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Employee Retention - Onboarding,
Offboarding & Stuff in Between
By Melinda Mezo of HR Alliances
Did you know that research suggests 90 percent of employees
decide whether to stay with their employer within the first six months of
employment? That’s a scary idea when you consider the typical employee’s
first days and weeks with a new employer. Scarier to me is the idea that
onboarding programs will be the next magic bullet for employee retention
problems—please curb your enthusiasm before you repaint your corporate
welcome wagon and start ordering the special coffee mugs!
Let me start by saying I’m not out to debunk research on the importance of
the onboarding process. As personal experience shows, a good or a bad one
can make a quite difference. Some of my onboarding experiences are probably
not that unusual. In one case, no one was prepared for my arrival on my
first day. My boss was out of town, there was no computer, workspace or
email set up for me, and to keep me occupied I was given a 6” binder of
policies and procedures, of which most did not apply to me. I studied the
binder in painstaking detail each day for the first week because I had
nothing else to do. My new colleagues eyed me with suspicion and (I thought)
a hint of malicious glee—would I sink or swim? Sure enough, by the time six
months had passed my disengagement and eventual leaving had already
commenced.
Let’s face it, being bored, lonely and underutilized does not encourage
confidence in a new employee, it inspires buyer regret. The memory of the
“warm and fuzzies” you received while you were being recruited evaporates in
the face of bad onboarding, leaving you to wonder whether the company that
recruited you and the one you are now working for are one in the same.
Bad onboarding experiences can also be stark when compared with your last
day on the job. Provided that yours is a voluntary termination and you’ve
performed reasonably well, it’s likely that your last weeks and days on the
job are full of warm feelings, hearty handshakes and affirmations. It’s a
funny coincidence that sometimes the very things that happened on your last
day (collegial lunches, heartfelt wishes from your boss and your boss’s
boss, extensive preparation and careful planning) were absent from your
first day.
On the other hand, say you’ve had a great onboarding experience but
eventually the welcome party retreats and you are weaned off your designated
buddy. As your co-workers go to ground and your boss becomes a stranger, a
cold empty feeling creeps in and your morale deflates as quickly as the
balloon on your “welcome to our team!” gift basket.
Okay, so what am I getting at? Congruence. The best onboarding program won’t
help your retention rates unless your employees have a consistent experience
from the time they check out your careers web page to the time they and
their colleagues retire.
The first six months of an employee’s tenure are critical. First impressions
do count and whether an organization is conscious of it or not, those
precious early days and weeks speak volumes about your organization and the
value it places on its employees throughout their career. But it’s not just
the quality of the desk side training, the buddy or mentor you’ve been
assigned or the benefits orientation that makes the first six months so
important.
When getting up to speed in a new job, employees synthesize massive amounts
of information about the company, the business, its customers, their
co-workers and their workplace. The human mind is a wonderful machine,
constructing and deconstructing information all day long as it makes sense
of its environment. It does this in part based on congruence: when
information “fits” it is added to the sum of knowledge and when it doesn’t
it is examined more carefully to see if it’s just an anomaly or should
initiate a reassessment of everything known so far
Let’s apply this to a hypothetical work situation. “My new employer wooed me
with great enthusiasm. But when I arrived no one expected me. My new boss
said in my announcement how excited she was that I joined the company. Then
I didn’t talk to her until my probation review. No one ate lunch with that
guy Dave until the day he left but we said we’d sure miss him. Now he is
being blamed for every problem...”
Constructing and deconstructing...when there is no congruence in the
employee experience the new employee’s brain says, “Wow. I am so tired. I
can’t make sense of this at all. Oh, look...there’s an interesting job over
there...” And so the employee retention problem grows.
The best onboarding program will not fix problems inherent to an
organization nor should it be used to hide those problems. Your employees
are smart—presumably that’s why you hired them—and it won’t take long for
them to sniff out any incongruities between what you say and what you do.
So if you want to make the most of the first six months of an employee’s
time with you, align your human resource processes with your management
processes and the realities of your workplace. It’s no magic bullet but it
is a recipe for retention. Start by allowing prospective employees to make
an informed choice about taking a job with your organization by accurately
representing it in ads and interviews. Make sure each employee’s first six
months is consistent with the expectations you’ve created. Then ensure that
each step of the human resource management process—from recruitment to
exit—enables your employees to say every day of their careers, “This makes
sense! I can see I’ve definitely made the right choice!”
Melinda Mezo is the Director of HR Alliances, a boutique firm
specializing in outsourced business services for small & medium size
companies. She serves on the Mount Royal College HR Advisory Committee & is
an Executive Member of the Calgary Disaster Recovery Board.
mmezo@hralliances.com
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