Mindbeat’s head of client and product development, Jessica Bellwood discusses the importance of strategic onboarding and reveals plans for new research into attrition.
After weeks of trawling through CVs and interviewing candidates, you’ve finally landed your perfect hire. You made the right choice but what happens next will determine if that individual flourishes within your organisation or, like around 40% of recruits, decides to quit within a few months.
It’s a commonly held belief that finding and recruiting a new employee takes 40 days on average and costs businesses upwards of 35% of an employee’s annual salary. So seeing new hires resign, in the knowledge that you’ll need to start over the recruitment process, is both a huge time waste and a financial migraine that all companies could currently do without.
The first 90 days in the life of a new hire are therefore crucial.
Since the pandemic, companies have spent too much time and energy on knee-jerk responses to headline-grabbing trends such as the ‘Great Resignation’ or ‘Quiet Quitting’ and not enough on ensuring that their onboarding strategies are carefully planned and fit for purpose.
The consequence is high attrition and new employees left ill-prepared to understand their roles within teams, navigate team dynamics, and even indoctrinate themselves into the new company culture.
Onboarding, or helping new hires adjust to social and performance aspects of their jobs quickly and smoothly, is the very first building block for better retention, efficiency and overall business performance.
Programmes vary across those organisations that do it well, with some offering complex and detailed ‘assimilation’ frameworks and others providing checklists and coaches to help analyse workplace situations and prospects for new employees.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, onboarding best practices can be distilled into four Cs – Compliance, Clarification, Culture and Connection.
Compliance is the policy-related rules and regulations you’d expect to learn about when starting a new role. Whereas, the other three focus on how a new starter gets to grips with all related expectations around their role, how they settle in and how they establish interpersonal relationships.
Here at Mindbeat, we talk a lot about an additional C – Confidence.
Let’s look at the levers you can pull as an organisation to keep attrition rates low by actioning these Cs, plus how coaching contributes to building stronger employee engagement and commitment during someone’s first 90 days in a new job.
Clarification
Ensure that employees understand their new job. If expectations are ambiguous, their performance will suffer.
The role of the hiring manager is key to ensuring that the job description is an accurate representation of the ‘actual job’.
Around one in four people say they left a job because it wasn’t what they had expected. Provide clarity on both the day-to-day role and what success will look like in their first three months.
Culture
A welcoming and open company culture will encourage new hires to help themselves during their first 90 days by making time to chat with colleagues, mixing socially, participating in company activities and displaying proactive behaviours such as asking questions and seeking feedback.
An external or in-house onboarding coach will discuss how the individual fits in socially and facilitate questions and appraisals with line managers.
Connection
Line managers play an important role by helping newcomers adjust to their new workplace environment and by providing feedback, advice and further opportunities for learning and development.
This also helps employees build trusted relationships with their line managers so that once the 90-day onboarding is complete, the Connection bond is made.
Confidence
Just as you were confident that you made the right choice when hiring, it’s paramount that each recruit quickly establishes self-confidence to aid their performance.
Self-efficacy has been shown to have a significant impact on organisational commitment, job satisfaction and even turnover.
A coach will help new hires prepare for their onboarding orientation even before they start by bolstering self-confidence and helping to overcome any challenges individuals may be encountering.
Onboarding a key retention strategy
Developing the coaching skills of line managers and using an onboarding coaching programme are vital for keeping new hire attrition rates low, so long as they’re offered as one element of a larger plan, have total buy-in from management, and are done in conjunction with the little things – like senior leadership taking new employees out for lunch and team leaders ensuring their first day is a positive one.
With organisations increasingly unable to afford the spiralling cost of high employee turnover, and more than half of exiting employees surveyed by Gallup admitting their managers could have done more to prevent them from leaving, effective onboarding will be a key retention strategy for the foreseeable future.
It’s something that here at Mindbeat and out in the coaching field, we’re keen to track and share insights on, to better understand the impact of how company strategies evolve.
With this in mind, we’re currently conducting research on new hire attrition and approaches to onboarding. If you’d like to take part and share your organisational insight, let us know and we’ll be in touch.
In the meantime, reach out and talk to us about how our coaching network can help improve your new hire experiences.