Transboarding

Study the world of work and one finding will leap out at you. It’s one of those revelations that is both surprising and obvious all at once. The discovery that the individual is in charge. Organizations are strategizing how to find, attract and keep individuals. Successful leaders have mastered the art of finding and attracting top talent, but retaining and continuously engaging individuals is now the reality.

There has been a broad shift towards individual empowerment in the workforce. From first contact with a prospective employer, individuals have more power and higher expectations than ever before – employee retention has been replaced with a need for continuous attraction and rehiring, i.e. ongoing effort to engage employees and provide attractive career options for them. In fact, research shows that employees value career options almost as highly as compensation. This makes transboarding—the seamless transition from role to role within the same organization absolutely critical to organizational success.

Organizations need to continually create delightful and engaging experiences for the individuals who have already chosen and continue to choose to commit to the success of their company. Traditionally, organizations have lapsed in their continual courting of employees who have already chosen to work with them. As leaders, we need to continually hire and then re-hire individuals.

The recognized need for transboarding to encourage and support employees in the transition to new, more challenging roles or projects within a company is driven by the essential need to keep talent from leaving for a perceived better opportunity. We need to go back to the basics and deliver at minimum the connectivity, communication and collaboration support needed for individuals to succeed. And those truly are the bare minimums. People require and deserve far more in today’s environments.

Embracing internal mobility and successfully navigating the transboarding experience involves a top-driven culture change for the entire organization. Leaders need to be visible and create opportunities for employees to engage with them. By connecting, communicating, and collaborating with employees, leaders are able to motivate employees to achieve more.

At Ceridian, we provide our leaders with the education, experience and exposure to help them manage and lead a diverse workforce. We recognize each individual is unique and by personalizing their experiences, we’re able to mitigate the disengagement caused by ineffective transboarding and set our people up for success.

Challenging as it may be, we place an immediate focus on what individuals need to be successful in their new roles. Including:

• Building Relationships - Leaders connect individuals with the people that will be instrumental to their success
• Setting the Vision - Educate individuals on the future of their function's success, what we are currently doing well and what success looks like
• Personalizing Communication - Discovering how each individual and each leader communicates and providing personalized coaching to help teams share who they are and how they work

Today’s best organizations operate as a team of teams - autonomy is high and trust is a necessity. The question becomes, how can you coordinate all this activity without creating significant overhead? In a word, culture. An organization’s culture is comprised of shared values and character. For us, these values are Diligence, Optimism, Agility, Transparency and Customer Focus. We have made significant investments to ensure our culture and values are communicated and understood throughout the organization.

For an employee going through the transboarding process, culture is an essential factor that informs both individual and team decisions. Shared culture helps employees navigate the ambiguity that comes with a new role, and provides common ground between teams. The work itself may be different, but the way we work is the same.

We are leaders in great and interesting, rapidly changing times. We need to adapt to the world of now and learn how to best empower individuals for success so they are committed to the ongoing success of our respective organizations. We need to empower our leaders to lead their people in the most effective way possible and we need to hold them accountable for their growth and development.

We live in a world where personalization is everything, from the way we order a Starbucks drink to the suggested purchases off our Amazon account. Our employee’s experiences should be no different. We need to architect unique and meaningful experiences to help ensure the continued success of our people and our organizations. After all, people don’t leave companies, they leave leaders.