During the Great Resignation and Great Reimagination, the talent shortage has challenged hiring managers to step up their talent acquisition efforts to hire the best talent.This is clearly a priority amongst not just hiring managers but executives, as in their latest CEO survey, Deloitte noted that talent was one of the most critical issues.
While bringing talent in the door during a tight labor market is a challenge, ensuring that new employees are onboarded and empowered to succeed in their new role is still an area of opportunity for companies and organizations. Research from Gallup’s onboarding report shows that only 12% of new employees believe that their company is excellent at onboarding, and research suggests that companies lose 17% of their new hires during the first three months.
Most recently, an anecdotal trend of the “Great Regret” or employees who take jobs but then leave them after realizing their mistake, is also gaining traction. According to research from The Muse, 72% of employees who recently changed and started a new job felt the job ended up being different than what they believed it to be.
A reason for this can sometimes come from how companies bring in and onboard new employees. Unfortunately, not all onboarding programs are holistic and effective to guide employees throughout the new journey into an organization. Many focus on important aspects, like setting up the technology and arming people with the right tools, which while important, are not nearly as effective to contributing in an impactful way, and helping the employee feel welcomed and engaged into a new company.
Furthermore, the ability to onboard and assist in a remote or distributed environment makes the challenge even more immense. Many companies have rushed to update their onboarding processes to account for shifting workplace policies, re-imagined new employee trainings, and determined how to setup remote employees who don’t come into a physical office, all of which are important. but even with improvements, challenges still exist.
Well Intentioned Advice Leads to Mistakes and Frustrations with new hires
For their part, employees themselves, also struggle when starting a new role. There are a lot of well-intentioned pieces of advice that help employees onboard, that taken in the wrong context, lead to mistakes and frustrations of both employees and managers. Here are a few common ones we see when working with employees:
1)A desire to hit the ground running and jumping head first too fast – Hiring managers and eager employees want to get off to a fast start and start contributing right away. This is a great mindset, but often underscores the stark reality that learning how to contribute and then contributing in an impactful way actually takes time, learning, and effort. In a rush to make a contribution, an employee pushes hard to jump into the throws of a project or initiative and ends up costing the team in time, effort or in damaged relationships.
2) Going on the never ending meet and greet – Meeting your colleagues and teammates and building relationships with people across the organization is critical to succeeding in a job. However, having an endless list of people to have 1:1’s with and a calendar filled with back to back to back virtual coffee chats has its limitations. While it’s important to get to know your colleagues, doing so in an intentional and thoughtful way that builds trust and credibility doesn’t happen overnight, nor is it meant to be a “one and done” tasks But the allure of checking off the to do list of meeting each team and stakeholder often takes precedence over disciplined and intentional relationship building
3) Getting stuck with documentation deluge – Great internal documentation in the form of memos, knowledge wikis, powerpoint decks and internal chat logs can scale important knowledge and ideas in an effective way. However, this can sometimes be overkill when you are starting a new role, and the amount of overwhelm that can occur when a new employee opens their inbox to dozens upon dozens of emails, decks and documents can be significant.
Managers: How You Can Help Your Employees Get Up to Speed Faster and Smarter
While your company is working hard on developing a thoughtful and intentional onboarding experience, managers play a critical role in ensuring their new direct reports are set up for success to contribute, feel welcomed and connected to the team, and confident in understanding their role and culture.
Afterall, while companies track attrition statistics, managers will be the first ones to feel the lost attrition if an employee leaves. That said, people managers are still struggling to collaboratively onboard new employees. In a survey from Career Builder, 37% of employees didn’t think their manager played a critical role in supporting their onboarding experience.
As a manager, it’s your job to ensure each new employee’s experience in the workplace is a positive one — but knowing what steps you need to take to create an effective onboarding plan can feel overwhelming. While you may not have control over the formal processes or programs your company sets, you can help your new employees and set them up for success.
After working with hundreds of employees who started new roles or joined new companies, we’ve identified four foundational elements that managers can focus on to help new employees build the context and confidence to onboard and contribute.
These four areas are what we like to call the foundational elements of employee onboarding. Just like the foundation of a house ensures that the house is safe, structurally sound, and able to support all the other aspects of the house that go on top of it, when managers target these four areas of onboarding their new hires, they can increase the odds that their new employee is setup for success.
#1)Communication
Communication takes on many forms and is a large component of any knowledge working job. This is also why it’s important to help your new employees understand how communication methods work in your organization. Getting your new employees to understand the ways in which people communicate, the modes of communication that are preferred, and the types of communication that are needed is critical to empowering them to contribute in a meaningful and impactful way is critical to helping them do any task, work on any project or build any relationship. The sooner that they pick up on this, the more likely they’re going to be able to build relationships, collaboration with others, and acclimating to the company and role.
Many times, we see employees and managers treating this as purely a technology issue. Just show them the tool and they’ll be set to go. We would argue that while making them aware of the tools and technologies is important, what’s more important are the behaviors and norms around the communication workflows within your company. Getting them to understand the unspoken or unseen reasons for why employees communicate in certain ways, or the best methods for communicating with others is far more important than tellign them which tools to use.
This also is a great time to encourage employees to think intentionally about how they communicate best, and what their communication style in fact is, and how that might fit within the team. Many companies use business communication tools like StrengthsFinder or DISC, but even just having new employees think critically about how they best communicate can be a great first step.
For example, one tool we use with our clients is a user manual, or a guide that articulates each individual employees’ communication style, strengths, and development areas. We find when teams do this together this is a great way to foster trust and collaboration, and also, for new employees to gain confidence in how they communicate, and how others can start communicating with them.
#2)Collaboration
Most employees in today’s knowledge worker economy have a portion of their work dedicated toward collaborative work. Being a new employee means that there is a lot to learn about the ways collaborative work gets done, how cross-functional projects are structured, and the ways of working that are unique to the organization. Taking the time to help your new employees understand the processes, workflows, and giving them a chance to ask questions, clarify roles and responsibilities and learn the methods for cross-functional work ensures that they are ready for when it comes time to work on teams and across your organization.
When working with a new
#3)Connection
Making employees feel connected and a sense of belonging ensures that they are starting off by building meaningful relationships with the right set of people. Connection isn’t just something that is or isn’t there, but rather, it’s a thing that builds, over time. To get started, managers should help new employees by identifying and prioritizing a set of people their new employee should meet, and connect with on a consistent basis over the first few months. While it doesn’t need to be a large amount of people, the goal should be to allow for time to build thoughtful and intentional relationships where the new employee feels like they have someone they can talk to, ask questions or brainstorm with. Having this sense of psychological safety with another feel teammate, especially when new allows for new employees to ask transparent questions, share ideas, and gain confidence,
As a manager, you can also help with connection by intentionally going out of your way to make sure your new hire feels welcome, and seen by others. You can also make a point of intentionally and regularly introducing them to new people and teams, and providing formal and informal check-ins to ensure they are feeling engaged.
One of our clients, a pharmaceutical company, also connects new hires with each other. Through various cohorts of individuals who start at the same time, new hires also get engagement opportunities of people who are at the same stage of the journey. Even if your company does not do this, managers can informally connect their new hires with others to make them feel that sense of belonging and connection.
#4)Culture
Chances are, new employees chose your company because they were attracted to what they heard about your company culture. While words matter, actions, behaviors and specifically the things that are championed and rewarded are what you need to help new employees understand. The marketing executive Seth Godin once described culture as “people like us do things like this.” Instead of just letting employees hear about your culture, you want to focus on helping your new hires see the culture in action. Working to help new employees see the behaviors, norms, and rituals that are a fabric of your company culture is critical to helping them understand how your organization operates.
Furthermore, helping them see examples of the culture in action, either through inviting them to rituals or common events, or connecting them with “culture carriers” where they can ask questions and gain insight are steps to ensure they have a good understanding of not just what people say about culture, but actions they actually take.
Conclusion
In today’s tight labor market, managers have to work hard to find and attract top talent. Watching it leave due to poor onboarding is an oversight that will cost more in the long run. Instead, managers should collaborate with new employees and focus on helping them effectively and efficiently gain the confidence to onboard smarter and faster. By working on the four c’s of collaboration, connection, culture, and communication, managers can help their employees get off to a great start.
If organizations want to ensure that during the great resignation that they cannot only attract great talent but retain and empower it to contribute, they must work on company wide onboarding programs to assimilate and integrate new employees. But hiring managers shouldn’t sit idle – For their part, managers must focus on investing in their new hires so they can onboard effectively and efficiently. Starting with the foundational elements of onboarding is a great place to begin.