Trends in Onboarding and Retention in 2013

(Editor’s Note: Today’s post is brought to you by Allied Van Lines®, a leader in the moving and storage industry with more than 75 years of experience. For a second year, they are championing a research project, Allied HRIQ, aimed to provide business professionals with data on current workforce trends. We also have an exciting LinkedIn group~ Allied HR IQ~ where HR professionals can network and share ideas about happenings in the HR space.  I encourage you to join today!  I have partnered with Allied Van Lines® in the past and am excited about this year’s survey results.)

Trying to find and then take the time to make sense of and look for valuable and relevant takeaways from the multitude of research and surveys about the workplace, talent management, and management trends can be quite challenging for most of us with busy, full schedules. And the folks at Allied get this, which is why they have asked HR bloggers like myself, Trish McFarlane, and Sharlyn Lauby to jump in and not only take a look at the recently completed data from the Allied HR IQ survey, but also to highlight what we felt like were some of the most interesting and important findings.

As Sharlyn shared earlier this summer, the Allied HR IQ survey put out some great information on telecommuting.  Give her article a read because, as we all know, this issue is still on the minds of many professionals. And later in the year, Trish examined the recruiting and relocation survey focus areas in her piece here.

I’ve been asked to look at the onboarding and retention components of the survey results.  I have to tell you, the full survey results are well worth your time to read, but in case you’re pressed for time, here are my key takeaways on these important topics:

Onboarding:

Some key findings from the data about new employee onboarding:

While onboarding is usually ‘owned’ by HR, (83% either led by corporate HR and/or Unit HR), there is usually not a specific budget allocated for the process, with 87% of respondents indicating that onboarding costs were simply baked in to overall HR spend.

In onboarding, success is not totally tied to the size of an organization’s budget - companies that evaluated their onboarding process as ‘Highly Successful’ spent, on average, over 50% less than companies rating themselves only ‘Somewhat Successful.’  However both groups spent significantly more on onboarding than the ‘Not Successful’ group.

Highly successful onboarding programs distinguished themselves in several ways - by clearly communicating employee expectations, incorporating formal and informal coaching and mentoring programs, and encompassing senior and line managerial participation in the onboarding process.

Finally, and perhaps the most interesting data point related to onboarding,  respondents indicated it takes about 8 months for new hires to be fully productive in the organization, a time horizon that did not vary much no matter how small or large the organization.

What can you take away from these findings?

Clearly, the best onboarding programs are ones that maintain a high degree of personalization, i.e., where the individual employee needs and situation are being considered and valued. Elements like specific goals and expectations, a high degree of managerial and leadership involvement, and the realization that onboarding should start sooner (even before the first day on the job) and last longer are just some of the hallmarks of successful programs. As we will see in the data about employee retention, a successful employee onboarding experience will pay dividends far into the future, and will clearly provide a fantastic return on investment.

Turning our attention to the Retention portion of the study... 

Retention

Similarly, several interesting findings were revealed from the survey respondents’ assessment of their retention strategies and their success (or shortcomings).

The Allied HRIQ survey participants indicated that only 76% of their new hires remained with the organization for one full year. Given the 8-month time to productivity finding from above, losing a full quarter of new hires before one year is kind of a distressing statistic.

To build upon the first point, only 62% of new hires who were retained for a full year were viewed as ‘Meeting or surpassing expectations,’ meaning 38% were performing at a sub-optimal level.

Why are so many new hires leaving before one year? Not surprisingly, the number one factor reported by the survey respondents was the employee’s ‘Relationship with their manager.’ This finding supports that often-repeated maxim that ‘People join companies, but they leave managers.’ Career advancement opportunities ranked next on the list of leaving reasons, reminding us that even new employees are concerned about their future career prospects with the organization.

Lastly, many companies, even quite large ones, are not doing a good enough job of asking and assessing executives’ willingness to relocate, even while reporting that this willingness and ability to actually relocate is an important factor for their advancement opportunities.

There are several interesting implications of the retention data from the Allied HRIQ survey, but if I could focus in on one element, it would have to be the level and attention of the employee’s direct manager and how that affects outcomes. As we saw in the onboarding data, a high level of managerial involvement led to better onboarding programs. And this type of attention and personalized development and management seems to also have a profound influence on retention. The data suggest that the most important factor in an employee’s first months with the organization is the relationship they have with their manager. So smart HR leaders will strive to ensure they work closely with these critically important managers to provide them the tools, resources, and capability they need to effectively guide new employees in their first months with the organization.

Final thoughts

Onboarding and retention will continue to be two necessary and important functions for the HR leader, and while most organizations feel like they are doing at least an adequate job in these areas, as the Allied HRIQ survey reveals, there is always room for improvement.

I encourage you to check out the full Allied HRIQ survey results here, where you will find lots more information and insight that can help to make your onboarding and retention efforts even more effective.

Second Life Enterprise

Recently, the folks at Second Life announced the availability of the beta release of Second Life Enterprise, a fully-functional 'behind the corporate firewall' version of the popular virtual world.

In the past many large organizations such as IBM, Intel, and Northrop Grumman have established and grown a presence in the 'main' Second Life environment for corporate virtual meetings, training, and collaborative projects.  What Second Life Enterprise allows these organizations, and perhaps others that were reluctant to embrace the virtual world,  the ability to install and maintain a private virtual world for the enterprise, but one with all the features and capabilities of the public Second Life environment.

With Second Life Enterprise, the organization installs the solution in its own data center and gets some essential enterprise capabilities; backup and recovery, LDAP integration, and bulk account creation. So instead of users having to use 'fake' names like 'JoJo Stardancer' you can use their real names sourced from the corporate directory.

The enterprise environment also allows the transfer of objects and buildings the organization may have created in the 'main' Second Life into the private enterprise world. 

Second Life has long had some very compelling use cases for large distributed organizations.  Holding virtual meetings supplemented with rich multi-media content, conducting formal training sessions, global project team work sessions, and new employee onboarding are just a few of the many potential opportunities to leverage virtual worlds in the enterprise.

Early in 2010, the Second Life Enterprise solution will be supported by the Second Life Work Marketplace, an application and pre-built solution market that will allow content creators and providers to licence solutions for meetings, training sessions, seminars etc. to the Second Life Enterprise customer community.

This offering though, is clearly targeted at the large enterprise with strong IT resources and more than likely a widely distributed workforce.  Pricing for the solution starts at $55,000 USD.  But for a large organization, that typically brings together large numbers of people from around the world for meetings or annual planning sessions, the price for obtaining, preparing, and utilizing a virtual world for some of these events may well be a cost savings.

Looked at more broadly, this announcement seems to continue a trend of the 'enterprization' of popular public, or consumer social applications. Solutions that started out as pure 'social' tools, (Twitter, Facebook, Second Life) seem to grow and eventually find use cases for the enterprise. For me, if the initial barriers to Second Life use (heavy client, high learning curve) can be overcome by Second Life Enterprise, this may be the most impactful use of a 'social' tool inside large enterprises yet.

My first day on the job (involves numerous beers)

It's the weekend, and I don't have the focus to craft a detailed, thoughtful post on HR Technology, so I thought I would tell the story of my first day on my first 'professional' job that I got after graduating college.

I was a recent Business/Finance graduate and after graduating landed a job at AT&T as one of what seemed like at least 5,000 folks trying to keep track of the giant corporations finances.

I'd rather not say the exact year, let's just say we were all still trying to get used to it being 'the 90s'.

So on the first day, I turned up to the offices of the division that I was to be supporting in beautiful downtown Newark, NJ.  The offices were fairly modern for the time, all the necessary amenities were present, and it was altogether a normal and sort of boring corporate office environment.

After a few hours of being introduced around the office, learning where the bathrooms and cafeteria were, it was about noon, and I was thinking about grabbing some lunch. Right about that time, two of the mid-level managers came by my desk to invite me to go to lunch with them. Ron and Frank were two 50 or so year old guys, with probably 25 years apiece in the company.  As I was brand new on the job, I did not hesitate to accept the offer and gladly went along.

We exited the building and hit the streets of Newark for the short two or three block walk to the place these two guys liked to regularly have lunch. The place was called Murphy's Tavern.

It was about as dive as dive bars could be.  Sort of tired looking, small, dimly lit, and with a nice, fragrant scent of about five million Marlboros and Lucky Strikes that had been smoked in there over the years.

But I was just out of college, and had spent more time that I should admit in similar looking bars while in school, so at first, the place did not phase me at all. I was feeling pretty good to get invited out to lunch by the leaders in the department on my first day.

As I said, this was a dive bar, not a restaurant, so the three of us took seats at the bar and were greeted by the bartender, a 60ish year old man named Jim. Jim greeted Ron and Frank (not much of a greeting really, the kind of hello that indicates it had not been a long time since they had last been in the bar), was introduced to me, and then immediately placed a bottle of Budweiser in front of all three of us.

That's ok I thought, it was summer, it was pretty hot that day, a cold Bud seemed like a good idea.  Besides, the two managers who brought me to lunch were having one as well, so I better to go along, try to fit in and all that.

After about five minutes of small talk and a few sips of the Bud, Jim the bartender puts a second Bud in front of each of us.  I had finished maybe half of my first beer, and number two was already there, queued up and waiting. Man, I thought, these guys aren't fooling around.  But I was ok with it, I was fresh out of school, and I did not have any problem tossing back a few beers, so I wasn't stressed. Ron and Frank seemed to make nothing of the fact that no actual 'ordering' had been done, the beers just simply appeared with not a word exchanged between us and Jim the bartender.

So 10 or so minutes pass, I am now working on beer number two, when Jim puts a third beer down in front of all three of us.  To this point no one has seen or asked for a menu (I was actually wondering if the place even served food), and I thought to myself, 'Dang, these guys don't even eat, they just go to lunch and get bombed'. Finally, a minute later Jim comes back over with a pad to take our lunch orders.  I don't remember what I ordered, but I imagine it was the same thing as Ron or Frank had, as I had never been in the place before and apparently there were no menus. While we were waiting for our food, I excused myself to use the restroom, and on the way to the back of the bar where the restrooms were, I finally got a chance to look around a bit more.

The walls of the bar were covered in large poster-size photographs, all black and white, of various celebrities and athletes.  James Dean, Joe DiMaggio, Robert DeNiro, Clark Gable, (Clark Gable?, that's pretty random), were some that I remember. Again, nothing too strange, just an old, dingy dive bar where these two old-timers seemed to eat lunch in all the time.

The lunch finally came, along with beer number four, and three of us finished up, paid the bill (the guys, or Jim or some combination paid for my tab), and we headed back to the office. After four beers and a greasy lunch, I was pretty much ready for a nap, and I don't really recall anything else about the afternoon.  At about 4:00, Ron and Frank came by my desk to let me know they were stopping for a 'quick one' before heading home, and that a few of the higher-ups in the finance department were planning on meeting them, and I should probably come along and get introduced to these 'important' colleagues.

So we headed back over to Murphy's, which was at this point pretty empty. Jim the bartender was still there, we had more Bud (I was fairly confident at this point Bud was the only beer served there), and made some small talk.  I was feeling really glad to be commuting via public transportation at this point as well, as were Ron and Frank.

About an hour passed, and the 'important' colleagues turned up, more middle-aged dudes who liked to drink Bud, and we proceeded to hang out for maybe another hour.  I am now about seven or eight beers in on the day, but even in that condition I was able to notice that the bar was getting more crowded, and the clientele was exclusively male.  And the folks who were coming in to the place were not the middle-aged office worker types that I was with.  No, the new crowd was much younger, more racially diverse, and not dressed in white shirts and ties like we were.  Soon, disco music started to play and some of the patrons started dancing in a small area near the back of the bar. About this point I had to make my way to the restrooms in the back and as I walked past the posters of Rock Hudson, Frank Sinatra, etc, and through and around the small crowd of guys dancing with each other, it finally hit me: Murphy's Tavern is a gay bar! I did not have a problem with that aspect really, but it is the kind of thing you typically mention to someone when taking them the first time, don't you think? I had maybe one more beer, and left, somehow making it to the train station for the train back home, still sort of amazed about the day and night.

So my very first day as a 'finance professional' was spent filling out a few forms in the morning, getting loaded at lunch with two of the managers, then returning to the bar with these same managers and some of the executives in our group, and finally realizing we were in (what I later learned) was a famous 'office worker' bar by day, and 'Newark's primary gay bar' by night.

I am not an expert on employee onboarding, but I do know this, it is probably not a good idea to take your new employee out for a four-drink lunch in a dive bar, then bring them back to the same dive bar/gay bar after work to 'network' with the execs, all the while not letting them know the 'unique' aspects of the place.

Note: If you have read this ridiculously long post, thanks for indulging me.  The story is 100% true. I changed the names of the specific individuals mentioned in the post, although I am pretty sure there is a zero chance any of them will ever see this.

Welcome Aboard!

In this time of economic turmoil and layoffs a post about new employee onboarding may seem out of place.

But, in many organizations the hiring and onboarding process never really stops, it may slow down a bit in a downturn, but there are always folks retiring, resigning, or otherwise leaving, and some new hires turning up. Getting your new employees off to a good start is really critical, most employees make the 'stay-or-go' decision within the first few months, and as many as 4% of new hires will leave after a disaster of a first day.

FlickR- MEADEH

Or, as in the case in many organizations, long-standing vacancies have recently seen an uptick in applicants, and all of a sudden a minuscule, mediocre applicant pool has some really talented prospects. So now is probably a really good time to assess your onboarding process and make changes as necessary.  

If you are like most organizations, your onboarding process mainly consists of a checklist of administrative tasks (payroll forms, computer account requests, parking passes), followed by some scheduled meetings with the department manager and possibly some other key people to get the new hire started in understanding the role, the organization, the processes, etc.  Larger organizations usually offer some type of New Employee Orientation workshop, where various support and administrative departments talk to a group of new employees regarding policies and procedures, normally the HR department organizes and facilitates these sessions.

All sounds pretty good right?  But what typically is missing is the ongoing support and networking that is usually critical for the success of the new hire. Who are the key sources of knowledge? Where is the repository of crucial information, the kind of stuff that is not in the 'official' company handbook.  Does any new employee truly succeed by doing what is in the handbook?

Since networking and access to knowledge are the key factors in new employee time to productivity, what are some of the tools and technologies available to better manage this process?

Corporate Social Networks - these are robust solutions offering features like employee profiles, discussion groups, blogs, etc.  The best known vendor in this space is probably SelectMinds. Jive Software's Clearspace product is also well regarded. These are 'big' solutions designed for larger organizations that have a well-developed strategy on employee collaboration. These are designed to give new hires a 'pre-built' network of the key folks in the organization that they will need to rely on to succeed. 

Public Social Networks - Set up a company or division page on Facebook, and LinkedIn, and encourage your employees to register and connect their.  This approach will emphasize the 'social' aspect much more than the professional, but if the point is to foster better and more meaningful connections amongst your staff if may work.  Besides, many of your employees are already on Facebook, and unless you are planning to block the site (generally a bad idea), you may as well go where they are.

Blogging and micro-blogging - There is almost no reason why your leadership (CEO, CIO, CFO, whatever) should not have at least a private, internal blog.  Executive blogs (and more frequently the comments) can reveal to a new employee more of the pulse or sensibilities of the organization.  These tools can also allow a new hire to introduce themselves to the conversation,  in a less formal or intimidating way than the traditional, 'march around and get introduced routine'. As for micro-blogging, set up your company on Yammer, and encourage your new hires to sign up.  Yammer (if you can get some key adopters) can be a great source of company news, projects, and discussion. 

These are just a few quick thoughts, ranging from the big and complex (a corporate social network) to simple and free, (Yammer).  There are lots more ways to approach this, and I will cover a few dedicated onboarding tools in another post.

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