Induction Program : Needs and ways to reboot our archaic methods of induction.

Soldiers in US Army after returning from Vietnam and Iraq at respective period of times reported post war trauma and had to be treated for anxiety and depression for a prolonged period of time. Movie stars and sports celebrities have undergone stress and anxiety when they were not in positions of prominence or when they were in oblivion. The digital age of today quite easily forgets the stars of yesterday and moves on to “which name sells the most today” and trust me public memory is quite subservient and dependent on the digital media today.

What is the point?? The point is drawing a very critical analogy between what has happened to veterans of Gulf War, to celebrities who are now in oblivion and between the people that join new companies.  The underlying characteristic is the sub conscious mind, which can play havoc even in the minds of the most disciplined person. The sub conscious mind tends to bring back memories in such a way that anyone can start or actually starts comparing his/her past with the present. Trauma appears when there is an absence of alignment between the past and the present. 

What can an Organization take-away from preceding two paragraphs?? What is the first point or rather first event of contact when someone joins an Organization?? Obviously it’s the Induction program, which can range from a day to a month depending upon an Organization’s complexity, design and its purpose. On an average what is an Induction program and what it does?? It is highly informative and highly factual. It makes a new joinee aware of the laundry list of policies of HR and the coordinates of the people in Admin, IT support and HR who will be needed in almost every phase of that new joinee’s life cycle in the Organization. There are some Organizations, which do talk about the strategic landscape during induction. So the new joinee through a one or two days of induction walks into his/her cubicle/cabin and is expected to perform from day one. The expectation from day one, of course, after induction is that the new joinee turned into an employee will start delivering. Does this sound real because there are a lot of assumptions behind this expectation. The first and foremost assumption is that the new joinee is consciously aware of what he has signed up for? The second one is that he/she will not compare his/her past  experiences with his /her present moment of truth in the new Organization and the third one is that he/she  has chosen consciously his/her new Organization.

All the three assumptions are false and transient. They cannot stand the test of veracity and time. The challenge, thus, before Business HR is to think in the contemporary context and to come up with ways and means to address situations in a highly stressed environment. Please remember that we are living in an age where mental disorder, anxiety and stress are very ubiquitous. In India especially in tier-2 and tier-3 town’s people leave their Organizations for an incremental salary of 3000-4000 INR per month and it appears, per se, that these people leave their Organizations for such marginal increase in their earning potential but the fact remains elusive. These people, most of the times, do not leave for money but for the reasons on a psychological context. They justify, to themselves, their decisions to exit by getting a relatively higher salary. They leave because their boss is cruel (another reason for inculcating Developmental Orientation among first level of leadership), there is no one for skip-level consultation, there is prevalence of cronyism to a great extent and the Organization doesn’t care for them. I can articulate these inherent reasons but a Sales Manager in Bhilai or Patna, for example, cannot articulate these reasons because he is young, na?ve and probably doesn’t know the alignment between inherent chaos and what the industry wants to hear as ,’reasons for looking out for change”.

What is the most important criterion for high performance? It’s the alignment between an employee’s thoughts, his/her assumptions and Organization’s culture. If the Organization strongly believes that satisfaction or happiness of customer is of supreme importance even on the cost of profitability and if, let’s say , a newly inducted key account manager has been subjected to performance reviews based on the profitability from his/her accounts then there will be a mismatch. The Organization where this manager worked earlier also nurtured customer’s satisfaction but had different assumptions. Those assumptions were based on the reasoning that only a satisfied customer can give revenue enough to generate profitability and if the account is profitable then the customer must be satisfied. In these two cases different assumptions lead to different cultural artifacts. The new Organization looks outward and works backward i.e. it strives to make the customer happy first and foremost and then works on backward integration….same way as Steve jobs used to talk about connecting the dots though in a different context. The previous Organization used to look inward towards its P&L and then work towards satisfying a customer to the extent the P&L would allow. Diving deep into the assumptions differentiate between the two cultures more vividly.

The newly inducted manager will not be able to change overnight because in all possibilities he/she may not be consciously aware of his/her underlying reasoning mentioned in the preceding paragraph. This manager will face problems not on account of performance but on account of the misalignment between his/her own thoughts and the Organization’s imperatives. He/she while working will unconsciously confront Organization’s culture on a daily basis and if he/she leads a team, which is if relatively tenured in the Organization then it’s a recipe for disaster. The danger lies in the fact that everything for initial one-two years will appear to be normal because the numbers will be in green zone and numbers can be illusory if not contextualized but eventually such misalignments will manifest itself in a big crisis in the same way when mental problems, if not treated for long, manifest themselves in the form of diseases, sometimes deadly ones, such as cancer.

It’s good to observe that business leaders, CFOs and CEOs, even the most number oriented leaders have started acknowledging the following:

1.      Sustainable growth cannot be actualized without an appropriate culture.

2.      Talent Management has to be, in entirety, aligned with culture and it should be a perfect artifact of culture.

3.      Change Management will have to be embedded in Organization’s tactics as well as strategy on an ongoing basis and

4.      Coaching is no more a fad but it’s going to be the new way through which Organization’s objectives can be imbibed.

An out of box thinking is required to create an alignment between Employee’s Value Proposition and Organization’s Value Proposition and Induction can be a stepping stone towards that pursuit. It’s time we start relooking at our Induction Program with the following questions in mind:

1.       To what extent a new joinee is made aware of Organization’s culture through Induction?

2.      Can, along with power point presentations, case studies of Organization’s success and failure be incorporated in Induction?

3.      Do we want to present a realistic picture of glories and setbacks or we want to present the Organization as utopia?

4.      Should we communicate the methodology of Performance Review or the philosophy behind the review?

5.      Should we emphasize on Dress Code or we want to explain that we need to be perceived as serious professionals who mean business?

6.      Should we show a vision statement and our values on a slide or we supplement the slide with videos reflecting upon what have we been doing to achieve the vision, why our core values so important to us and how have we, even in turbulent times, not compromised our core values?

7.      Can we articulate our ideals on job? Examples – we allow failures till we learn from those, we are fine with adequate or at times less than adequate performance but we are not ok with even a little compromise on integrity.

8.      Do we have a clear-cut, easy to explain plan to enrich employees both financially and individually including competencies?

9.      What is our area of focus, building an Organization of repute or building an Organization, which can be stock market’s poster boy?? We don’t need to be absolutely forthcoming about this but we can subtly express our aspirations as both the aspirations are good enough and there is no need of being judgmental here.

The above questions can be food for thought on creating an Induction, which is not only informative and factual and is carried out perfunctorily but also a platform to align a new joinee to the underlying assumptions and artifacts of culture .the purpose should be to help the new joinee, from day one, explore and unravel the iceberg’s portions, which are invisible and underneath the water.

Another novel method of aligning a new joinee with Organization’s culture can be coaching. For mid-level and senior positions coaching can be initiated the moment a candidate accepts the offer. In the time period acceptance of offer and actual on boarding , through coaching to a great extent, an employee’s past cultural influence can be neutralized and he can be , possibly, turned into a very potent performer in the new culture. As such the moment a person resigns his/her emotional ties with the present Organization is severed and unconsciously he/she is ready to embrace a new partner (read new employer) and at this stage he /she is most receptive to coaching.

HR and Business leaders will have to think of new ways to create alignment between an individual and an Organization, which is predominantly an interaction between individuals.