What makes one employee more successful than another? Why is successful behavior not discussed in organization? And why is it not part of the start? These questions are the basis behind the idea of the Successful@Work Onboarding App.
I started reading about being successful in organizations and the pitfalls of a new job. And with the conviction that every employee has the potential to take her organization further. That he or she wants to have fun and rise above himself together with colleagues.
The mission of Successful@Work quickly became clear: to connect new employees with their organization as quickly as possible, so that they use their talents and qualities to the maximum for themselves and their team.
But where did all these questions begin?
What you may not know about me is that I started out as a compensation consultant. In the late 90s I built an online reward questionnaire. IT professionals could find out what a good salary was via this platform. My idea was that this transparency would ensure that employees receive a fair remuneration for their work.
The job title formed the basis for determining what the remuneration, including a lease car, an important part, should be. Gartner’s IT profiles were used for this. The problem was that there was a huge inflation of job titles. After six months of work experience, you were already a senior project leader or programmer. I therefore wanted to expand the research by adding a weighting of tasks. But my boss did not share this ambition. As a result, I started looking for a new challenge.
For the next 11 years I worked as an external HR advisor to ensure more transparency around fair remuneration within companies. I made job classifications, salary and performance management systems. The turning point came when I attended a training assessment interview. One of the participating managers asked “what should my employee do now?”. That had just been recorded in the new job description, but this manager couldn’t do anything with it.
The conclusion was that all those beautiful systems did not lead to more transparency about what was rewarded. Or to put it another way, what was successful. How did the conversation about being successful between manager and employee improve? Which tools would help? What if I described successful behavior or explained more about employability? Or perhaps the strategic HR policy needed to be improved.
With the feet in the clay
Eventually I found out that these systems also only work to a limited extent and I decided that I wanted to experience it up close. I started working as an HR manager in various organizations. They were always organizations where many changes took place. Organizations where the behavior of managers and employees had to be adapted to the changing times.
Every time I saw that the changes that had to be made take a lot of time. And that the changes did not get off the ground easily or at all. Partly because of systems, but also because what was successful before – read: which employees were successful – is still successful. There were also many conflicting interests and many employees who thought: ‘this will pass’ or ‘we’ve seen that before’.
I personally experienced these conflicting interests myself. At one point I had both an HR Director and a Regional Director as a manager. They both had different interests, a different idea of where the organization should go and set different demands on me. How do you deal with that then? What is successful behaviour, what is rewarded? And which way is the organization heading?
I wondered more and more why is successful behavior not discussed in organization? And why it wasn’t part of the start?
The idea
And so the idea behind the Successful@Work Onboarding App was born. It started with an analysis that the new employee dreamed of. A nice job with development opportunities, a good work/life balance, nice colleagues, bond with the company and the product or service, good remuneration, etc.
But actually the new employee starts from the question: “Can I be successful here?” And the same goes for the organization: “Can the new employee be successful here?” That has also become the basis of our inspiration onboarding programs: How do I become successful in this organization?
Take advantage of all this knowledge and experience and let the new talent discover during her onboarding which step can be taken today to be more successful tomorrow.
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