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 

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:

• 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.