showing them how they will make a difference, giving them examples of how their fellow employees make a difference, making them feel welcome as with our Sponsor a New Hire program. It’s those kinds of things that lead to not just better retention, but a more inspired workforce.”

Consciously designing work experiences so they lead to employees feeling welcomed respected, valued, inspired, proud, and determined doesn’t just help you with employee retention. It also directly improves employee motivation, productivity, and customer service.

That’s why I believe in the following four mantras, which are important for management to keep in mind when making decisions that affect employees’ work experiences:

• “Everything Matters”
• “Think Experience”
• “What’s the Emotional Take Away?”
• “What’s the Perceptual Take Away?

I hope this article stimulates you to examine your orientation program, share more stories that communicate what makes your organization great (i.e., stories that elicit pride), and share more stories that show how employees make a difference.

Last, but certainly not least, remember to ask your new employees for feedback on what you can do to create a more emotionally engaging onboarding experience.

Employer branding is quite the rage these days. Yet, I’m still amazed at what many people think it means to “create” an employer brand.

Let me give you an analogy for what I see as a common and very misguided approach to employer branding. Engaging in this mistake doesn’t just hamstring your ability to become an employer of choice; it will diminish employee morale, loyalty, and engagement.

Here’s the analogy.

Several years ago, a friend told me how much he loved his new Audi, but then in the same breath, how he would never buy another one. This seemed a bit puzzling, until he went on a rant about his distasteful buying experience, followed by frustrating service experiences. Because he bought it from the only Audi dealer in his area, his service alternatives would require a long commute. Even though this car was his all-time favorite vehicle, he would never buy another.

About a week later, I heard an especially clever radio commercial by this same dealership. After it ended, I juxtaposed the “we’re so wonderful” message from the commercial with the story my friend told me.

“Isn’t this so typical,” I thought. “They spend all this money and creativity on getting people to come through the door, only to drive them back out by the experience they deliver. Wouldn’t it make sense to invest some of that money on upgrading the service they actually deliver?”

This is exactly what I see most companies doing when it comes to employer branding, or recruiting for that matter. They invest great sums of money and intellectual firepower on clever ads and recruiting campaigns, but next to nothing on making sure they actually deliver a great work experience that makes a great employer brand possible.

The Illusion of Employer Branding

Over the years, when I’ve asked HR professionals and ad-agency reps about whether they’re involved in employer branding, if they answer “Yes,” they always go on to talk about updating logos, creating spiffier collateral material, and coming up with the perfect tag line. They follow this up with their “internal branding campaign” (i.e., trying to convince their employees this is who they are as an employer). Those things are great, sort of, but it’s putting the cart before the proverbial horse.

Just like the car dealership, those approaches might help get people through the door, but if the employer doesn’t actually deliver a great work experience, those employees will soon be heading back out.

Before You Tell the Labor Market Who You Are (Or Would Like Them to Think You Are)

If you’re spending thousands of dollars on “employer branding” that focuses on creating an alluring employer brand that is really a myth, you’re wasting your time and money. Before you “spread the word,” invest in making sure what you’re saying is true.

This means, you want to first:

1. Ask your employees what they think about you as an employer.
2. Find out what they see as your strengths and your weaknesses.
3. Ask them how you compare to other employers.
4. Find out what new hires heard about you and why they chose you over other potential employers.
5. Ask your new hires if you’ve been delivering what they expected.
6. Ask employees representing different demographics and professions what you can do to become more of an employer of choice.
7. Make sure you do something with this input. There’s nothing quite as effective at breeding cynicism and disengagement as asking for employee input and sending it into the big Employee Input Black Hole. Al Stubblefield, CEO of Baptist Healthcare (an employer of choice and patient satisfaction exemplar in the healthcare field) notes that the foundation of its success has been soliciting and using employee input.
8. Design key employee experiences with greater mindfulness and precision. Make sure each step of the crucial employee experience creates a positive emotional and perceptual take-away. Ask employees for step-by-step feedback on these critical employee moments of truth because they profoundly affect an employee’s overall work experience. Examples of such moments of truth are new hire orientation; the onboarding process; any organizational change; and performance reviews.
9. Unleash your secret employer branding weapon: supervisors and managers who know how to create a great work environment. Quint Studor, former president of Baptist Hospital, noted that their willingness to invest in their middle managers’ professional development differentiated them from most organizations. Common sense combined with research by the Gallup Organization tells us that bosses are the most important factor affecting an employee’s work experience. As Gallup’s research revealed, “Employees join companies, but they leave managers.” Thus, if you’re serious about actually being an employer of choice and not just saying you are, invest in leadership development at all levels. Make sure all of your supervisors and managers get the training and coaching required to know how to create a work environment that can make you an employer of choice.
10. Set up a system that shows managers how they’re doing and holds them accountable. Quint Studor describes this as the “glue” that holds the whole process together. If you want your leadership development investment to translate into employer of choice status and a powerful employer brand, you must provide your managers with a scorecard, progress reports, and coaching. Otherwise, only your better managers will attend your leadership development program, and even they will forget to implement what they learned amidst the maelstrom of today’s workplace.

Without accountability, the managers who are in the greatest need of a skills upgrade (typically those who think the people part of managing is “touchy feely”) will either avoid leadership training or, if required to attend, will fail to use what they learned. Thus, if you’re serious about being an employer of choice, manager accountability is a must.

The Consequences Go Far Beyond Employer Branding

If you do employer branding right, you won’t just enjoy the luxury of having the cream of the crop want to work for you, you will also enjoy many side benefits. If you analyze and upgrade the work experience you provide, if you actively involve your employees in all aspects of the process, and if you keep monitoring and refining each aspect of the work experience (especially those critical moments of truth), you will also enjoy the side benefits that affect your bottom line:

• Lower turnover.
• Lower absenteeism.
• Higher productivity.
• Better customer service.
• A more positive, “can do” workforce.

Now For the Next Step

If you want more of the “how to’s” related to analyzing and creating a more employer-of-choice-worthy workplace, ERE.net has several of my articles that go into depth on this, starting with How to build a compelling employer brand.

Finally, if you’re already doing this, I’d love to hear from you if you want to post comments. It’s always fun sharing examples of what organizations are doing right.

If you’re serious about upgrading your new-hire orientation program and onboarding process as a whole, here are 13 questions you need to ask. Ask them of yourself, your HR department, your management team, your frontline supervisors, and most important, your new employees.

1. Do we make our new hires feel welcome? Analyze step by step the first few days on the job that your new employees experience. Do you do things that communicate “We’re glad you’re here” or is it more “All right get to work, we’ve got things to do here?” Ask new hires who’ve been on the job a month or two how welcome they felt the first day, the first week, the first month. Ask them what you did that made them feel welcome and what you could do to create a more welcoming experience. In overhauling a call center orientation program, we had all the team leaders sign a welcome poster and put a sign in the lobby welcoming our new crop of call-center reps. In our evaluations, new hires reported that they never felt so welcomed in any of their other jobs.
2. Do we inspire pride? The first application of this question requires brutal honesty. Look at how well-run both your orientation program and the onboarding process as a whole are. Are they thorough, organized, compelling, and state of the art, or are they a slipshod, haphazard mess? Most organizations tolerate a level of professionalism and efficacy in their onboarding process they would never tolerate in their overall operations. The other aspect of inspiring pride relates to the next three questions. If you want to inspire your new hires, rather than leave them with buyer’s remorse, make sure your orientation program lets them know they joined a great company. The next three points explain how.
3. Do we connect them with the big picture? The more new hires understand the mission, vision, goals, and uniqueness of your organization, the more engaged they will be from the outset. If the centerpiece of your orientation program is rules, regulations, and logistical minutiae, you can guarantee they will have second thoughts about their job choice. Orientation programs that don’t emphasize the big picture rob the organization of perhaps the greatest value new hires bring to their new employer: enthusiasm and the desire to make a difference.
4. Do we show them how much they matter? Engaging employees from the outset requires more than just communicating “This is what we’re about and why we’re a great company.” It must also include “This is how you help make it all happen.” Communicating this is especially important if you want to attract and retain Gen Y employees, who place an extremely high priority on work that matters and being able to make a difference. At the call center I worked in, the original orientation and training focused on the technical side of the call center reps’ jobs for the first couple of weeks. The message? “Your jobs are about processing transactions. In this company, you’re a worker bee.” Mindful that what we emphasize communicates a message to employees about what’s important, we changed the order of topics. Day one was devoted to how important their jobs were and how, to our customers, they were Acme Insurance (obviously not the real name of the company.) Think orientation programs you’ve attended and what difference it would have made for you if you heard how vital your role was from day one, rather than hour after hour of transactional, technical information.
5. Do we collect and share stories? Great companies communicate their greatness through great stories. Whether it’s Nordstrom’s legendary customer service stories (remember the one about the customer returning the tires?) or Southwest Airline’s legendary customer service and work environment, greatness is communicated not through PowerPoint lectures, charts, and graphs, but through stories that touch the heart and capture the imagination. One of the best things you can do to upgrade your orientation program is collect stories from your employees about experiences they’ve had that embody the unique personality of your company; convey what it’s like to work at your company; illustrate the great things your company does; and demonstrate how employees make a difference. Share these with your new hires. Better still, have the people who told you these stories come in and share them. Doing so accomplishes several useful objectives. First, it creates a more engaging, inspiring orientation programs. Second, it communicates to current employees they are an important part of helping new hires come onboard. Third, it gives frontline employees the chance to be a star and informal leader.
6. Do we make our orientation program interesting and interactive? Many, if not most, orientation programs are about as interesting as watching cement solidify. Besides being boring, such programs send a disturbing message to your new employees. Such programs say “You just joined a company that doesn’t know how to do things right.” Think of boring orientation programs you’ve attended and what you thought about your new employer. There’s too much information available on how to make learning fun and interactive to excuse old-fashioned, boring data dumps.
7. Do we make our process employee-centric or employer-centric? Borrow from the playbook of great customer-service companies: design the customer experience from the customer’s perspective. In this case, analyze your onboarding process from the new hire’s perspective. When you’ve been with the same company for awhile, it’s easy to forget what it’s like to not know what’s going on, who to go to for help, and the desire to not be seen as a high-maintenance employee. To design your process from the new hire’s perspective, ask them for their perspective. Smart companies, like Northeast Delta Dental, awarded the Fourth Best Small Company to Work For in the U.S., do this. They continually ask new employees for feedback on how to make their onboarding process more user-friendly and how to more effectively address the needs of their new employees.
8. Have we broken our orientation program down into bite-sized chunks? Think of times you’ve endured orientation programs that were info-dump ultra-marathons. How much did you retain? How impressed were you with your new employer? You knew that was a stupid, ineffective way to impart information. Your new hires will have the same opinion. As one manager I interviewed wisely noted, “With today’s employees, just as you’re rating them, they’re rating you.” By breaking your orientation program into digestible chunks, you not only communicate, “We’re a company that does things right,” you also communicate, “We care about you and respect you enough to spare you a lousy, nonsensical training experience.”
9. Are we offloading as much information as we can onto our intranet (or non-digital equivalent if you don’t have an intranet)? Have you ever had someone give you detailed, step-by-step instructions days, weeks, or months before you would actually need them? How helpful was that? By offloading as much information as you can so it’s available in an “as-needed” basis, you are being more efficient and effective. You’re also once again communicating to new hires that you know how to do things right.
10. Do we make it easy for new hires to get the information they need? Having a comprehensive intranet gives your new hires a greater sense of security that they can find the information they need when they need it. This, combined with a culture that makes it ok to ask for help, reduces the anxiety of being in a new environment, not knowing the ropes, but not wanting to be considered a pain in the neck. Do you have both a comprehensive knowledge base and a friendly, “glad to help you” culture? If you do, your new employees don’t waste valuable time and energy fretting about how they are going to find the information they need.
11. Do we make it easy for new hires to tell us how they’re doing?and how we’re doing? In companies that have a “suck it up” and “sink or swim” mentality, new hires learn quickly that it’s best to keep their mouths shut. Their employer never hears about what they do that alienates their new hires (until the exit interview, and often not even then). Designer Blinds, an Omaha-based company, reduced turnover from 200% to 8%, in part by instituting what they call the “Entrance Interview.” After analyzing its turnover statistics, it discovered that most of its new hires were leaving between 90 and 180 days into their employee experience. So rather than wait to find out why they were leaving in the exit interview, the company decided to prevent them from leaving in the first place. It did this by instituting the Entrance Interview. These are now held prior to the 90-day “witching hour,” so they could find out what their new hires needed, how they could help them be successful, and so on. At Northeast Delta Dental, at 90 days, new hires get to have their “20 Questions with Connie” meeting. At this meeting, new hires sit down with Connie Roy-Czychowski, VP of HR, and give her feedback on every aspect of the onboarding process and their work experience.
12. Do we have an effective mentoring program? A good program also lets the person doing the mentoring win, since recognition plays a major role in employee engagement. Mentoring also provides tremendous value to current employees because it gives them a chance to develop coaching, supervisory, and leadership skills. Given that professional development and skill portfolio expansion are especially high priorities for today’s workers, a mentoring program also aids your efforts at retaining and engaging your current employees.
13. Do we help our managers do their part well? As Gallup’s research has shown, when it comes to employee engagement and performance, it’s all about the boss. More than any other factor influencing employee engagement and performance, an employee’s supervisor plays the most important role. Helping supervisors understand how to create a positive, productive, inspiring work experience is not only the foundation of a high-performance workplace, it’s a “must” if you want an effective onboarding process. If HR simply asks supervisors to help their new hires get started without helping them do it right, they won’t. Make sure your supervisors receive training, support, checklists, and so on, so they cover all the bases. Companies like Bensonwood Homes, a New Hampshire-based company, and Northeast Delta Dental have detailed checklists for supervisors that outline what they should do the first day, first week, etc.

One Final Point

Business sage Jim Rohn has a simple saying that conveys much wisdom: “It’s not what you know, it’s what you do with what you know that makes a difference in your life.”

My hope is that as you read through these questions, you didn’t simply ask yourself if you knew these factors were important. They’re pretty common sense (yet despite this, rarely done). Ask yourself, your HR department, your management team, your frontline supervisors, and most important, your new hires whether you are actually doing these. Then involve all to make sure you can answer each with a confident “absolutely.”

If your organization is doing a great job at new-hire orientation and/or the onboarding process as a whole, let me know.

After joining the java juggernaut, he went on a coffee-hunting expedition with Dave Olsen, Starkbucks’ chief coffee buyer. Bedbury, author of A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century, probed Olsen for the secret to Starbucks’ branding success. What was, to use anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson’s famous term, the critical “difference that makes a difference”? What mattered the most to the company’s branding success? Was it all about the coffee beans; were they that different? Was it the ambience Starbucks has so assiduously created? Was it the employees they’ve hired? What particular part of their winning combination mattered most? After pondering Bedbury’s question and weighing the variables, Mr. Olsen responded: “Everything matters.” All world-class brand managers know that everything matters. They know that every communication and every interaction with the customer matters. Every decision and every choice matters, because they will either strengthen or weaken a brand. This same principle holds true when it comes to organizational and managerial practices and how they affect employee morale, engagement, and pride. Every decision, every moment of truth in which an employee bumps up against organizational policies, procedures, and processes matters.

Noticing Minor Flaws

The principle “everything matters” is especially true in the first 60 to 90 days of an employee’s tenure with your company, because employees are the most impressionable during this period. When people are in unfamiliar territory, they are more alert for any clues that will help them navigate the terrain. In this state of uncertainty, they are also more likely to leap to conclusions when forming perceptions and opinions. This is because when we feel vulnerable and uncertain, we’re more prone to remove any uncertainty possible. To use a term from cognitive psychology, they are vulnerable to making “premature cognitive commitments.” When we make a premature cognitive commitment, we leap to a conclusion before having enough data to make a truly informed choice. Because new hires are more vigilant for clues, they’re likely to notice even the most minor examples of a poorly designed and executed orientation program and onboarding process. Because they are prone to premature cognitive commitments, they are more likely to see these as indicative of a poorly run organization that doesn’t care about employees. Thus, when it comes to onboarding, everything matters.

Everything You Do Sends a Message About Your Company

Every choice, every action, every communication has potential consequences. Every choice has a consequence in terms of how quickly an employee gets up to speed. Every choice communicates to the employee something about your organization. For instance, poorly organized, “fly by the seat of your pants” orientations communicate something very different about an organization than does a well-organized, professionally delivered program. Recognizing the importance of having new-hire orientation reflect and support the company’s culture of excellence, Eric Wood, president of EnviroSense, requested that his HR team conduct an “orientation makeover.” Because every action carries an implicit message, their new orientation program communicates to employees a message consistent with the company’s culture, mission, and values. “In our business,” says Wood, “high levels of performance and attention to detail are critical and expected of every employee. In order to ask for this level of performance, we want to make sure we show our employees the same commitment.”

Showing You Care Is One of the Strongest Drivers of Employee Engagement

The level of support provided to employees after leaving orientation also communicates an important message. Using a “sink or swim” approach to onboarding communicates a loud “we don’t care about or value you” message, while an onboarding process that provides new hires with a mentor and periodic check-ins sends employees the kind of message that leads to engagement and loyalty. At Community Living Association, a Maine non-profit organization that provides services to individuals with developmental disabilities, employees frequently complained about how awkward it was going into a new home when they were both new to the job and a stranger to their future client. To remedy this, new employees no longer have to “cold call” their new client. Instead, a staff member who already knows the clients makes the introduction. By demonstrating their concern for their new employees’ comfort, management obviously communicates a far different message than if the company had adopted a “that’s just how it is…deal with it” stance.

Is Your Orientation Program All Rules and Red Tape?

Another significant moment of truth that matters greatly is whether your orientation focuses on rules and regulations and neglects the inspirational component of being a new employee. Making orientation primarily about rules and regulations communicates something very different about an organization than an orientation that communicates these messages:

• “We’re happy you’re here.”
• “You’re part of a great organization.”
• “This is why your job is so important.”

Recently, someone told me how a friend of theirs who had just been hired by a social-services agency quit before finishing the orientation program. He said he was disgusted with the focus of the orientation. From the very beginning, all he heard about was how to protect himself and the agency from lawsuits and government sanctions, and nothing about the agency’s clients and the noble nature of the work he was hired to do. When you communicate ideas like “We’re happy you’re here,” “You’re part of a great organization,” and “This is why your job is so important,” you tap into three of the strongest human motivators: 1) the need for meaning and purpose, 2) the desire to matter, and 3) the desire for esteem. By making sure these human needs are addressed from the outset, your company will engage new employees right from the start.

They’ll Make a Difference

Northeast Delta Dental, awarded the fourth best small company to work for in America by the Great Places To Work Institute, does an especially effective job of immediately tapping into employees’ need to know they matter and will make a difference. At the company’s orientation programs, HR invites senior-level managers to talk with new hires about their specific departments, helping new hires understand the big picture and the important role the new hires will play in contributing to the company’s goals. This links their individual “little pictures” with the big picture. But the HR department at New England Delta Dental doesn’t stop at inviting senior management to talk to new hires. To make sure each speaker’s presentation is as relevant as possible, executives are briefed ahead of time about who will be attending and what department they will be joining. This allows them to tailor their remarks to make them most relevant to this particular audience. Such attention to detail and professionalism matters. It tells new employees: “You’ve just joined a company that does things right. You’ve joined a world class outfit.”

Questions From Connie

It’s easy to get lulled into the misperception that new hires don’t notice or don’t care about the many little fumbled moments of truth during the onboarding process. They’re not complaining, so it doesn’t bother them, right? Wrong. Remember your early days at a new job and how you didn’t want to be perceived as needy, high maintenance, or negative? You learned to do the best you could despite the many ways your new employer made doing your job well — and caring about it — difficult. Although you didn’t complain, your respect for your employer or boss, and your engagement level, dropped. This is why you want to make sure you make it comfortable for new hires to give you feedback. The more you demonstrate that you are interested in continually upgrading the process, and need their input to do so, the more likely you will get honest feedback. Notes Deb Franklin of Designer Blinds, “Rather than wait for the exit interview to find out what’s wrong, we decided to conduct ‘entrance interviews.’”

After analyzing turnover data, Franklin found that the most vulnerable timeframe for new hires was between the second and sixth months. While their onboarding process seemed to be doing things right for the first month, it was this next timeframe that needed serious attention. Hence, the entrance interview was born. As new hires enter this next phase, they meet with HR to discuss how they’re doing and identify any trouble spots. Franklin reports that the company’s entrance interview has played a major role in reducing its turnover by 96 percent. At Northeast Delta Dental, at the 90-day mark, new employees participate in what has now become a company tradition: “20 Questions With Connie.” Connie Roy-Czyzowski, VP of human resources, sits down with each new employee and asks them questions such as:

1. How is your job?
2. Is it what you expected when hired?
3. Any surprises? If yes, what?
4. Do you have all the work tools you need?
5. How is your relationship with your manager?
6. Was the new employee orientation helpful?
7. What would you do differently?
8. Do you visit the company’s corporate intranet?
9. Was it easy to find?
10. Anything you need that you don’t have access to?

This structured interview at 90 days helps Northeast Delta Dental address issues that are affecting the new employee’s morale and performance, and provides the company with valuable information on how to continually improve its onboarding process.

These changes also translated into improved attendance, increased productivity, and — not surprisingly — a reduction in their damaged-goods rate. At Designer Blinds, an Omaha based manufacturer of window blinds, upgrading the onboarding process played a central role in reducing turnover from 200% annually to under 8%! Because of the dramatic drop in turnover, they were able to reduce their recruiting budget from $30,000 to $2,000. A 2003 study by Hewitt Associates demonstrating the connection between effective onboarding and engagement revealed that companies who invested the most time and resources in onboarding enjoyed the highest levels of employee engagement. Both research and common sense tell us that it makes sense to invest time and effort into preparing employees to be successful at their jobs. If you want them to become productive as quickly as possible, why would anyone not do what it took to make that happen? If you’re going to spend all that money on acquiring them and paying them to come to work, why would you not prepare them to succeed? Despite the obviousness of this, many organizations approach new hire orientation with a level of professionalism and quality they would never tolerate in their daily operations.

Orientation as Nightmare

Rex Castle, senior vice president of human resources of State National Bank of Lubbock, Texas, captures the typical new hire orientation nightmare:

You come in and sit down in monumentally uncomfortable chairs and are bombarded with papers, rules, policies…you know those ‘this is how you get fired’ sort of comments. If it’s a big employer and a big group of new hires, someone stands in front of a PowerPoint slide show and reads the slides to you. Usually it’s an HR underling who is totally uncomfortable in front of a group and rarely, if ever, smiles. You sign and sign and sign more paper than you would if you were buying a house, and then you walk out thinking, ‘Man, I hope I don’t get fired, but at least I know how to get fired.’ And those are the good orientations. The poor ones are done by a harried manager on location and God only knows what it is the employee is receiving in terms of an understanding of policies and procedures.

Most employees have had variations on this theme, including some of the classics:

• Being put to sleep by presenters who either need a personality implant or a Toastmasters overhaul.
• Watching the HR rep scurry about trying to find the laptop and projector, or the correct copies of employee manuals, while everyone waits and fidgets.
• Discovering that their work station is “not quite ready.” While it is covered with outdated equipment waiting to be discarded and boxes of miscellaneous “stuff,” it doesn’t have a telephone or PC.
• Having a harried — or just plain disrespectful — boss show up an hour late to “welcome” them on their first day. (This was not an uncommon occurrence at a company that, not surprisingly, had low morale and a 40% turnover rate.)
• Handing them off to the first available employee — including the most cynical, resentful, burnt out, disengaged employees — for “first day on the job coaching.”

Eric Wood, President of EnviroSense, Inc., a New Hampshire based environmental consulting firm, understands why you should be worrying about doing onboarding right: “With a thorough orientation and onboarding process, the probability of achieving the goals of the business and the employee are greatly increased. Without it, the probabilities of disappointment, employee turnover, re-work, and dissatisfied clients all grow unnecessarily.”

Are You Making These Common — and Costly — Mistakes? Mistake #1:

Trying to cram 20 hours worth of information into four mind-numbing hours of orientation. From a purely practical point of view, doing this wastes your time and your hire’s. If it’s impossible for them to absorb the information, if it’s going in one ear and out the other, why spend precious time on this exercise in futility? Smart organizations break orientation into “bite sized chunks.” They also select the most effective medium for the particular type of information, offloading information that is best accessed on one’s own onto the corporate intranet. Cramming too much information also sends an undesirable message to your new hires. Because it’s so blatantly ineffective and unpleasant, employees can interpret this as an indication that:

1. Their new employer is a second-rate outfit that doesn’t do things right.
2. Their new employer doesn’t care about how it affects its employees, i.e. they don’t respect their employees.

Mistake #2: Running a slipshod, “fly by the seat of your pants” program, believing that doing so has no negative impact. If you run a slipshod, disorganized, second-rate orientation program, you are sending the message that you’re a slipshod, second-rate company. Harsh as that may sound, that’s the message such programs send. While all operational decisions and practices can impact an employee’s assessment of the overall intelligence, professionalism, and effectiveness of their employer, few moments of truth are as vulnerable to interpretation as the onboarding process. There are several psychological reasons for this vulnerability. First, human beings are “meaning-making creatures.” One of the most fundamental human drives is the need to make sense out of our world. Few experiences create greater anxiety than not understanding what is going on or why something is happening. In the workplace, when something significant occurs ? our boss scowls at us, we hear of an upcoming all-staff meeting about a “new development,” or we’re not asked for input on a change that directly affects our job, we try to make sense out of what just happened and why. In the absence of an explicit external explanation, we generate our own explanation. This need to understand and explain to ourselves what is happening and why it’s happening is most powerful when we find ourselves in uncharted territory. In unfamiliar situations, especially those that are ambiguous — i.e. where we’re not sure what is going on and no one is guiding us — we feel vulnerable.

When we feel vulnerable, we feel insecure. In this emotional state, we are especially sensitive to any clues — real or imagined — that will help us make sense of our situation. Hungry for clues, for information that we can use to make sense of this new environment, we are more likely to come to hasty conclusions, based on minimal information. Cognitive psychologists call this making a “premature cognitive commitment.” Premature cognitive commitments — coming to a conclusion without getting enough facts to make a truly accurate impression — also leads one to achieve a false sense of closure and certainty. Once a person makes a premature cognitive commitment, once they’ve arrived at their assessment about a person or situation, future data is unlikely to shake their “understanding.” (Thus, the truism: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”)

Because new hires find themselves in uncharted territory, they are more prone to grasping for any possible clue to help them understand their new environment. Thus, they are more likely to “make meaning” out of anything and everything their new employer does or doesn’t do. The new hire will more likely place greater significance on any displays of slipshod, disorganized, or poorly thought out onboarding. Because of their vulnerability to premature cognitive commitments, they are more likely to take these perceptions as indicators of the company as a whole. Those first impressions can and will taint their future perspectives on the employer.

Mistake #3: Making your new hire orientations as dull as watching paint dry. Despite all the information available on creative training techniques, interactive exercises, and games, many organizations still insist on putting new hires through coma-inducing data dumps and form-filling marathons. Orientation programs that have filling out forms, speakers droning on about various policies, and watching the obligatory sexual harassment video as their centerpieces neglect one of the most important roles of new hire orientation: creating an inspiring experience that reassures new hires they made the right choice and lays the foundation for high employee engagement. Neglecting this can cost significantly both in terms of employees never becoming engaged — and therefore not working to anywhere near their potential — or just leaving. In fact, Betty Lou Smith, vice president of corporate HR at Hunter Douglas, discovered that the primary reason for their 70% turnover in the first six months was because new employees never felt a connection to their new company; they never felt engaged. Prior to their onboarding overhaul, Hunter Douglas production workers received a ten-minute orientation before heading out to the shop floor.

Mistake #4: Using the “sink or swim” approach to onboarding. Throwing a new employee into the fray without appropriate support and coaching is one of the most common, and damaging, mistakes an organization can make. Not only does it dramatically increase the odds the employee will leave, it communicates to all employees two morale and pride damaging messages: “Management doesn’t care about their people” and “Management doesn’t have common sense.” Effective onboarding means keeping in touch with your new hires as they integrate into your organization. It means actively seeking them out to find out how they’re doing and — this point is critical — making it easy for them to tell HR and their boss what’s on their mind. Even assertive individuals can be reluctant to ask questions or say “the way you do this isn’t working.” The more safe and easy you make it for new employees to speak the truth, the more likely you are to prevent employees from waiting until their exit interview — 90 days into their job — to tell you what went wrong.

• “What do our customers want from this interaction?”
• “What emotions and perceptions does the way we handle this step leave with our customers?”
• “If we do it this new way, what emotions and perceptions would that leave with our customers?”
• “What emotions and perceptions do we want this moment of truth to create, and what do we need to do to create them?”

Asking similar questions about the work experience you deliver to your employees will help you design the kind of experience that employees would want to tell others about. They want to tell their friends and colleagues because they feel so lucky, and they know how unusual their employer is. They WANT to give the people they care about and respect an opportunity to be as lucky as they are. Not only does creating such a satisfying, motivating, and inspiring work experience turn your workforce into a band of headhunters, it also improves morale, productivity, engagement, and customer service quality. Doing this isn’t a “nice to do if we had the time” project. Doing it well has far-reaching implications for the very sources of your financial viability. 10 Moments of Truth You Must Get Right So, how do you create the kind of experience that encourages quality referrals? First, to make it more manageable, break down the “Employee Experience” into sub-experiences. Think about what moments of truth comprise the total employee experience. Think about the interactions employees have with their boss and with their employer that most powerfully affect morale, engagement, and productivity. Some of the most important ó and often botched ó moments of truth that shape the overall employee experience are below. Think about the questions that follow these moments of truth, and how you can improve your own employees’ experiences in each. 1. The interviewing and hiring experience.

• Does your process leave applicants feeling respected?
• Does your process lead people to view your company as a well run outfit?
• Does your process lead people to view your company as an employer who cares about and respects its employees?

2. The “preparing an employee for their new job” experience.

• Is your orientation program inspiring or does it leave new employees with “buyer’s remorse”?
• Does your orientation program leave new hires with the impression that you’re a well-run, professional outfit that does things right ó or does it leave them think you’re a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, clumsily run organization?
• Does the process you have (or don’t have) for integrating new hires into the workforce in the first 90 days lead new hires to feel they are valued, that their employer cares about their well-being and success? Or is it more of a “sink or swim” experience?

3. The “giving directions and delegating” experience.

• Do supervisors and managers clearly communicate expectations, the “how to” when appropriate, and other factors related to employees understanding what is expected of them, or do employees often feel like they’re flying blind?
• Do supervisors and managers make it clear how they prioritize the various tasks and give reasonable workloads and time frames?

4. The “giving corrective feedback” experience.

• Do managers make this a regular part of their conversations with employees, or wait to surprise them in the annual performance review?
• Do managers know how to give feedback in clear, concrete terms, or only in vague terms that leave employees feeling frustrated and without direction (e.g. “You need to be more of a team player”)?
• Do managers know how to give corrective feedback respectfully, or only in a scolding way?
• Do managers know how to invite employees to share their point of view so they feel understood, or do they just “talk at” and “preach to” employees?
• Do managers integrate these conversations into a productive professional development plan?

5. The performance review experience.

• Are performance reviews seen as a necessary evil by all involved, or as a useful performance enhancement and professional development tool?
• Is the information contained in the performance review truly a review of previous conversations, or is it late-breaking news?
• Are employees active participants in the review process, assessing their own performance, or is it primarily something that the manager “does to” the employee?
• Is it safe for employees to disagree and not be perceived as disagreeable?

6. The “employee has a concern” experience.

• Do managers listen to what employees have to say, or do they dismiss, talk at, or lecture to their employees?
• Do employee concerns get addressed, including employees being apprised of the status and outcome of the issues they raised? If the concern doesn’t result in change, are the reasons why explained?
• Do employees have to badger their boss to get them to act on a concern, or do managers respond with the same interest and alacrity they would if their boss asked them?
• Do employees feel listened to?

7. The “employee has an idea” Experience.

• What message do employees get about their ideas and input: “highly valued” or “don’t bother”?
• If an employee comes up with an unworkable idea, how does the manager handle it: in a way that leaves the employee feeling respected and appreciated, or feeling stupid, irrelevant, and patronized?
• Do employees receive the information and the big picture context that makes useful ideas possible?
• Are employees apprised of the status of their ideas, and if the idea isn’t used, why?

8. The “we’re going through a big change” experience.

• Are employees kept in the loop ó or kept in the dark ó during change processes?
• Do employees get the truth or do they get spin?
• Are employees asked for input and feedback about possible changes?
• Does management make the rules of the game clear when asking for input or feedback ó i.e. how feedback will be used, whether it will influence the outcome or whether it is more about finding ways to help employees deal with an outcome that is out of their control?
• Are employees allowed to dissent without being seen as “not a team player”?

9. The “conflict with your boss” experience.

• Is it safe for employees to voice their disagreements with their boss, or is it considered a CDM ó a Career Damaging Move?
• Is it safe for employees to be honest with their boss if they feel their boss’s managerial behavior is counterproductive?
• Is honesty and openness valued, supported, and encouraged?
• Are managers coached about how to make it safe for employees to be open with them?
• Are manager held accountable for their behavior toward employees, or is one of the perks of power the freedom to mistreat one’s staff?

10. The “employee goes the extra mile or does something great” experience.

• Do employees feel taken for granted or do they feel appreciated?
• Do employees feel that going the extra mile is recognized and appreciated?
• Do employees feel that hard work and high performance is recognized by their boss and by the company?

Now What? This list will get you started on analyzing the work experience you deliver. Here’s how to use it for maximum benefit:

1. Use the experiences I’ve listed as a starting point for you, your management team, and employee advisory council to generate a more complete list of experiences that comprise the total employee experience.
2. Use the questions under each experience to analyze how you can improve the way you deliver that experience. As always, involve both your management team and your Employee Advisory Council in this process.
3. For each moment of truth, ask:
   • “What would employees want from this interaction?”
   • “What do our employees say they want from this interaction?”
   • “The way we handle this step? what emotions and perceptions does it leave with our employees?”
   • “If we do it this new way, what emotions and perceptions would that leave with our employees?”
   • “What emotions and perceptions do we want this moment of truth to create? and what do we need to do to create them?”
4. You can get the ball rolling by asking your employees, “Do you have the kind of work experience at our company that makes you want to tell others that we’re a great place to work? Does it make you want to recommend us to your friends and colleagues?”

Make sure you involve employees not only in data gathering, but also in implementing changes. As in any change or organizational development initiative, the more you involve your employees in the process, the more invested they’ll be, the better your data, and the better the results.

• Analyze your default brand for strengths and weaknesses
• Reverse engineer your negative attributes and emotional associations to identify the work experiences that are creating them
• Identify the employer brand attributes and emotions you want people to associate with your organization as an employer
• Design experiences that elicit these attributes and emotional associations

In this segment, we will explore how to use stories to capture, communicate, and strengthen your employer brand. Stories are both the major raw material and the most important finished product of your employer brand. They are primary raw material, because they capture the experiences you will analyze to identify your default brand’s attributes and emotional associations. You will also use stories as the building blocks of your desired employer brand. Stories are an important “product” of the employer branding process because they will be the most compelling medium through which you communicate your employer brand to the labor market. Two Types of Stories: The Mini-Drama and The Mini-Documentary In this article, I’ll be using the term “story” rather loosely. I’ll use it in it’s traditional way ó the recounting of a particular incident ó and I’ll also use it to include descriptions of ongoing, reoccurring events. Whereas the recounting of a particular event might be thought of as a mini-drama because it involves specific characters with some emotional charge to the incident, I think of the description of ongoing, reoccurring events as more of a mini-documentary. Here’s an example of the mini-documentary type of story that comes from Maine Employers Mutual Insurance Company (MEMIC), a Portland, Maine, workers compensation company. In describing what makes MEMIC different, CEO John Leonard gives an example of MEMIC’s non-hierarchical culture: “When we have meetings about a particular worker’s comp case, you might find the VP of Indemnity and a claims representative at the same table, discussing the issues and offering their perspectives. It’s not about titles here, it’s about who has the knowledge…” This story is not about a specific event. It doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end like a dramatic story. Instead, it describes a facet of the ongoing work experience this organization delivers. Hence, it’s like a mini-documentary, depicting what it’s like working at MEMIC. This article will explore how stories ó whether mini-drama or mini-documentary ó play an important role in helping you identify, build, communicate, and strengthen your employer brand. We will now explore what role they play in each part of the process. Stories As Brand Defining Tool Stories captured through interviews with employees contain the data you will use to identify your default brand. Questions such as: “What was it like for you as a new employee here?” and “What experiences come to mind that, in your opinion, capture what it’s like to work here?” will elicit stories from employees about experiences that capture various facets of the work experience your organization delivers. You would then analyze these stories for the employer brand attributes and emotional associations they contain. For instance, let’s say you ask employees to tell you about their experience as a new employee, and you hear story after story recounting how they felt overwhelmed by a “sink or swim” environment where they weren’t given enough help or guidance. From these stories, you would extract such default brand attributes as “they don’t care about new employees,” “this is a disorganized outfit,” and “if this is indicative of how they run their company, they don’t know what they’re doing.” You can infer from these stories that the “emotional takeaway” employees are left with ó i.e. the emotional associations they connect to their new hire work experience ó might include anxiety, confusion, frustration, and even resentment. As discussed in earlier segments of this series, you would then identify how you need to re-engineer the new hire experience so these negative attributes and emotional associations were eliminated. Conversely, let’s say employee stories about their new hire experience contain such common themes as “I felt so welcomed by HR, by my new boss, and my co-workers,” “I was impressed by all the different things the company does to help you get started off on the right foot,” and “I remember being in orientation and feeling like ‘this is not your ordinary company.’” Out of these stories, you would identify the positive brand attributes and emotional associations that will be part of your desired employer brand. Stories as Brand-Building Tool Stories are not only the raw data used to analyze and identify your default brand, they’re also a primary vehicle for building your desired employer brand. Stories that illustrate your organization’s desirable employer brand attributes enable you to paint vivid word pictures of what your desired employer brand looks, sounds, and feels like. Attributes are abstract and open to interpretation ó for instance, what do employer brand attributes such as “employees matter” or “world-class place to work” mean? By collecting stories that illustrate these attributes in action, you make your brand vision unambiguous and understandable. For desired attributes that your company does not yet possess, you will need to ask employees for examples from past employers or, if they’ve never experienced such an attribute, ask them to describe how they envision this attribute being embodied in a work experience. Since we’re talking about stories, let’s use one to illustrate how stories make abstract attributes concrete, specific, and understandable ó and therefore executable. The following story is an example of the “mini-documentary” type that describes an ongoing experience rather than a one time-event. Years ago, I interviewed Gun Andersson, co-founder of Hanna Anderson, the Portland, Oregon, company that sells upscale children’s clothing primarily through mail order. I asked her for examples of what made their company an employer of choice. One example she gave focused on their call center representatives’ work experience. Hanna Andersson encourages its call center employees to notice and pass along customer comments. Whether it’s an individual customer’s comments about a design that doesn’t seem to work well or overall customer themes observed over time, Hanna Andersson’s call center reps relay what they hear from the marketplace to the designers at the clothing company. Unlike the typical call center rep, who is treated as if they’re capable of nothing more than processing transactions, Hanna Andersson’s call center reps get to be real players in their organization. They aren’t just told they matter; they get proof that they matter. In the next season’s catalog, they see design changes and product offerings which reflect the market intelligence they provided. As the above story illustrates, stories bring employer brand attributes to life. They make abstract terms understandable. While “employees matter in our company” can mean anything ó and therefore nothing ó this story gives a clear example of what “employees matter” means in the Hanna Anderson work experience. Such clarity and specificity will enable you to create a more understandable and compelling vision of your desired employer brand. For each employer brand attribute and emotional association, you will want to collect a number of stories that illustrate the many facets of that attribute or emotional association in the work experience you provide. Stories As Brand-Communication Tool Stories not only allow you to create a clear, compelling employer brand vision, they also play a central role in communicating your employer brand to the labor market. Stories are far more compelling and believable than simply saying, “we’re a great place to work” or “we care about our employees.” Any employer can say these things ó and just about everyone does. But not everyone can back such assertions with evidence. With stories, you provide that evidence. You also increase the odds that the listener will remember your claims. For instance, Gun Andersson told me the story I just shared back in the mid-’90s, yet I remember it as if I had heard it yesterday. If all she had said was “employees matter in our company,” I would have long since forgotten that claim. Stories don’t have to be dramatic or heart wrenching to be compelling to prospective job applicants. They can be as simple as the story that Marguerite Stapleton, VP of Mission Effectiveness at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, Maine, tells of a woman she met while speaking at an orientation class. The woman, in her mid 60s, was far older than the typical new CNA she encountered at the hospital. When asked what made her pick St. Mary’s as an employer, the lady said she chose St. Mary’s because of the excellent, nurturing care her mother received when she was a patient at St. Mary’s. From this experience, she decided that she wanted to be a CNA and she wanted to work at a place where patients still received healthcare with a human touch. To the kind of healthcare worker hospitals hope to attract ó the kind that is truly committed to excellent care ó such a story tells them “this is the right place for you.” To maximize the effectiveness of your employer-brand-defining stories as a communication tool, your branding team would be wise to do what St. Mary’s Marguerite Stapleton is doing: compiling these stories into a book. First, this allows you to capture “slice of life” stories that might otherwise be forgotten after the people present during the experience leave your organization. Second, it provides a handy resource for orientation facilitators, new managers, your PR department, and everyone involved in the recruiting and hiring process. You might even want to sort these stories by attributes or themes. Stories as Brand-Strengthening Tool Storytelling is also a powerful tool for strengthening your employer brand internally. “Strengthening your employer brand” means making your employer brand vision and its associated attributes increasing