Number 1 Fatal Mistake HR Pros Make: Foolishly Believing Orientation Equals Onboarding

Why One Day of Paperwork and Policy Videos Isn’t the Same as Integrating New Hires Into Your Organization

Employee Recruitment is Only the First Step

Recruitment and selection are sometimes tedious and time-consuming. But you keep at it, doing the hard work of the recruitment process, gathering information and advertising to fill the open spots. Your boss told you to hire “X-Number” of employees for multiple roles, and you found them. That’s fantastic! The steps of the hiring process you’ve laid out as an HR professional are as follows:

• Application
• Resume or Application Screening
• Telephone Screening Interview
• In-Person Interview
• Drug Testing
• Offer
• Acceptance

OK, you’ve hired and moved on to a start date for the new employees, and you’ve got a room full of people who need to complete their paperwork and watch a handful of videos on company history, safety and drug avoidance. When that was done, you turned them over to their new supervisors, who showed them their work area and, perhaps, how to log on and set up passwords on the network.

Is your work done from an HR standpoint? Have you given the new employees the best chance of success in your organization? This article aims to answer whether a generic orientation meeting is enough to ensure retention and first-engagement morale.

Our Talent Acquisition System is Broken

The recruitment and selection process looks different per the business. But a common theme runs throughout the entire talent acquisition system in America. Competition breeds competence and excellence in human resources employees. The skills required to contact, set up and conduct the interview take time to master, and many have done so. But turnover is rife. The retention problem may not always rest on HR’s shoulders alone.

Often, upper management — CEOs or owners — don’t feel the need to go further than the status quo. “Why should we do anything else? We hire intelligent people. They’ll figure it out!” This quote may be something you’ve heard before. Perhaps you’ve had it said about you, too. And while it’s nice that the people in charge believe you’re an intelligent employee, think about how difficult the first few weeks are for any new worker.

According to Computerworld :

“New employees who start a job feeling undertrained and disconnected from their work environment are far more likely to quit than those who have a good onboarding experience.”

Perhaps the entire recruitment cycle is a broken one. What can we do?

The American Employee Journey

Like the hiring process steps for employers, an employee journey contains milestones. It begins with the words, “You’re hired.” Those words mark Milestone Number One. And every employee milestone carries weight and creates, reinforces or changes the worker’s perception of the company and their place in it. Here is a sample list of milestones for the average employee:

• Hired
• Onboarded
• Passed 90-Days
• Received a Raise
• Promoted
• Received Second Raise
• Avoided Layoff Scare
• Changed Roles
• Received Third Raise
• Promoted Second Time with Raise
• Retired

While some of these steps look different for all of us, a few are pretty important. The raises may or may not happen in sequence. Nor the promotions. And, hopefully, the layoff scare doesn’t enter the picture. But position changes are common, as are several other specific-to-the-company possibilities. But Onboarding is perhaps a more significant milestone than any other, sans Hiring. Without it, the employee probably won’t see any other milestones.

And yet we fail in many businesses to address the new hire’s first REAL on-the-job experience. Why? Especially when it’s so critical to their success and job satisfaction!

The Onboarding Process Gone Wrong

Companies don’t set out to ruin a new hire’s future with them. It’s not a deliberate act, albeit it looks like one. And it feels like one to the worker going through it. Definitions of our two terms may be helpful here:

• Orientation: A process of introduction wherein new hires are given information regarding the organization and their fit within it.
• Onboarding: The process of integrating new hires into their positions step by step until an acceptable comfort level is obtained and satisfactory work is produced.

What does your particular organization do for newly hired employees? Do you mimic what far too many companies do and show some outdated or mind-numbingly boring videos that leave them in a fog with the strength left only to sign their documents? To be fair, there are legal departments to satisfy as well as liability concerns, so a need exists for the very things you’re doing.

But what happens next? Are they sent home? Or, maybe handed to their new supervisor, who shows them to their cubicle? Do they leave with more questions than they came in with?

If that’s all that’s being done before they come in the next day, expected to plug in and work, you’ve already lost a portion of them. And you won’t get them back. That means you’ve wasted all the time and effort recruiting and hiring them. On top of that, now you need to start over and find their replacements from a dwindling pool of qualified candidates.

And you’ll lead a new group through another orientation in two days. Yikes!

Lost and Found?

Let’s look at it from the new hire’s perspective. You’re excited and proud to have a new job. Glad you were one of the chosen applicants and grateful to your new benefactor in difficult economic times. So you dutifully show up for orientation as requested.?

Sure, it drags a little, and if you’ve been in the workforce for years, the information isn’t new. But that’s OK. You’re eager to learn all you can as fast as you can. And when it’s over, you meet your supervisor, who runs over a few things, shows you to your workstation and helps you log onto your company computer.?

Then it’s back home. You’ll start your first full day tomorrow, so you get a good night’s sleep and wake up ready to tackle the new day. But the new day ends up tackling you.?

It was a terrible first day, from not understanding how the time clock works to having login problems to having people talking all around you without introductions to expecting you to answer questions on a topic you know very little about. Your only solace was knowing that the first few days can be overwhelming, so you held out hope for a better Day Two.

But Day Two was worse. There was a meeting, and the CEO walked in demanding to know what your name and job title were. He did it in a loud and intimidating manner, too. The parking lot was confusing, and you had to go to a department you didn’t know how to find and ask someone something about your time card.

Tick, tick, tick.

You’ve been there three weeks now and feel lost about your duties, expectations and how the culture works. You don’t know many people’s names or titles, and you don’t know who to ask when your supervisor isn’t there. So you do what too many new employees do — go on Indeed, hoping a new job can be found fast!

Finding a new job is probably your best hope. Maybe there, the onboarding process will be better…after all, it couldn’t be much worse.

Onboarding Done Right

You understand the recruitment cycle as an HR professional, but onboarding seems out of your control. And to a degree, you’re right. It’s not on human resources to onboard everyone from the mailroom to the corporate suites. Is it? The answer is YES and NO.

According to eloomi:

“...great onboarding boosts employee experience and can increase retention by 50% .”

There are four generally-recognized phases of employee onboarding:

• Preboarding: Phase ONE: The first day is the correct time to hand out the documentation, show the videos, get the signatures, explain policies and give any extra resources to the new hire that may help them feel comfortable — basic information such as dress codes, where pertinent things are located, how payday is handled and more.
• ?Onboarding: Phase TWO: Phase TWO is a company-accepted space of time (usually a few days to a week) to allow the employee’s transition to go smoothly. Phase TWO should not include demands on job expectations. During this phase, introductions to management and key individuals should be warm and friendly. Integration into company culture is the goal of phase two. Think of it as the “Getting-to-know-you” phase.
• Training: Phase THREE: This is the most critical phase and should be done with one-on-one mentoring when possible. Workshops, seminars and a dedicated experienced employee should be made available. Clear job expectations, as well as what the company offers the employee, are done now. Employee engagement and the freedom to ask “dumb” questions should be limitless in Phase THREE.
• Transition: Phase FOUR: The shadowing by an experienced employee ends, and the new hire slowly sees more responsibility come their way. The fourth and last phase finds the new hire adjusting to the position and culture. If all goes well, you have a new, successful contributor. But if problems arise, don’t give up on the employee you’ve already invested time, money, and effort into.

Sometimes, minor adjustments to the work environment or specific tasks must be made. Don’t be afraid to experiment to see what works best, and don’t neglect interpersonal relationships or underestimate their importance to all employees' health, well-being and productivity, including the nube.

Morale is based on these work relationships, as is the ability of one worker to make suggestions to another without fear or anger. FOUR is the most prolonged phase. Its overall success depends on management allowing the new workers the freedom to do their jobs and trusting them to manage their time and tasks without undue interference.?

If all goes well, you’ve successfully onboarded the most vital tool in the company’s belt: a contented, motivated human being with interpersonal threads crisscrossing the entire organization. Sadly, too many businesses undervalue this asset and believe they are easily replaceable. [SPOILER ALERT: THEY’RE NOT]

Onboarding Wins by KO

You can see the difference between Onboarding and Orientation. One makes solid employees happy in their work, while the other does not. But remember that onboarding does little good if a toxic culture exists. If the poisons of Theory-X management, distrust, intimidation, and micromanaging run through the veins of your organization, you’ll need to address these first.?

It’s a fact that many business leaders still haven’t grasped the concept that contented employees, given even the slightest praise, work far harder and more conscientiously than ones under a fear-based system who receive threats.

But once you have a solid foundation to build on, you can begin the onboarding process. The new hires will tell others who will become new hires, who will tell others, ad infinitum. And the good vibes created from the top of the corporate ladder to the latest employee will reap an additional harvest: PROFITS.