The latest issue of Workforce Recruiting is out, and the focus is on a topic that’s easy to agree with, but hard to execute – the role of effective onboarding in driving increased retention and engagement.
So, here’s the question. Can an extended onboarding process that lasts a year drive better retention
and engagement? The answer is obviously yes, but as with many obvious answers…. the question is how?
HR can’t be the Love Boat onboarding police, and that’s the fundamental problem with onboarding that extends beyond the normal orientation period. You’re only as good in retention as your front-line managers allow you to be.
That’s especially true if you have a wide range of talents and capabilities among your most entry-level supervisors, which most of us do. Some managers naturally have the gift that comes with instincts and experience, while others struggle. So, it goes with their ability to retain employees.
So how do you effectively onboard, help maximize retention, and reduce voluntary turnover with your group of front-line supervisors?
The Workforce Institute recently released a whitepaper with multiple takes on the role of Front-line Managers in retaining hourly workers, including:
-Refusing to accept that there is nothing you can do to improve voluntary turnover (this would seem to be a call for structure in the onboarding process, related to formalizing the activities of managers in onboarding, acclimation and retention); and
-Measuring the performance of front-line managers with respect to their management of turnover (this would seem to motivate front line managers to comply with the onboarding structure you put in place – after all, what gets measured usually gets results).
So, putting an extended onboarding process in place is a good thing. But unless the front-line supervisors are helping to drive the activities, it won’t matter.
Hate to throw out the buzzword here, but reducing voluntary turnover while keeping pay and benefits the same probably comes back to whether you create high levels of engagement within your workforce.
For engagement, I read Zinger and Wright. One of the things I learned from Tim Wright on engagement was that in the average workforce, 29 percent of employees are engaged in their work, 54 percent are not engaged, and 17 percent are actively disengaged.
That suggests that one of the best ways for organizations to reduce voluntary turnover is to figure out a way to prevent new employees from migrating to the "not engaged" category. Every new employee comes into your organization engaged. How long they stay engaged depends on whether your workplace drives the following traits of engaged employees (from the Gallup G12):
- Consistent levels of high performance.
- Natural innovation and drive for efficiency.
- Intentional building of supportive relationships.
- Clear about the desired outcomes of their role.
- Emotionally committed to what they do.
- Challenge purpose to achieve goals.
- High energy and enthusiasm.
- Never runs out of things to do, create positive things to act on.
- Broaden what they do and build on it.
- Commitment to company, work group, and role.
Which ones can you impact as a company through onboarding to help reduce voluntary turnover? I bolded the ones I thought might be possibilities, through better performance management, communication, etc. Note that the best person to drive those activities, with coaching, training and support from you, is the employee’s manager/supervisor.
The ones that aren’t bolded? You probably need to figure these out at the point of hire, because they seem difficult to impact once the person is in your workforce….
You have stated the problem succinctly, but what of the solution?
In over 30 years of managing people, I made all the mistakes one can make but eventually learned effective solutions. These were so effective that I was able to successfully turn around four different management disasters the last being a 1300 person unionized group in New York City. Creativity, innovation, productivity, and morale literally went through the roof.
But I had started with the traditional top-down command and control approach to managing people. That approach, I eventually learned, was the definition of a disaster because it naturally demotivated and demoralized employees. After 12 years of using it and being my own worst enemy, I shifted over a period of years to a bottom up approach and experienced nirvana. This approach emphasizes meeting the needs of people, the most basic of these being the need to be heard and be respected. So the manager listens to employees and gives them what they say they need to do a better job.
It wasn’t until I listened to my employees that I actually realized how bad top-down was. If you want to better understand this bottom up approach, I invite you to read the articles at
http://www.bensimonton.com/articles.html
starting with the article “Leadership, Good or Bad”.
Best regards, Ben
Hmmmmmm. My thought is that if you select the right people as supervisors, train them, support them and evaluate them on the supervision part of the work, you might not have to worry about creating long term onboarding programs. The immediate boss, especially the first on a new hire encounters is going to have much greater impact on the engagement of the new hire than any program.
Wally – agree with onboarding as a band-aid to poor supervisor skills. It’s tough to say it all comes back to those skills of the supervisors and the chronic under-investment we make in them, but it’s true.
Same thing for the engagement thing in my post. Good supervisors have a higher % of employees who are engaged – without broad engagement programs….
Thanks for checking in…
KD