“Your employees are your brand”is more than just a cliché, as we were reminded this week, with a national pizza chain’s unfortunate customer experience, when an employee typed a racial slur on the customer receipt.

As expected, apologies were made and the employee was fired. A month ago, a similar incident with a different national chain led to another employee termination. Sadly, these stories are not unusual. As an Asian-American woman, former restaurant manager and an HR practitioner, I was able to relate to this story in a myriad of ways.

Could these incidents have been predicted or prevented? Who owns this problem - HR? The Hiring Manager? What kind of experience or training did this employee have? What is the fair expectation from someone who makes only minimum wage? Is it an issue relating to franchise management? What next? What are companies doing to mitigate this risk to their brand?

“Your Employees are Your Brand” is much more of a truism, if possible, with retail businesses. Yet it’s not the statement as much as the context of the statement that provides the painful “a-ha” moment, along with the missed window of opportunities, from the hiring of the employees to the dramatic firing of said employees.

Show them what it means to work here:
Companies are spending millions of dollars on hiring. Today more than ever before, managers have greater access to tools to make that “quality hire”, which I think provides a false sense of security about the fact that people are diverse, complex, irrational and unpredictable beings, who bring their own experience and biases into the workplace.

While the focus of Employment Branding during hiring seems to be more about “why should you work here,” it should lead into “what it means to work here,” with specific expectations from the new employee to become part of that brand. I don’t think of it as “smile training,” but more a way to ensure that “support” and “challenge” go hand in hand. When the employment brand is the conscious and authentic articulation of the company’s values and culture, it becomes a living, breathing employee value proposition and code of conduct. Strategic Onboarding is key to this. I see Onboarding as a conversion, a transformation of new hires to dedicated employees. This comes from deliberate intent and systemic practice by the organization.

Onboard to align and engage:
Great hiring is definitely not the only guarantee of success! Ensuring an ongoing “fit” and integrating them into the company culture is an entirely different game altogether. It’s like managing chaos – you have to slow down to speed up and, in this case, that comes from aligning and engaging your talent. Employee engagement without the alignment can be detrimental, as is evident from our example story.

Busy and difficult times are causing HR and Line Managers to inadvertently overlook or cut vital programs. New employee onboarding is a perfect example of this. Onboarding is often misconstrued to be a tactical exercise, without adequate consideration and training around the assimilation of employees into the company culture. Yes, we want the employee’s Day 1 to be “on the job,” but that doesn't end with getting paperwork done ahead of time and having the rest be a “learn-on-the-job-as-you-go”. It can be a huge mistake to cut the time and money spent on engaging with new recruits before and after they start.

In summary, Onboarding is not merely about paperwork, nor is it just the romance of new hire, it is that precise balance of the excitement of the new hire with organizational readiness to support and coach the employee, and brings in social, cultural, role and business context elements. After all, your employees are your brand!