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ATD Blog

End the New Hire “Honeymoon Is Over” Blues

Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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According to the 2008 research paper Driving Continuous Results Through Engagement published by Watson Wyatt “engagement drops nine percent after the first six months and continues to drop after that.” As engagement declines, so does productivity, initiative, discretionary effort, and overall performance.

Cost of ineffective onboarding

The steady decline of engagement is not the only cost of ineffective onboarding. For some employees, the onboarding experience is so disappointing, they  experience “buyer’s remorse” almost immediately and leave their new employer for more promising opportunities. The Onboarding Benchmark Report, published in 2006 by the Aberdeen Group, reports that 90 percent of employees make the decision to stay or leave within the first six months.

The cost of ineffective onboarding goes beyond the cost of disengagement and turnover, though. As anyone who remembers their own new employee experience can attest, ineffective onboarding extends the amount of time it takes to become a productive contributor.

Indeed, better onboarding means new employees provide economic value sooner. For instance, in an onboarding study conducted by the staffing company Randstad, upgrading the existing onboarding program increased revenues generated by account executives by nearly 500 percent.

Dial in to new hires 

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Think back to when you’ve been a new hire. You didn’t want to be seen as high maintenance or difficult, so you learned to make the best of an obstacle-laden, performance-hampering onboarding experience. As a result, your engagement level probably diminished—as does that of the average employee. More important, you didn’t get up to speed as quickly as you could have if you had been fully enabled. 

To prevent the inevitable engagement decline that occurs after the new hire honeymoon phase, organizations need to dial into the voice of each employee. Being “dialed in” means knowing how to engage each new employee in honest, open discussions about their goals and needs, their new hire experience, and their relationship with their manager.

The more honest and detail-rich the information you gather, the greater your ability to:

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  • get new hires up to speed as quickly as possible
  • help new hires feel a part of your organization and bond with peers (something extremely important to Gen Y employees)
  • lay the groundwork for a productive, engagement-enhancing relationship with their hiring manager.

Open discussions send an important, positive signal to the new employee. Just as certain words or actions can lead to a “turning down” of performance, these discussions have the opposite effect—they help new employees conclude that this kind of interest in their needs and goals deserves more than simply “adequate” performance.
While getting candid feedback from employees can be challenging in general, it is even more challenging to get honest, critical feedback from new hires. Managers are even less likely to hear frank, assertive requests from their new hires for resources and guidance than they would from long-term employees.

This requires more than random conversations, such as: “Hey, how’s everything going?” Getting useful, actionable information from new hires requires an even more advanced communication skillset than required to elicit useful information from long-term employees. It requires greater skill at cultivating the sense of safety from which clear, candid conversation can flow.

Tips for better onboarding

  • Amp up your education for hiring managers about the critical role they play in the onboarding process. Help them realize it’s time to stop outsourcing onboarding to HR. THEY are the key player in onboarding.
  • Educate your managers on what components of the employee experience they need “intel” on if they want to not only have happy, motivated employees, but also employees who are capable of performing at 100 percent as soon as possible.
  • Provide training and coaching for managers on how to facilitate candid conversations with their new hires, so they feel safe enough to give candid feedback.

We will discuss how to achieve more productive onboarding in the webcast End the New Hire Blues: How to Get The Critical Information You Need to Prevent Disengagement and Turnover. Join us October 6, 2014, at 1:00 p.m.

About the Author

David Lee is the founder of HumanNature@Work. He works with management teams interested in improving employee engagement, customer service, and morale. He has worked with organizations and presented at conferences both domestically and abroad. An internationally recognized thought leader in the field of employee engagement and performance, he is the author of of  Managing Employee Stress and Safety, the May 2012 Infoline "Powerful Storytelling Techniques," and nearly 100 articles and book chapters on topics related to employee performance, which have been published in trade journals and books in the United States, Europe, India, Australia, and China. Referred to as a “pioneer in the field of onboarding,” he authored one of the first industry whitepapers, as well as a chapter on this topic in the second edition of the business classic The Talent Management Handbook. 

About the Author

Jacob Schneid has 30 years’ experience as a trainer, coach and consultant in individual, work unit, and organizational improvement. His consulting practice, The Momentum Group (established in 1995), focuses on employee performance improvement and organizational measurement. He is a dynamic coach and trainer and has provided coaching to people at every level (ranging from executives to employees) and trained various audiences on a wide variety of topics. Over the past 20 years he has developed and implemented a variety of custom surveys on behalf of client organizations. These have included engagement surveys, employee surveys, customer surveys and surveys that assess an organization from the perspectives of all of its key stakeholders. He has had extensive involvement in interpreting survey results and presenting these to clients, and facilitating planning sessions and action teams focusing on implementing post-survey improvements. He has had a career-long interest in employee motivation and strengthening employee-manager relationships. As an outgrowth of this interest, he has developed a unique tool for improving the engagement of individual employees which has been successfully used in several leading Canadian companies.

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