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.

Buying a car, choosing your next job - more similar than you think

The good folks at Careerbuilder recently released their 2012 Candidate Behavior Study, conducted in partnership with Inavero, and while the big, catchy conclusion from the study was boiled down to essentially read as 'Passive Candidates Don't Exist', I found even a more interesting, (to me anyway), finding from the study's data.

According to the Careebuilder study, job candidates consult nearly 15 resources per job search, including company career sites, Facebook, online job boards, employer review sites (such as Glassdoor.com), professional and personal networks and staffing and recruiting firms – before they even decide to apply to a job. Below is a chart from the study showing how job search research stacks up against other, similarly important and complex purchasing decisions:

Job Searching is complex

While we have been talking for a while, (here just last Monday), about Human Resources and Recruiting looking and acting more like the classic Marketing function, but as I pointed out in my post last week, and the Careerbuilder study reinforces, Marketing is changing dramatically as well, making, especially for HR and Talent pros, the shift to more of a Marketing mindset even more challenging.

From the report on the study's findings:

It used to be that a consumer would go to the store and find something on the shelf for the first time and make the decision to purchase right then and there,” (Careerbuilder's) Barnes explains. “Today, however, thanks to technology that enables us to research and compare products – at any time of day, from anywhere – consumers are doing significant research on products before they even step into a store.

Job candidates, we’re finding, are using this same approach to their job search.” For employers, these findings underscore the need to put as much effort into “marketing” their job opportunities and employment brand as they do their products, services and consumer brand. Candidates are utilizing multiple platforms to interact with employers, search for opportunities and find out what it’s like to work at companies – and they’re doing so increasingly through social media and from their mobile devices.

That means employers need to explore and take advantage of the many and various opportunities to connect with candidates these platforms afford.

Some quick thoughts on what this all might mean for you - the HR and Talent pro that might feel themselves in a position not at all unlike our friends over at a Big Box retailer like Best Buy, who watch shopper after shopper wander around the store, viewing and touching the merch, then immediately pulling out their iPhones to price check all over the internet, read product reviews, and figure out if their might be a better deal out there.

1. You probably don't need to everywhere, but you need to be moving in that direction. If your candidates are hitting up as many as 15 sources of informaton to learn about your company and jobs, then having a wide (and deep) employer brand presence across multiple sources.

2. True source of hire will become almost impossible to pinpoint. The candidate you eventually hired saw your opening via a job alert from Indeed, talked to a friend who used to work at your company, read some reviews on Glassdoor, checked out your Career site, then found someone in their LinkedIn network willing to forward their resume to the hiring manager. So - what was the source of hire?

3. If HR and Recruiting is becoming the new Marketing, then HR pros are even more behind the game. The Careerbuilder report pulls pretty deeply from a Google-led marketing research project called the Zero Moment of Truth, (ZMOT). If you want to speak the language of the modern marketer and job seeker, then you probably need to know what the heck the ZMOT is and how it impacts your employment marketing efforts.

I don't post about too many research reports, (honestly, there are too many to post about anyway), but I did learn a few things from the Careerbuilder research, and I recommend you check it out if you want some new insights into how candidates are searching for jobs, and how you can best adopt and adapt to these changes.

Have a great Monday everyone!

Do you Read These?

Earlier this year I co-presented at the Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD) annual conference in Washington, DC.  The AHRD is professional, research-driven organization made up of Human Resources academics and a few 'reflective practitioners'.

At that time I also became a member of the AHRD and almost immediately began Some light readingreceiving a regular series of journals and publications from the academy.  Titles like:  Human Resource Development Quarterly, HRD Review, and Advances in Developing Human Resources.

These are pretty heavy titles, full of some excellent research pieces written (mostly) by Professors of Human Resources from the USA and many other countries. Articles like 'Meaningfulness, Commitment, and Engagement: The Intersection of a Deeper Level of Intrinsic Motivation' have some great information and can be very valuable for academics and practitioners alike. They are not 500-word blog posts, but if you can wrestle your way though them, you can usually pull out some great insights.

But some other pieces incredibly arcane and narrow in focus and quite honestly seems to exist to support University tenure requirements for publishing. An article like 'The trend of blended learning in Taiwan' fits pretty squarely in this category. By their nature they have limited use and a small potential audience.

Currently, I am in the (long) process of writing an article for one of the aforementioned journals, and since this is the first (and likely only) time I will ever write for an academic journal I have some observations on the process and on the academic journals themselves.

1. It takes an incedibly long time to write one of these articles. 

You generally submit an abstract or basic idea for a piece to the editors, wait months to hear if your idea is accepted, then submit a 'expanded' abstract, wait for another few months for feedback, submit a revised expanded abstract, wait, submit a first draft, wait, submit a final draft, wait, and eventually (for me this will be over a year later), see the article published. Oh yeah, actually writing the content takes a really long time too, more details on why that is to follow.

2. Style is (almost) as important as substance

There are often incredibly detailed and precise requirements for the format and structure of each different submission.  Length, section titles, headings, and of course strict adherence to the citation formats are so stressed and emphasized that it actually is a bit frustrating and annoying. Does anyone really notice if an article uses APA citation format 5 or format 6?  Does anyone even care? This part of the 'writing' process often involves grad student (free) labor.  The idea seems to be to recruit a grad student that is good with research to help find references and compile the bibliography in exchange for a credit on the article's eventual byline.

3. What other people have written is more important as what you write

In this kind of writing for academic journals there is a heavy emphasis on citations.  It is not unusual to see a 12 page article with over 100 citations.  In some of these pieces, nary a paragraph goes by without some external source cited (almost always another academic journal article). I get this to some extent, my (or anyone's) opinions on a topic do carry more weight if it can be shown that other author's have agreed, or drawn similar conclusions; and certainly any statistics or factual statements should show the real source of the data. But many times reading one of these pieces, with so many citations, you wonder why the article was even needed at all.  The academic journal citation is probably the earliest form of the blog link or the retweet.  Too many of those, and you wonder if the author actually has anything useful to add to the discourse.

4. I am pretty sure hardly anyone will read the article

I keep up with at least 100 other HR blogs, have attended plenty of events, watched dozens of webcasts, and hosted and listened to scores of talk showson HR and recruiting this year.  I have never heard anyone, in any context, mention the AHRD, talk about any of the journals they publish, or cite any of the journal articles in a blog post, presentation, or in any other forum.  My unscientific observation is that the only people that will ever read my article are the editors of the journal, and a very small percentage of the folks that actually get the journal.  And perhaps once in a great while someone doing an academic database keyword search will stumble upon my article for possible use as a (gasp) citation for an article or assignment. This citation (if it ever does happen) will also hardly be seen by anyone outside of this tiny circle of journal editors and academics.

Frankly, I am at the end of the post and I am not really sure what my conclustion is.

Could it be the process, form, and ultimate outcome of the academic publishing process is kind of ridiculous and largely unappealing?

Maybe it is a call for more 'mainsteam' HR practitioners and industry bloggers to take note of the excellent work (if you look hard enough) that can be found in these academic journals?

Could it be that instead of working on my first draft that is due soon, I found it easier and more satisfying to bang out a 900+ word blog post on  the whole thing?

I will end with this, does anyone reading this post actually read any Human Resources Academic journals?