Are you experiencing acute employee turnover among new hires, especially those with less than one year of service? Are you of the opinion that maybe your company is spending too much time and resources on new hires? Are you about to cut orientation and training budgets for new hires? Hold your horses. Why? Because you are about to shoot yourself in the foot.
To-date, 61 Brazilian soccer players have graced the English Premier League with very few success stories. A success story Juninho Paulista who played for Middlesbrough. Juninho had a friend Simon Clifford, a primary school teacher who helped him adjust (on-board). He met Juninho every day, even assisted him in booking doctor’s appointments and making sure that he felt at home in a new place (Soocernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski). See the similarity. Your new hires are joining a new company. They need to be on-board.
Instead of chopping and changing your on-boarding program, you should be making it passionately engaging! According to Aberdeen Group survey in November 2014, best-in-class organizations are 11% more likely to retain first year employees. A solid on-boarding is a process designed to acclimatize new hires and aims to fulfill three objectives; showcase your company’s values, provide support and learning opportunities that will bring new hires up to speed and increase the retention rate of new hires.
First involve your line managers. They are the ones that make a real difference to new hires’ decision to stay. After all, line managers are the ones that will provide new hires with support, coaching and be a role model. If managers give impetus to on-boarding, you are already half way there.
Next is pre-boarding before day one. Ensure that the candidate’s experience during the application and selection process is in line with your company’s values. Be it in the way you conduct your interview, job adverts and even forms. It says a lot about who you are as a company. Engage accepted candidates by giving them information such as handbooks or access to useful links.
Wow and connect. Make it a memorable first day. Provide a work desk, computer, email access and other necessary evils of the modern age. Provide opportunity for new hires to connect with people internally. You can easily achieve that by scheduling visits to the various departments and assigning a buddy.
Invest. Train new hires on skills and knowledge needed for the job. Equally important, inform them of the ways things are done here, in other words, your company’s culture. This is best done through experiential learning. You can’t teach values, you have to experience it.
Ensure that the on-boarding process lasts at least a month. Conduct temperature checks along the way. This gives the opportunity for new hires to regularly meet with HR and line managers to discuss their experiences and more importantly give them channel to provide feedback.
Track new hires’ turnover rate and engagement levels. Plot your stability index (current number of employees with more than one year tenure / last year’s number of employees with more than one year tenure).
You may not be able to save them all but as my former boss used to say “Don’t forget that our ex-employees could one day become our customers”. My guess is that they would find you passionately engaging!
