Think back to a time when you experienced a situation similar to one of those described in the six pitfalls. It could be in the context of a family, school, community, and/or work project. Reflect on what happened, what you learned, and how you would avoid the situation if it were to come up again.
There is a situation that I was involved in back in 2014 that comes to mind. It resulted in a new assignment for me…
I was working in our field operations as the Mid Atlantic Area HR Manager at the time. Our corporate HR Team had been working on a new associate onboarding experience for 2 years. The scope of the project would impact all of our new associates who were hired in our field and corporate locations- thousands of associates. The projet team was being led by the Corporate HR Manager and there was a team of several corporate HR folks. From time to time, they would hold a conference call and invite some associates from our field operations to get feedback on what this onboarding process should look like. Every time they would get this project to a point where they wanted to implement it, they would get feedback on pieces that were not feasible in the field. This continued to occur over the course of the 2 years, and our operations in the field was getting frustrated that there was nothing actionable that was coming out regarding onboarding, which was one of the biggest challenges for them. The reason why this was failing, was because there were too many strategists on the team, and no presence from anyone more tactical.
When this was finally recognized, I received a call from our SVP of Corporate HR and he asked if I would be open to coming into our corporate facility and taking on the project lead for onboarding. The objective was for me to take on this project with a set of eyes that were “fresh from the field”. This way, I could call upon the experiences that I had in the field and make sure that they were applied to the project and would have a better chance of being supported by the field operations teams. I agreed, and onboarding became my sole project. The first thing I did was to make sure that there were other team members that had field experience (i.e. more tactical minded). Together, we overhauled the work that had been done over the past 2 years, and put together a new process.
Our new onboarding process was implemented in October 2015, and was strongly championed and supported by field operations.
2 responses to “Blog #2- Marketing OD”