Well you can.

It’s called: Show more appreciation and give more recognition.

I had an experience recently that reminded me of how often even really smart managers neglect to use these simple practices, and by doing so, miss out on the morale-boosting, engagement-inspiring results they bring.

Not showing appreciation or giving recognition also carries a significant price tag. In fact, lack of appreciation was cited by the Department of Labor as the No. 1 reason employees leave their job.

How Often Have You Gotten a “Thank You” or “Way to Go!”

Think of your own experience as an employee over the years. Think of how rarely if ever you had a boss express appreciation when you went the extra mile, worked extra hours, or did an exceptional job on a project.

Think of what a “motivation killer” that was. Even though you still worked hard and did a great job because of your work ethic and professional pride, your heart was just a little less into your work.

You probably cared just a little bit less.

Teaching Employees to Care Less

After a while, the cumulative effort of being taken for granted reaches the tipping point, and the loyal, hard-working employee becomes what Gallup calls ROAD Warriors — Retired On Active Duty — or they simply look for more appreciative pastures.

Here’s What Not to Do

Recently I finished up a project helping an organization improve its onboarding process for salespeople. One of the managers in this company — I’ll call him Justin — played an essential role in helping me understand the day-to-day realities and requirements of their new salespeople. Not only was he helpful, but he was also very generous with his time, telling me never to hesitate to call if I needed more input or feedback. Throughout our working together, I made sure Justin knew how much I appreciated both the quality of his insights and his willingness to give of his time, despite his onerous workload.

When I finished the project, I told Justin I would write a letter to the Senior VP of his department, letting him know how helpful Justin had been, and what specific qualities Justin demonstrated that were so useful.

Before sending the letter out, I emailed Justin a copy—in part as another way of letting him know how much I appreciated his help—and to let him know what specifically he did that was so helpful.

I then sent the letter on to the senior VP.

You Gotta Be Kidding!

A couple weeks later, I e-mailed Justin to see what the Senior VP said to him about the letter.

Nothing.

Not a word.

Wake up Dude!

As I think about this senior VP, who is a brilliant individual, I can’t help but think, “You had this opportunity spoonfed to you to praise one of your hardest working, most dedicated, and most innovative managers and you blew it. Come on! Wake up!”

A Missed Opportunity

Here was a great opportunity for the VP to not only express appreciation and recognize a high-value employee, but also a great opportunity to communicate that he values the specific behaviors demonstrated by the manager.

This is one of the under-recognized benefits of showing appreciation and recognition: when you acknowledge—with specificity—the good work that you notice, you reinforce it.

Mindfulness Time

OK, so what to do with this simple little cautionary tale? Practice paying attention for opportunities to express appreciation and recognition.

To prime your brain for this, you might want to think about the various people you work with right now. Think of those people who stand out in terms of how well they do their job, how easy they are to work with, how “internal customer friendly” they are, or who act in other ways that make your life easier and better. Then, one by one, consider:

1. What they do that you appreciate.
2. How they help make your job easier or help you maximize your productivity.
3. What they do exceptionally well.
4. What about their personality, their way of being, you appreciate.

How to Put This Awareness to Use

-Be on the lookout for opportunities to express appreciation. It can be as simple as:

“Connie, I was just reading an article about appreciation and the article was suggesting that you think of people who are especially helpful and to let them know that … and I thought of you immediately. I SO appreciate how easy you are to work with. If something needs to get done, you do it. You never complain or make it sound like an imposition. I really appreciate that.”

“Krista, I was just reading an article about appreciation and the article was suggesting that you think of people who do something you really appreciate and to let them know that. So I thought of you. I starting thinking about how much I appreciate the fact that you really listen. There aren’t a lot of people who truly listen and want to understand what the other person is saying, and I so appreciate that you do. Thank you for that. It means a lot to me.”

-If an employee in your organization, a client’s or a vendor’s organization does something really helpful or simply has a history of being a pleasure to work with, let their boss know.

-Catch yourself taking people for granted by not acknowledging what they do, and rectify it. Be on the lookout for opportunities to say “thank you” and “I appreciate that.”

Here’s the Best Part

Both research on gratitude and our own life experience shows us that when we give someone a compliment, when we express gratitude, when we do something kind, we feel better. So, becoming more generous with gratitude and recognition doesn’t just make other people feel better. It’s a great way to keep your own morale high.

• Provide leadership and guidance.
• Listen to the Millennial employee.
• Provide challenge and change.
• Provide structure (i.e. clear expectations, goals, assessment of progress, etc).

One of the website’s readers posted a point-by-point criticism of the article, concluding with: “The advice given is good for employees of all ages. Contending that it is uniquely applicable to a new generation is nonsense.”

While I agree with the rather prickly poster’s perspective that the author’s advice applies to all employees, I do think he missed the nuances the author was trying to convey.

More specifically, practices that are helpful for workers of any generation are even more critical with Gen Y employees because of the cultural milieu this generation grew up in: extremely involved parents, the self-esteem movement, unrelenting emphasis on fame and making your mark on the world, etc.

So for instance, while providing leadership and guidance is just good management practice, regardless of the direct report’s age, it takes on greater significance with the Millennial employee. Given that Millennials have been described as the most coached and micro-managed generation (think “helicopter parents”), they, on average, want more attention and interest from their manager than would the “typical” Gen X employee.

Thus, simply writing off recommended practices for bringing out the best in Millennials as no different than with other generations, ignores the deal-breaker importance of these practices if you want to attract, retain, and engage the Millennial generation.

The Source of “The Gift” Gen Y Employees Are Handing You

So, when you look at what the research on what the Millennial generation wants in a work experience along with their unique attitude towards work, it’s hard to escape this conclusion:

“Gen Y employees want what everyone else wants in a work experience. However, if they don’t get it, they are far more willing to speak up … or leave.”

While obviously not everyone in a generational cohort thinks or acts the same way, on average, Gen Y employees are known for being much more comfortable challenging authority and speaking their minds. Gen Y employees are also well known for not sticking around if they’re not happy.

While many managers and HR professionals tear their hair out over these tendencies, they miss out on the priceless information their Millennial employees are giving them because of these proclivities.

Gen Y Employees: Your “Canary in the Coal Mine”

Your Gen Y employees are the Canary in the Coal Mine in terms of your managerial practices and the work experience you deliver.

A quick synopsis of the term in case you’re not familiar with it: Long ago, before sophisticated technology, coal miners would bring a canary down into the mine shaft as their early warning sign that CO2 levels were getting dangerously high. If the canary keeled over, it was a good time to head to the surface. Because canaries are more sensitive to CO2 levels than humans, they showed the effects before the men did. Thus, the canary’s increased sensitivity saved lives.

Your Gen Y employees are your Canary in the Coal Mine for those things that lead all employees to become disengaged. Things like:

• An impersonal boss who only sees you as a tool to achieve his/her goals, and shows no interest in your well-being or professional development.
• Outdated, nonsensical policies that make it hard to do your work.
• Lack of respect for your right to have a life outside of work.
• Being kept out of the loop, so you always feel like you’re laboring in the dark.
• A boss who only gives negative feedback — never praise or appreciation.
• No clarity around how your work matters and contributes to the big picture.
• Few opportunities to make a difference; to do something that truly matters outside of your routine tasks.

“I Quit … But I’ll Still Come to Work”

While all employees want these things, many of those from older generations tolerate them, rather than complain or leave. Instead, they will join the ranks of what the Gallup Organization calls ROAD Warriors — Retired on Active Duty. These employees who no longer care comprise 55% of the workforce, according to Gallup’s research. These are the people who say:

“I’m so mad, I am no longer going to work here … I’m not going to leave though … I’m just not going to work.”

The fact that 55% of employees in the average organization are just going through the motions is only half the problem. The other half is that because they don’t speak up or leave, their employer doesn’t realize “CO2 levels are rising.”

Thus, it’s easy for employers to go along blithely unaware of the huge price they are paying for ineffective management practices and organizational policies. Because these employees are not as vocal or willing to leave as Gen Y employees, it’s easy to think that:

• New employees don’t notice or don’t care about the sloppy, boring-as-watching-paint-dry orientation program and indifferent welcome they received.
• Conducting an employee survey and never reporting the results didn’t have an effect on morale and trust.
• When managers speak disrespectfully to their direct reports, it’s quickly forgotten by those employees, and leaves no emotional wake.
• Not asking employees for input over changes that directly affect their jobs is just something they need to get over.

Without Feedback, It’s Easy to Think Things Are Fine When They’re Not

Without dramatic feedback — either an “in-your-face” confrontation or high turnover — it’s easy for employers to lose millions of dollars a year in lost productivity and lost customers due to disengaged customers and never even realize it’s happening.

But with Gen Y employees, there’s no mystery. They’re more than happy to let you know what you’re doing wrong. And that’s the hidden gift of this generation:

You don’t have to wonder about whether you are doing the things that prevent you from attracting, retaining, and engaging talent. You don’t have to worry about laboring under the illusion that all is well when it’s not.

Your Gen Y Employees Will Tell You … Or Leave

So no matter how cheeky they might seem in their delivery, or how annoying you find their lack of loyalty, they are giving you valuable information. It’s sort of like being told you have bad breath. It’s not pleasant news, but it’s better than not knowing.

So What to Do?

1. Help your less vocal employees speak up. Banish the “suck it up” message that pollutes many organizational cultures. This is not a call to Whiners, but a request for frank, adult-to-adult conversation about what you do as an employer that makes people want to stay and do their best, and what makes people polish up their resume. If you doubt the importance of making it safe for people to speak up, read my article “The Movie Scene Every Manager Should Watch … But Might Be Afraid To …“
2. Thank employees for speaking up. Do this both when it happens and later in a public forum. Share examples in your team- and organization-wide meetings of how employee feedback is being used to make your organization a better place to work. This both communicates that management values employee input and it also energizes people, because they hear proof that they can make a difference, they do matter.
3. Don’t devolve into an arrogant “It’s an employer’s market they’re lucky to have a job” mentality. While you may have the upper hand in terms of people being security-conscious right now, remember the ROAD Warrior phenomenon. Even if people don’t leave, poor management and organizational practices significantly reduce the performance of those who stay. In this economy — or any economy for that matter — can you afford 10, 20, or 30% less productivity than your workforce is capable of?
4. Help your managers help you. Since an employee’s supervisor plays the most significant role in that employee’s performance and level of engagement, according to Gallup’s research as well as other studies, make sure your managers know how to do the things that lead to maximum performance and engagement. Make sure they also have the skills to engage employees in “crucial conversations” and foster honest, open dialogue.
5. Involve your employees in making improvements. Doing this helps you in three ways. First, it taps into the human need to matter, to make a difference. Believing that your input matters and that you can make a difference are huge drivers of employee engagement. Second, involving employees in making improvements fosters an adult/adult relationship with management, rather than a “kids-complain-to-mom-and-dad” dynamic created when employees are encouraged to speak up about what’s bothering them, and management’s job is to come up with solutions. Third, engaging employees in finding solutions is a powerful antidote to the feeling of helplessness and lack of control many people feel during these difficult times. Solving problems and generating creative solutions triggers the biochemistry and emotions of confidence and success, which puts employees in a more productive frame of mind to face the big challenges ahead.

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 increasingly more a part of your culture. Your employer brand becomes increasingly more a part of your culture each time a work experience reflects your brand promise. Your organization is more likely to deliver work experiences that keep your brand promise if that brand promise is continually on everyone’s mind and guides everyone’s actions. That’s why story telling will play such an important role in reinforcing and strengthening your employer brand. Stories teach and remind employees “this is who we are,” “this is what makes us great ó and because you make us possible ó this is what makes you great.” Doing this keeps your brand attributes alive in everyone’s mind and reinforces the values and qualities that make your organization what it is. Part 2 of this series contains a story that’s an excellent example of the type of story you would use both to communicate your employer brand externally and strengthen your employer brand internally: “At a seminar I was leading a couple of years ago, I had a supervisor from MBNA, a perennial member of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list, tell the group a story about a moment of truth he had with his employer. He had been wondering if working in this particular division of the company was right for him and whether he even wanted to work in a call center at all. “When he experienced the following moment of truth, he realized he was in the right place. An elderly gentleman called to thank MBNA for extending his wife and him credit. He told the customer service representative that his wife, in her late 70s, had always dreamed of getting her college degree and had used their credit card to help finance this endeavor. She would be graduating that spring. The customer service representative who took the call relayed it to the supervisor. The supervisor went out and purchased a graduation card, everyone on the team signed it, and they sent it to the new graduate.” This is the kind of story you would use to both communicate what kind of company you are to job applicants, and to remind employees what kind of company they’re working for. Telling employees such a story strengthens your employer brand because it provides a clear, explicit, tangible example of your employer brand attributes. In this story, it communicates that if you work for MBNA, you’ll be working for “an employer who cares about it’s customers” and “a company you can be proud of.” Conclusion Stories play a central role in each phase of the employer branding process. To make the most of this important data source and communication device, you’ll want to be a story collector. You’ll want to do this both formally and informally. You can do this formally through one on one interviews and focus groups. You can do it informally by teaching your managers ó and all employees for that matter ó to be alert for employer-brand-defining stories in action and encourage them to share those with the employer branding team.

1. Putting together a team that understands, influences, and experiences all facets of employer branding and your employer brand
2. Involving employees in every facet of the process
3. Becoming an expert on your target market
4. Finding out if you deliver what employees want
5. Thinking “experience”

In the Part 2, we explored how to identify your default employer brand. Your default employer brand refers to your organization’s current reputation in the labor marketplace, along with its unique personality or ethos. As discussed in the second segment, regardless of whether you and your management team have consciously addressed employer branding, your organization already has one by default. You already have a reputation in the labor market and a corporate personality. Once you’re clear on your default employer brand, you’re ready to build your magnetic employer brand. You do this by building upon the strengths of your default brand and paring away the flaws. In this article, we will examine how to do that. To put the following thoughts in context, I recommend reviewing the first two articles in the series and the article “The True Power of a Magnetic Employer Brand,” so you get the philosophical and conceptual underpinnings of this approach. Analyze Your Default Brand For Strengths and Weaknesses As discussed in Part 2, when you identify your default brand, you will generate a list of attributes and emotions associated with your organization as an employer. You then want to go through these associations and identify those that lead to a magnetic employer brand and those that don’t. For instance, people might associate the attribute “accepts only the highest quality work” with your organization as an employer. This would obviously attract talented people, because they want to feel proud of their employer and work with winners. However, let’s say that you also have the following attribute associated with your organization as an employer: “Management doesn’t provide adequate support or resources to meet quality standards.” Such a perception (brand attribute) would be accompanied by brand-damaging emotional associations such as wariness and anticipated frustration. This negative perception and accompanying emotional associations would obviously counterbalance the “accepts only the highest quality work” attribute, and weaken your employer brand. Thus, your first step in building your desired employer brand is to identify the perceptions and emotional associations that comprise your default brand. From there, you will explore how to change the negative associations and perceptions and build upon the positive ones. Reverse Engineer Your Negative Attributes and Emotional Associations Reverse engineering your negative attributes and emotional associations means deconstructing the experiences that create the negative perceptions and emotional associations connected to your default employer brand. This reverse engineering process, called “employee experience mapping*,” allows you to take each employer-brand-damaging experience and break it down into a step-by-step process. Doing this enables you to identify which parts of the experience, which steps in the sequence of interactions, create brand-damaging emotional and mental associations. This reverse engineering process enables you to fix employer-brand damaging experiences with great precision. Reverse engineering your negative attributes and emotional associations with employee experience mapping involves taking each negative attribute and emotional association and identifying what experiences are creating them. Let’s say one of the negative perceptions you discover people have of your organization as an employer is that “it’s a chaotic, slipshod outfit.” You would then ask your Employee Advisory Council and perhaps some employee focus groups: “What employee experiences have lead to that perception?” This inquiry will provide you with a list of experiences that have contributed to this perception, this negative brand attribute. Let’s say one of the major sources of this perception is the new-hire experience your organization delivers. Using employee experience mapping, you would create a flow chart, mapping each step of the new-hire experience. You would then ask your employee advisory council which steps of the process are creating the negative perception. Minnesota’s HealthEast Care System has effectively used this process to analyze the weak links in the new-hire experience it delivered. Concerned by the soaring costs caused by the vacancy rates common in healthcare institutions today, they identified the new-hire experience as one of the critical employee experiences that needed improving. It is often in these first few months that an employee decides whether they’ve chosen a good employer, or whether they’ve made a mistake. Doing the new hire experience right is vitally important to retention and employer-of-choice status. From interviews with employees about their new-hire experience, the new employee engagement team enabled HealthEast to identify weak links in those critical first months. By fixing these weak links and adding employer brand strengthening components to the new-hire experience (which will be discussed later), HealthEast’s vacancy rate dropped from 10.6% to 2.6% in the past three years (national vacancy rates range from 12% to 16%). This led to an estimated $12 million dollar savings due to a reduction in the need for staff overtime and costly temporary healthcare workers. Besides the huge financial savings reaped by these changes in the new-hire experiences and other facets of the overall work experience, HealthEast now enjoys employer of choice status: they were just recognized as Minnesota’s best hospital workplace. Some of the more common employer brand damaging employee experiences that are likely to be creating negative perceptions and emotional associations are:

• The new-hire experience
• The performance-review experience
• The “ask employees for input” experience
• The “communicate about upcoming changes” experience

Given that most organizations botch these experiences ó and therefore damage their employer brand ó these will probably be among your list of experiences that get mapped, analyzed, and then improved. The improvement phase involves both redesigning the various steps and facets of each experience that have been generating negative perceptions and emotions, and adding employer-brand-building components. Identifying Desired Employer Brand Attributes To build in employer-brand-strengthening components to each employee experience, you need to first identify what attributes and emotions you want people to associate with your employer brand. To identify these desired attributes and emotional associations, refer to the information you have gathered during the earlier stages of this process about what your target markets are looking for in an employer. As discussed in Part 2, you need to know what it is that the best people in each demographic and profession you employ, value most in a work experience. Once you have this information, you will then start exploring how to create experiences that naturally lead to such perceptions and emotions. Designing Experiences That Elicit employer brand Attributes As discussed in previous articles, to create a magnetic employer brand you need to “think experience.” One of the most important questions to guide your employer-brand-building process is: “What kind of experience would lead to the perceptions and emotional associations we want to create?” Organizations wanting to create a truly magnetic employer brand would be wise to emulate businesses known for their sophisticated ó as in discerning, intentional, and disciplined ó approach to creating memorable, brand-building customer experiences. Companies like Anthropologie, Disney, Washington Mutual, Southwest Airlines, and Ritz Carlton pay attention to each moment of truth in a customer’s interaction and examine whether it builds or diminishes their distinctive brand. They examine each moment of truth, each step in the process, in terms of the perceptions and emotional associations it creates. Do the perceptions and emotional associations created by this interaction build the brand? Do the perceptions and emotional associations created by this interaction support the brand’s identity, or do they conflict with ó and therefore damage ó the brand’s identity? For instance, if calling Southwest Airlines to make a reservation meant being greeted by a bored, crass, or morose call-center rep, this experience would obviously not contribute to Southwest’s brand identity as a fun, customer-centric airline. Thus, managing its brand means making sure that the “call to make a reservation” experience doesn’t produce perceptions and emotions that are inconsistent with those they want people to associate with their brand. All successful brand managers, especially those responsible for a branded customer experience, bring tremendous levels of discernment, intentionality, and discipline to the way they execute on their brand promise. They realize that, in the word’s of Starbuck’s chief coffee buyer Dave Olsen, “Everything matters.” If you apply that same level of discernment, intentionality, and discipline to the various employee interactions that together create the work experience you deliver, you will engineer experiences that build a magnetic employer brand. Returning to the example of HealthEast revamping its new hire experience, we see what happens when you bring this level of discernment, intentionality, and discipline to designing the new-hire experience. This is especially telling because most organizations treat this employer-brand-critical experience in a careless, fly-by-the-seat-of-their pants, sink-or-swim manner. According to Trudy Knoepke-Campbell, the director of workforce planning at HealthEast, a key part of the experience redesign was starting with a different perspective. “The orientation process isn’t over in the first day or first week,” she says. “It spans several months, as the employee learns their job, learns about the culture, and begins to feel part of the organization.” With this perspective as a foundation, HealthEast’s new employee engagement team created a systematic, intentional process that spanned an employee’s first 18 months. This process now includes meetings with managers and classes designed to create high employee engagement. HealthEast’s new employee engagement team also added simple, common sense steps like providing each new employee with a buddy to help show them the ropes and answer questions they might be afraid to ask their boss. Compare the perceptions and emotional associations such a well-thought-out, employee-centric process creates in new employees with those created by the typical sink-or-swim experience many organizations put their new employees through. The typical new hire experience leads to perceptions such as: “They don’t seem terribly professional here,” “Mediocre seems good enough here,” or, “They say employees are important, but it’s clear that’s just talk.” Along with these perceptions, the typical new-hire experience leads to such emotions as frustration, insecurity, resentment, and “buyer’s remorse.” Contrast these associations with those created by HealthEast Care System’s new hire experience. Their employees’ experience working for their new employer is likely to lead to such perceptions as, “They do things right,” “They really do care about us,” and “They walk their talk when they say employees are important.” With this kind of new employee experience, when they think about their job and their new employer, they’re likely to feel a variety of positive emotions, such as confidence, security, pride, and respect. By consciously designing a new hire experience that leads to employer brand building perceptions and emotional associations, along with redesigning other employer-brand-critical employee experiences, HealthEast has established a strong employer brand, as evidenced by its being recognized as Minnesota’s best hospital workplace. As mentioned in previous articles, you will want to involve employees in every facet of the employer branding process, including this phase. Just as companies with strong customer service brands involve customers in the process of assessing and improving the experience they deliver, you want to involve your “internal customers” ó your employees ó in designing work experiences that lead to a magnetic employer brand. Because they are the recipient of the work experience you deliver, they can give you insights you’ll get nowhere else.

*This term is based upon the customer service strategy of Customer Service Mapping, where you break down a customer’s experience into each step as a way to identify how to improve the overall experience.

1. Marketing thought-leaders recognize that the traditional ways companies differentiated themselves in the marketplace are no longer viable in the new economy. Sources of differentiation such as pricing, features and benefits, design, and variety of offerings, can be quickly and easily duplicated and improved upon by the competition.
2. One of the few remaining ways companies can differentiate themselves is through the customer service experience their employees provide.

Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines’ legendary CEO, has recognized point #2 for years. Whenever asked about the secret to Southwest’s success or about the competitive advantage created by its unique business model, Mr. Kelleher would always set the record straight, saying “It’s not those things…they can be copied by a competitor tomorrow.” What couldn’t be copied ó and their true source of Southwest’s competitive advantage, according to Mr. Kelleher ó was its people and its culture. In addition to the above two points made by Dr. Sullivan, I’d like to add two more of my own:

3. Advertising overload has diminished audience receptivity, and therefore diminished the effectiveness of this medium. We’re tired of being bombarded with marketing messages and we’re tired of hype. Branding efforts can’t rely on yelling louder or more cleverly about how great your product or service is. Instead of telling people how great you are, you need to show them. This brings us to the fourth key point that forms the foundation of this article, and the foundation of your action plan.
4. The most powerful vehicle for brand building is direct experience with that product or service. Thus, world-class brand managers make sure their product or service creates the kind of experiences that elicit desired emotional and mental responses. They also recognize that the quickest way to destroy a brand is to promise something in your advertising that you don’t deliver in real life. In other words, anything that affects the experience people have with your company, product, or services directly and powerfully affects your brand.

Creating Mental and Emotional Associations Let’s examine this process of creating specific mental and emotional associations more closely. The more you understand this concept, the greater your precision and overall efficacy in supporting and strengthening your corporate brand. Although it seems like there are as many definitions for “brand” as there are branding experts, the definition I find most useful is, “the perception that the market has of a company, product, or service.” This perception has both a mental and an emotional component. The mental component of perception includes qualities associated with the brand, attitudes toward the brand, and images that come to mind when thinking about the brand. Because a brand consists of these mental and emotional associations, the branding process is one of intentionally creating specific, positive mental and emotional associations to your product, service, or company. For instance, take a company with a strong, distinctive brand, such as L.L. Bean. Given how they are perceived by most people, I imagine that those responsible for L.L. Bean’s brand want consumers to associate their company and its products with such qualities as “easy to deal with,” “excellent quality,” “honest value,” and “the place to shop if you love the outdoors.” Every marketing, product development, and customer service policy decision is made with the goal of creating and reinforcing these desired associations, and by doing so, strengthening the company’s brand. Branding experts are also very conscious of the emotional responses they want their product, service, or company to create. In other words, they consciously create specific emotional associations that help shape how people feel. Consider companies with very strong, evocative brands like Disney, Starbucks, Ritz Carlton, and Southwest Airlines ó or any other company you love doing business with, for that matter. When you think of any of these companies, you experience a unique amalgam of emotions that flavors your perception of that company. Even if you can’t consciously name the specific emotions, you feel them. To summarize, branding involves the intentional formation of mental and emotional associations to a product, service, or company in order to differentiate it in the minds of customers and potential customers. The sum total of these carefully created associations comprises the brand. HR and the Creation of Experiences That Build Your Brand Because emotional and mental associations are most powerfully created through direct experience, effective brand building requires examining the various experiences your workforce creates for your customers and potential customers. Creating the experiences that build your brand requires understanding what logistical support, managerial practices, organizational qualities, and hiring practices lead to a workforce that is capable of, and wants to, create these brand-building experiences. Here’s where HR has so much to offer. Your knowledge of what factors enable and inspire employees to give their best, combined with your experience in gathering and interpreting feedback, will contribute greatly to the process of creating brand-building experiences and the conditions that make them possible. The Corporate Brand Reverse Engineering Process For the rest of this series, we will explore how you can make this happen. The process we’ll be using is like reverse engineering. We will start with your brand and back up step by step, identifying what actions are required to make the preceding one possible. The process will look like this:

1. Identify your brand and the overall perception it is designed to create.
2. Identify the desired mental and emotional associations that comprise your brand.
3. Identify what experiences lead to these associations. Do this for all departments and processes in your organization.
4. Identify the policies, training, logistical support, or workforce practices that need to be in place to make these experiences possible.
5. Identify which employee qualities ó that is, what kind of workforce ó will enable you to provide the types of experiences that lead to the desired mental and emotional associations that will support and strengthen your brand.
6. Identify how you will recruit, hire, and retain these kinds of people.
7. Identify whether you have an employer brand that attracts these high quality people. (Click here for more of my articles on employer branding.)

As you reflect on the above “reverse engineering” process, please keep in mind the truism, “It’s not what you know, it’s what you do with what you know that makes a difference in life.” I say that because the recommended actions that will help you support and strengthen your brand aren’t intellectually complicated. They’re not rocket science. It’s like the Gallup Organization’s landmark research on the twelve factors that make the strongest impact on organizational success. None of those factors are a big surprise to anyone in the HR field or any knowledgeable manager. It would be easy for someone to say, “Well, I could have told you that.” The value in identifying these “differences that make the difference” isn’t in simply knowing what they are. The value is in finding out if they’re present in your organization and then taking action to make sure they are. The same is true for the recommended action steps for the corporate brand reverse engineering process. My hope is that you don’t simply read this and say, “That makes sense.” My hope is that you actually put this process to work. If you do the latter, you will contribute significantly to one of your company’s most important assets ó its brand.

• Current employees
• Former employees
• People who have turned down job offers with your company
• People in your industry (your vendors, competitors, and industry associations)
• People who represent the various job disciplines and levels for which you continuously hire externally and/or promote from within
• Managers from all levels within your company
• The community in which you reside
• Colleges that you may recruit from

Find out what people have heard about your organization as an employer. Find out whether your company is seen as a “first choice” or an “if nothing better comes along” employment prospect. Ask them about what words and phrases come to mind when they think about your company. Do you hear phrases like “sweat shop” or, “They have great ads about being a wonderful place to work, but in real life it’s nothing like that”? Or do you hear comments like “top shelf,” “fun place to work,” “They care about their people,” and, “They expect a lot, but they give a lot”? From your employees, ask for words and phrases that capture the essence of their work experience and your organization as an employer. The responses you get from your employees and people outside your organization will give you a glimpse into the mental and emotional associations that have inadvertently been created in the minds of employees and job seekers. Later in this series, we’ll explore how to manage your employer brand so that every interaction your company has with employees, job seekers, customers, and the public builds positive associations that strengthen your employer brand. Collect Stories That Capture The Essence of Your Organization Ask employees and managers at all levels to share stories that, in their opinion, define what it’s like working in your organization. To help trigger their recall, offer a list of employee/employer “moments of truth”?? that is, interactions that impact and shape an employee’s perception of their employer. These include perception-defining moments such as how they experienced your hiring process, orientation, and first sixty days on the job. Other critical moments of truth include how your company deals with difficult news and uncomfortable changes, whether supervisors shows appreciation, whether employees feel their requests for adequate resources are ignored or heard, and whether or not management solicits employee input on changes that affect their jobs. With the help of your employee advisory council, create a list of the critical moments of truth that shape an employee’s perception of their employer and use this to help interviewees recall brand-defining stories. Such stories don’t have to be dramatic or long, drawn-out epics to be powerful and telling. They can be as simple as the following:

• At Lincoln Financial Group of Portland, Maine, a call-center customer service representative left the company to work in another call center because it was far closer to his home. He soon returned. When I asked him why, he replied: “They just didn’t value quality customer service like we do at Lincoln, and I couldn’t work in a place like that.” This simple vignette captures one of the most important drivers of employee satisfaction and a strong employer brand: pride in one’s work and one’s employer.
• At a seminar I was leading a couple of years ago, I had a supervisor from MBNA, a perennial member of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list, tell the group a story about a moment of truth he had with his employer. He had been wondering if working in this particular division of the company was right for him and whether he even wanted to work in a call center at all. When he experienced the following moment of truth, he realized he was in the right place: An elderly gentleman called to thank MBNA for extending his wife and him credit. He told the customer service representative that his wife, in her late 70s, had always dreamed of getting her college degree and had used their credit card to help finance this endeavor. She would be graduating that spring. The customer service representative who took the call relayed it to the supervisor. The supervisor went out and purchased a graduation card, everyone on the team signed it, and sent it to the new graduate.

By gathering these kinds of stories, especially those around critical moments of truth, your employer branding team will be able to assess your organization’s strengths and weaknesses as an employer, gain diagnostic clues about your default employer brand, and gather the building blocks for creating your desired employer brand (a step that will come later). These stories will also become an integral part of communicating your employer brand both internally and externally. Identify Your Organization’s Personality Just like people, every organization has a unique constellation of attributes, talents, shortcomings, charming qualities, and quirks. Getting clear about your organization’s personality is a prerequisite to communicating your uniqueness as an employer. Having a clear sense of your organization’s personality also improves your hiring process. “The more clear you are about what your company is about, the better you’ll be at getting the right people,” notes Scott Helbing, vice president of global brand strategy at Dell Computers. Just as in dating, the more you know about yourself and the more you know what you’re looking for, the fewer frogs you end up kissing. Because Dell’s management is clear about who they are?? a company whose phenomenal success has been built upon operational excellence?? Dell both attracts and actively screens for individuals who share that passion for action. Contrast Dell’s corporate personality with another famous technology company, Apple. Apple’s iconoclastic, visionary corporate personality and its focus on leading-edge product development offers a work experience different from Dell’s. By knowing clearly who they are, both Dell and Apple can articulate their unique work experience offerings and more effectively attract and recruit people who can contribute to their success. When it comes to employer branding, it pays to “know thyself”. Strive For Unflinching Honesty Just as “knowing thyself” in the personal realm isn’t always easy or necessarily pleasant, asking for feedback about your organization’s personality will bring you a mixture of good news and bad news. Avoid the tendency to believe your own press and to deny the validity of perceptions that don’t fit your views, especially if the feedback contradicts your published materials. How your employer branding team responds to unflattering perceptions, especially those expressed by employees, will be a critical moment of truth. Will you write them off as inaccurate and uninformed, or will you take them seriously? Remember that to the perceiver, perception is reality. Whether the perception is real or not in actuality, the consequences of a person’s perceptions are very real. Likewise, when looking at your employer brand, consequences of employee perceptions hold very real consequences for your ability to be viewed as their employer of choice. One common example of the very real effect of employee perceptions?? whether they’re accurate or not?? comes from the call-center industry. A frequent lament among customer service representatives (CSRs) working in call centers is that management cares more about quantity than quality. They feel they are judged more by how many calls they can take, rather than how well they serve their customers. This perception has significant employee satisfaction implications, which translate to serious employer branding implications. Depending upon the company, this perception ranges from very accurate to inaccurate. For companies where CSR perceptions are accurate?? management doesn’t value quality as much as quantity?? the understandable consequences is diminished “company pride” and job satisfaction. However, for companies where management truly does value quality as much as quantity?? and therefore CSR perceptions are inaccurate?? the consequence is still the same: diminished corporate pride and job satisfaction. In the latter case, the moment of truth becomes whether management dismisses CSR perceptions (“They simply don’t get it, no matter what we say”) or whether they take it seriously, even if they disagree vehemently with that perception. Taking it seriously would mean adding to the organizational improvement action list the following: “Find out what we’re doing that sends out the wrong message,” and “What can we do to both communicate how strongly we value quality and to reinforce it by our processes?” This list will be addressed later in the employer branding process. As you work on this step of the process, remember that identifying your default employer brand is different from building your desired employer brand. It isn’t about how you want things to be, it’s about what is. Get Ready For Phase Two By doing the research described above, you will have identified your default employer brand. You will have a mosaic of attributes and emotions associated with your organization as an employer. You will have a library of stories that add depth and nuance to your employer brand analysis and?? when it comes time to tell your story?? will bring your employer brand to life. With the guidance of the branding expert(s) on your employer branding team, these attributes, emotions, and stories will coalesce into an image of your default employer brand. This will be the foundation upon which you will build your desired employer brand. At this point, you will also have a list of organizational and supervisory practices and processes that need to be improved upon for you to deliver on your employer brand promise. In the next segment of this series, we’ll explore how to define what that promise will be. Special thanks to Christine Johnson, director of employee communications services at Shaker Recruitment Advertising & Communications, for both her conceptual and stylistic contribution to this article.

• Today’s employees want
• The most talented employees want
• Employees in your particular industry want
• Employees from the demographics you hire want
• Employees from the various fields and job positions you hire want

Although this may seem obvious, we have plenty of evidence that many ó if not most ó organizations don’t understand or don’t know how to deliver the kind of work experience that employees want. Knowing what employees value most highly not only allows you to build an employer brand that is relevant and compelling, but it also provides a framework for ongoing monitoring of whether you are delivering the kind of work experience you think you are. Where do you find out what your target market wants? For today’s “typical” employee, you’ll want to draw on the plethora of research identifying what matters most to employees and what impacts both satisfaction and productivity. Good places to start include Gallup’s research, published in First Break All the Rules; David Maister’s work, published in Practice What You Preach; and Watson Wyatt’s research, published in their report WorkUSA 2002. To discover what workers in your specific industry value, contact your industry association. For information on what the most talented employees are looking for, interview your star performers to find out what is most important to them. Interview star performers who’ve left. Find out what important factors they found elsewhere. Regardless of what industry you’re in, you hire people that represent a variety of professions. You’ll want to understand their unique need and value hierarchies. This amount of precision allows you not only to create a compelling employer brand to the general labor market, but also to fine-tune your message and the work experience you deliver to your various sub-markets. For instance, your accountants’ value hierarchy will likely be very different from that of your sales force or your customer service representatives. You might be delivering the kind of work experience that accountants want, but not what sales or customer service professionals want. Thus, your employer brand would not be consistently strong across the board. To learn more about the value hierarchies of the various professions and demographics you hire, contact the various trade associations that represent the profession in questions or The Society for Human Resource Management. If you draw heavily from a particular demographic, become an expert on that demographic. For instance, when Deb Franklin, HR Manager at Designer Blinds of Omaha, Nebraska, wanted to hire from two different ethnic groups, she brought in experts and studied the cultures of these ethnic groups so that Designer Blinds could more accurately address their needs. The result? They have a waiting list for their second shift and a turnover rate of 7.5% ó one tenth the average rate for manufacturers in their region. You will also want to understand the different work-experience value hierarchies of different generations. To learn about these generational differences, start with the classic “Generations At Work,” by Ron Zemke et al. The values and needs that are unique to today’s employees and to the various demographics lie upon a bedrock of timeless, fundamental human needs. Regardless of one’s profession or age group, or changes in societal norms, human beings have fundamental, hard-wired needs and drives that impact employee satisfaction. These include the need:

• For meaning and purpose (i.e. to matter and to be part of something that matters)
• For community and connection
• To learn and grow
• To feel a sense of control and autonomy
• To experience mastery and self-efficacy (e.g. to feel the “thrill of victory” rather than “the agony of defeat” at work each day)

When your work experience taps into these fundamental human needs, you unleash a gusher of enthusiasm, pride, and appreciation ó and an impassioned word-of-mouth PR campaign that positions you credibly as an employer of choice. To make sure you do tap into this powerful source of employee satisfaction and inspiration, have someone on your team with a strong psychological background who understands what fundamental human needs drive employee motivation and satisfaction. Find Out If You Deliver What Employees Want Once you know what your target market wants, the next step is to find out how well you’re delivering that. Conduct individual interviews, focus groups, and employee surveys to find out whether or not you are delivering the kind of work experience the most desirable employees are seeking. For this to work, you will need to make it clear what you plan to do with this information ó and that in fact you will do something with it. As mentioned previously, if your management team has a history of not doing anything with employee input, credibility building will be an important first step. Think “Experience” To provide your employer branding team with precise, actionable intelligence from employees, break down employees’ total work experience into process experiences or moments of truth. For instance, what is the new hire experience like in your organization? Does this critical moment of truth feel like sink or swim, or “We’re glad you’re here. You’ve joined the best, and here’s why”? How would they describe their “interaction with senior management” moment of truth? What about their “the organization is going through change” experience? Asking employees how they experience each moment of truth will provide you with valuable information about how to create an exceptional overall work experience. Companies known for providing unique, stand-out customer service ó companies such as Ritz Carlton or Southwest Airlines ó do this with their customers. They pay close attention to each facet of their customers’ experience to make sure it reflects and strengthens their brand. By carefully managing each customer service “moment of truth,” they differentiate themselves in the marketplace with what the Forum Corporation calls a “Branded Customer Experience.” You can use this same principle to create a branded “work” experience. By using this same attention to detail in making sure each facet of your employees’ work experience reflects and strengthens your employer brand, you create a branded work experience that establishes you as an employer of choice. The first step in this process is to identify and analyze these moments of truth and how well you are doing in each. Get Ready For the Next Step At this point in the process, you have:

• An employer branding team in place
• Active employee involvement
• A clear understanding of what your employees of choice want in an employer
• A clear, honest, ongoing feedback loop with employees that enable you to continuously gather information about organizational strengths and weaknesses
• A clear understanding of what needs you address well, and what ones you don’t
• A list of organizational practices and policies that weaken your employer brand and those that strengthen it
• A list of “moment of truth” experiences that help shape employees’ overall work experience, and a clear picture of how well you do in each area

In the next two articles in this series, we’ll look at identifying your default employer brand and then move into using the information your employer branding team has gathered to create your own unique and compelling employer brand.

• “How does the way we do this affect our employer brand, our appeal in the labor market?”
• “Does this process inspire pride in our workforce (and therefore their ability to speak highly of us)?”

When considering a change in these areas, an important part of the conversation should be how the change will affect your employer brand. For instance, if you make a change in your customer service process that is less customer-centric, expect a diminution in employee pride and a corresponding decrease in employee-generated positive PR and referrals. Does the Way You Run Your Organization Warrant Pride? Facilitating employee focus groups over the years has taught me one thing above all else: employees notice everything. Ineffective processes, poorly thought-out decisions, nonsensical rules ó they notice it all. These observations form the basis for some pretty unflattering assessments of management’s ability to run the organization. These assessments, in turn, profoundly affect not only employee morale and loyalty but also what they say to others about their employer. Because management is usually unaware of these unspoken observations and judgments, they don’t see how they are contributing to a weak or weakening employer brand. To prevent this from continuing, senior management would be wise to examine all organizational processes and ask:

• “Does the way we do this process reflect a well-run operation, or a fly-by the-seat-of-the-pants outfit?”
• “Does the way we do this engender pride?”
• “Does this contribute, or detract from, the employer brand we are trying to create?”

Each manager should be held accountable for asking these questions about the processes he or she is responsible for. Each process should be examined step by step, because each step is a moment of truth that either helps or hurts your employer brand. For instance, each step in your recruiting process communicates to the job applicant something about your organization ó for better or for worse. Commenting on how everything matters in the recruiting process, executive recruiter Catherine Swift, of Swift and Associates, a Portland, Maine, recruiting firm, notes: “Little courtesies make a big impression on candidates. For instance, something as simple as informing a candidate that their next appointment is running late, so they’re not just left hanging outside the person’s office, wondering when the door will open.” How such moments of truth are handled speak volumes about how much your organization respects people and how competently the organization is run. Do You Support or Thwart Excellence? Many organizations drive their most talented employees out the door, and into the arms of their competitors, by subjecting them to inadequate technology, insufficient logistical support, and creativity-stifling bureaucracy. Although nobody likes to have their efforts at doing good work thwarted, this is even more of a deal-breaker to those who demand excellence of themselves and others. When they’ve had enough and leave, they become part of their former employer’s negative PR firm. Those who stay simmer silently, with no intention of ever making an employee referral. For instance, I worked in an insurance company where customer service reps had to do battle everyday with a Byzantine database system that’s lack of usability was matched only by its sloth-like speed. Call after call, customer service reps would attempt to wrest the needed information from their computers, while their customer’s patience evaporated. Think of how this affected not just job satisfaction ó and therefore, turnover ó but also what employees told others about their employer. Then compare their experience to the daily experience of Fidelity Investment employees, who use a database and knowledge management system where critical information is just an intuitive mouse click away. Then think of the recruiting implications of both situations. If you’re serious about being a talent magnet, your technology, policies, support, and training should be examined through the lens of:

• “Does this support, or thwart, excellence?”
• “How does this affect what employees think of our organization and what they tell others?”
• “Does this contribute or detract from the employer brand we want?”

Do Your Managers Inspire Loyalty, Excellence, and Pride? Every interaction employees have with their manager shapes their impression of your organization, for better or for worse. As most people in the business world know by now, Gallup’s research shows that an employee’s supervisor influences their level of satisfaction and productivity more than any other organizational factor. Curt Coffman and Marcus Buckingham, authors of the best-selling First Break All the Rules and consultants with Gallup Organization, conclude that it’s better to work for a great manager in a lousy company than to work for a lousy manager in a great company. However, the odds of having great managers are better if senior management models, supports, and requires respectful, effective management. This is perhaps the most important area where senior management can influence the “moments of truth” that will either help you become a talent magnet or be just another talent repellent organization. Managers should be coached to remember whenever they are dealing with a “moment of truth” to ask:

• “How does the way I’m handling this affect employee morale, respect, and loyalty?”
• “Would this decision or approach lead to employees feeling proud of, passionate about, and committed to our organization?” Here are some of the more critical “moments of truth” that managers would be wise to examine because they’re so frequently mishandled:
• Whether or not employee input is solicited about changes that directly affect their jobs.
• Whether employees hear about changes in a timely way or at the last minute.
• Whether management initiates and executes changes in a well thought-out way or acts in an impetuous, fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants way, which they perceive as dynamic and visionary but which employees see as careless and clueless.
• Whether appreciation and recognition efforts are “done to” employees as gala events, or whether appreciation and recognition are a regular part of the manager/employee relationship, and management and employees co-create events that are meaningful to both parties.

Do You Have What Today’s Worker Wants? Knowing what your customer wants and delivering it is Marketing 101. Smart companies also know that to keep satisfying your customers, you must stay “wired into the voice of the customer,” to use the phrase coined by Richard Whitely, Vice Chairman of The Forum Corporation and author of The Customer-Driven Company. Both principles should be applied to your organization’s recruiting efforts. To be a talent magnet, you need to know:

• What today’s employees value most in an employer.
• What matters most to the various professions and demographics you desire (e.g., what’s important to a 25-year-old graphic designer will be different from what’s important to a 50-year-old accountant).
• Whether or not you are delivering what matters most to your employees.
• Whether or not you are addressing the eternal human needs that have always affected employee performance and loyalty, such as the need for meaning, the need to be part of something greater than oneself, the need to learn and grow, and the need to experience mastery and self-efficacy.

What’s Next? For this to be more than wishful thinking, you need to recruit senior management onto your team, and together build an organization that is an employer of choice. to begin the process, here are four actions you can take:

1. Share this article with your senior management team.
2. Share articles from ERE and other websites on issues related to employer branding, attracting, and retaining employees, the role managers play in retention and productivity, the cost of turnover, etc. This doesn’t just help recruit them to your team, this increases your value to senior management. Why? First, you multiply your value exponentially if you’re part of the process that gets everyone involved in making your organization a talent magnet, and therefore unleashes your volunteer recruiting team (your workforce). Second, by helping them identify the factors that are impeding your organization’s ability to recruit and retain the best people, you will help management save a tremendous amount of money in recruiting and turnover costs, not to mention opportunity costs.
3. Encourage your CEO or other senior executive to facilitate ongoing discussions around the principle of “Everything Matters,” and to work with managers on making sure their processes and actions are contributing to a powerful Employer Brand.
4. Start and maintain an employer advisory council. Involve them in exploring the above questions. Work with them regularly to stay wired into your workforce. Doing so will help management make decisions that strengthen your Employer Brand. It will also inspire passion and commitment, because instead of being just hired hands, your employees get to be players on a winning team.

Regardless of how effective your recruiting department is, trying to recruit the best employees without senior management being part of your team is like a basketball team trying to compete with only one player on the court. To compete successfully, you need everyone on the team playing in the game. You need everyone to recognize that everything matters and pull together to make sure you actually deliver a “product” ó in this case, a work experience ó that the best employees want. With a product that the best employees want, recruiting becomes infinitely easier. More importantly, when you create a great organization that provides a great work experience, you unleash the secret recruiting weapon of all employers of choice: employees who love where they work and love talking about it.

1. Having pride in one’s work and employer
2. Doing work that has meaning
3. Understanding the goal and one’s role in meeting it
4. Being a player and not just a hired hand

In this third and final article, we will examine two more human needs that affect your organization’s ability to create a loyal and passionate workforce. These are:

4. Having the chance to experience efficacy
5. Being heard

At the end of this article, you will find a “Next Steps” section with eight things you can do to translate this information into the beginning of a successful, comprehensive retention strategy. But for now, let’s examine how your organization satisfies these two other critical human needs. Do Employees Get to Feel the “Thrill of Victory” in Their Work? We are hard-wired to desire the feeling of mastery, the “thrill of victory” that comes from doing something effectively. Whether it comes in the form of solving a problem, completing a task, or conquering a challenge, mastery provides intrinsic pleasure. The behavior of babies and small children demonstrates the fundamental and self-reinforcing nature of this drive. Nobody has to reward a baby to encourage it to try relentlessly to stand up or tie its shoes. “The thrill of victory” is reward enough. The same is true for people at work. Nothing leads to feeling good and feeling good about oneself like being good at something worthwhile. Conversely, few things create a demoralized workforce more quickly than preventing employees from doing their jobs well. Improving morale and retention requires examining your organization for the typical ways organizations hamstring efficacy, such as inadequate training, out-dated technology, and job expectations shrouded in mystery. Besides affecting retention, these obstacles strongly impact productivity. A 1995 study by Yankelovich Partners for the firm of William M. Mercer revealed that the average worker surveyed could be 26% more productive if it weren’t for the following obstacles, listed in order of importance: lack of direction, support, training, and proper equipment. A few questions to ask your managers and employee advisory council:

• Do we prepare our employees to do their jobs well through adequate orientation and training?
• Do we have any jobs where failure and inadequacy are the primary experiences employees have?
• Do we provide the technology and logistical support for employees to do their jobs well?
• Do our managers know how to set clear expectations, give clear feedback, and perform productive performance reviews?

Do Employees Feel Heard? Few things enrage employees more than when senior management doesn’t bother to ask for their feedback or how they are doing. Although giving employee feedback is Management 101, many senior managers plow ahead with new initiatives or maintain unproductive practices without bothering to ask how they are playing “among the troops.” I’ve often been struck by the power of the need to be heard when conducting focus groups with organizations having serious morale and turnover problems. On several occasions one or more employees will sigh at the end of the focus group and say “Whew, I feel so much better just being able to say what’s on my mind. Now I can get back to work.” When I hear this, I can’t help but think of the morale and productivity increases the organization would enjoy if they implemented formal and informal processes that engaged their employees in an ongoing conversation about how they are doing. Questions to ask your managers and employee advisory council:

• Do our employees believe we listen to them?
• Do our employees believe we care about what they have to say?
• Do we actively solicit feedback from employees, both formally and informally?
• Do our managers ask their subordinates for input on how to improve as a manager?
• Do we respond to employee feedback promptly, letting them know what is being -done ó or not ó with their feedback?
• Do we make it safe for employees to express dissatisfaction and disagreement, or do we label them “not a team player”?

Getting the Biggest Bang For Your Retention Buck If you’re serious about holding onto your best people, you cannot ignore the results from Gallup’s research, which involved over two million employees. Curt Coffman and Marcus Buckingham, the primary researchers in the project, make clear the critical role managers play in an organization’s ability to retain talented people: “If you have a turnover problem look first to your managers,” they assert. “People leave managers, not companies.” How a boss treats an employee is the strongest determinant of their work experience. Just as in customer service, where the truism goes, “To the customer, the employee serving them is the company,” to an employee’s manager is their employer. Having supervisors who haven’t been properly trained or aren’t held accountable for how they treat their people is a recipe for low morale and high turnover. Quint Studor, CEO of Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, Florida, who has led the hospital from below average to a national exemplar of patient and employee satisfaction, notes that a vital part of his organization’s turnaround was investing in an area most organizations give short shrift: management development. At Baptist, managers at all levels are taken offsite for two days, every 90 days. After just two years, overall employee satisfaction had risen 30% while turnover for nurses ó something no hospital can afford in today’s labor market ó had decreased by 40%. Thus, perhaps the most important action your organization can take is to provide your managers with the training and support to do their jobs well and to hold them accountable. Not only will your employees be happier, but so will your managers, because they’ll be more effective. Taking the Next Step Here are some next steps to put the ideas we’ve discussed in this article series into action:

1. Create an employee advisory council and use the questions I posed here and in Part 2 as a catalyst for exploring how to create a more intrinsically satisfying work experience.
2. Use these questions to engage your management team in the same conversation.
3. Actively involve your workers in generating and executing solutions.
4. Stay connected with the voice of your workers through surveys, focus groups, town hall meetings, Q&A coffees, informal check-ins by managers, and your employee advisory group.
5. Impress upon your management team that retention is everyone’s job, not just HR’s.
6. Invest in management development. Help your managers increase their Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ) by learning about human nature and how it affects employee performance. Help them develop the skills to bring out the best in their supervisees.
7. Support your managers’ development by instituting a coaching and mentoring program for them.
8. Hold managers accountable by using appropriate goals and metrics in their performance evaluations.

Retaining employees ó especially your best ones ó requires more than goodies and gimmicks. It requires understanding which human needs drive satisfaction and high performance and then using this knowledge to create an intrinsically motivating work experience. If you do this right, you are on your way to becoming an organization that truly is retention-worthy.