At a recent meeting with a long-standing client that has a strong company culture, the CHRO asked my opinion on how to solve a growing issue. The retention rate among new hires was going down, and the CEO was asking for both an analysis and a plan to stop the slide. The realization was that something needed to change, because the amount of recruitment and retraining was driving unneeded expenses.
Recruiting and onboarding practices were never topics that were addressed in our work together or in our status meetings — primarily because the overall retention numbers for the organization were impressive. Pulling back the curtain, it became clear that there were marked differences between longer-term employees and new hires, and between the later millennials through baby boomers and those very early in their careers. To put it succinctly, what worked in the past might need significant revisions.
The Action Plan
The CHRO agreed to a multi-phased approach:
1. Conduct an audit of the current onboarding program.
2. Compare the current program to known best practices and emerging industry trends.
3. Assess applicability of cutting-edge onboarding measures (what I will call here onboarding 2.0), designed for specific demographic groups but applicable across the workforce.
The first phase was relatively easy because human resources managed the current program. But that immediately pointed to a deficiency: The onboarding program was HR-centric rather than representing a true, aligned partnership among senior management, HR and the hiring managers. The current program felt more like set events in a limited process instead of a three- to six-month process concentrating on mission, values and experience.
Knowing that the organization had a strong culture, which is a factor in retention but which can carry with it some good and bad elements, we began to stress test the culture to determine what may have changed or to identify aspects of the legacy culture that were getting in the way. Our team recommended anonymous interviews as well as focus groups with a cross section of staff representing a mixture of tenures, generations and genders in an effort to better map the existing culture.
Phase 1 Results
The analysis of the interviews helped define what was taking place: Millennial new hires were the least likely to feel connected to the organization’s culture and, in some aspects, the mission. We also found pockets of gender and tenure issues. Specific comments further emphasized that senior management’s internal employee messages were not resonating with new hires as the messages continued to lean toward a culture that was somewhat stale and not inspiring for new recruits. These messages were disconnected from the messages heard during the recruitment process.
We learned that a clear breakdown was occurring early on, where hiring managers were not investing enough time and effort in bringing new hires up to speed and communicating their importance to the team. Even when dialogue was taking place, a gap remained between new hires and their managers in what new hires were hearing during recruitment and what was transpiring over the first 120 days of employment.
Phase 2 Improvements
We also compared the current onboarding program to a set of objective best practices we had identified. In working with the organization’s HR team, we found that many of the best practices were already in place, but they had room for improvement in their design and consistency of application. These included:
• Forming a true cross-departmental onboarding team with a year-round and ongoing charter.
• Ensuring job descriptions matched the positions accurately.
• Reaching out to new hires before their start dates to engage them in organization history, successes, mission and values.
Our analysis was shared with the CHRO and subsequently presented to the CEO with the following recommendations:
• Improve CEO messaging to broaden the audience and create specific new-hire communications that emphasized the organization’s mission and aligned the opportunities for impact by the employees.
• Update and extend the new-hire onboarding program including messaging and approach, and train hiring managers immediately to follow the program and align with leadership messages, themes and, especially, opportunities for impact.
• Create a timeline for adding select best practices identified as missing to the organization’s program.
• Add onboarding and retention metrics to hiring managers’ goals and performance measures, and articulate the career framework to the hiring managers as one not driven exclusively by HR, but as an organizational priority.
The CEO and CHRO understood that the changes necessary would take months to implement, and that the cultural shift would take that much longer. So milestones were developed and shared with the entire organization, and they were linked to hiring practices and the new onboarding platform as it developed. The organization also committed to ongoing monitoring through employee surveys and focus groups over the coming years to identify necessary tweaks and to help determine if the cultural shift and new onboarding experience were helping to improve the retention issue with new hires.
In order to manage the changes with the resources available — in essence, to not bite off more than they could chew — consideration of onboarding 2.0 practices would be postponed to the first annual review of the revised program.
In an upcoming Part 2, we'll explore highlights of the first-year analysis and understand what is coming into focus as onboarding 2.0 evolves.
