Pre-boarding

Many employers have an official on-boarding process for new employees.

It’s that short period after hire when we tell new employees what they need to know before they start doing what we actually hired them to do.

This includes sharing our values and providing ethics & compliance training. Just like we would not let a machine operator on the shop floor without safety training, we don’t send an account executive to a trade show without antitrust training.

We do this at the outset of employment to frame messages that come later – messages about sales goals, production quotas, delivery schedules, etc. Our values provide context for our rules.

However, few of us remember that we communicate about our values even earlier in the hiring process. How much we talk about our ethical culture during the interview stage sends a message. How often we communicate our values as part of our marketing efforts can determine the talent we attract.

If an ethical culture is truly the foundation of our business, everything we do should communicate accordingly.