Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.
—Henry Ford
In the olden days of training, we used to talk about “getting them before they have teeth”—bringing on new people whose ideas and attitudes were open and unencumbered by a lot of bad habits and experiences.
• At that early stage of their job tenure, they were much more likely to accept our rationale for doing things in a certain way.
• If, however, we waited months, even years, before we started to try to build their Knock Your Socks Off Service skills, we often had the same kind of challenge orthodontists face when patients wait until they are adults before trying to do something about a gaptoothed grin.
Today we are committed to the importance of starting employees off with more than just the right technical skills. Marcia J. Hyatt, former director of employee development for CenterPoint Energy, a natural gas distribution firm, said it well when we first interviewed her on the topic. “If we believe employees treat customers the way they themselves are treated,” she said, “then isn’t it critical that we are as careful about the first impression we make on new employees as we expect them to be of the first impression they make on customers?”
If you believe, as we do, that actions often speak louder than words, then it is critical that we think about the entire new employee orientation process as carefully as we think about the basic program’s content. Just as with our customers, we have to manage our people’s initial experiences with the organization. Those first moments of truth on the new job can set the tone for years to come; they can, in fact, determine whether the new employee has a long tenure with the organization or will have packed and departed in short order and been replaced by another in an unending succession of slot fillers and seat warmers.
What message do we send to the new employees who report for the first day of a new job, only to find their supervisor and most of their new peer group absent, out of town, in meetings, or otherwise occupied? What values are we communicating when we drop them off in their new cubicle, e-mail them a hyperlink to the new employee manual on the company intranet site, and bury them with administrative and benefit forms?
The message isn’t that the organization views them as a valuable resource—it’s that they are simply the latest warm body to fill a seat and are to be moved as cost-efficiently as possible down the orientation assembly line. Yet plenty of research shows how effective good orientation can be at reducing avoidable turnover of new hires:
• Companies that provide a well-structured, comprehensive orientation can reduce turnover by up to 50 percent within two years, according to a study by Deliver the Promise, a consulting firm based in San Anselmo, California. The investment needed to build effective orientation programs pales in comparison to the high costs of turnover, the study found.
• A study at a large computer company demonstrated that the time for new people to reach full productivity shrank from five months to three months for employees who had been carefully oriented to the company in general and their job and department in particular.
Perhaps the best-known example of turning the new employee orientation program into a sophisticated process with far-reaching consequences is the Traditions course at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Every new employee who goes to work “at the park” is a graduate, whether they’re going to be wearing badges that say Guest Relations or operating a broom and a dustbin.
The Traditions course is visible evidence of the extraordinary care that Disney takes to make sure that new employees understand the culture, values, and expectations of the organization. In the Disney vernacular, the world consists of only two classes of people: the “guests” who visit the park and the “cast members” who work there. In the Disney approach, new hires get a rare dose of reality as part of the new-employee orientation process. They’re shown, in detail, how hot, tired, and cranky guests are capable of behaving—and misbehaving—and given an introduction to the ways the organization expects them to handle that important part of their job.
An equally far-reaching, although less obvious, part of the orientation of new cast members is the way they are treated during the orientation program—and indeed, the care with which the whole orientation process is structured. The Traditions program is carefully scripted and conducted in a comfortable, specially designed Traditions training room. Instructors are well aware that they are setting the tone for the way these new hosts and hostesses will treat guests when they make their first on-stage appearances. They’re upbeat but realistic, supportive but challenging.
Other organizations combine special treatment for new hires with an early dose of service-related training. At some Fairmont Hotel and Resort properties, employees arriving for their first day on the job have their cars valet parked or receive vouchers for a free night’s stay at a property. Others wear bathing suits during orientation to experience the spa’s exfoliating showers and mineral baths. The on-boarding program, designed to help new hires experience what guests go through—and to make them feel like VIPs in those highly impressionable first days on the job—is a result of focus groups that identified “showing empathy” as a key way for Fairmont to separate itself from competitors.40
What makes a first-rate new employee orientation program tick? Human resource and training managers say some of the best programs share these features:
1. They avoid the day one “information dump.” The last thing people want on the first day of a new job, when excitement is at its peak, is to spend most of it filling out forms and reading benefit information. Shrewd companies have new employees complete these administrative tasks, as well as set up e-mail accounts and passwords, in advance of their first day. Rather than bury new hires in paperwork, they seek to maximize interaction with coworkers and bosses on day one, as well as familiarize them with the building layout. Some of the most successful orientation programs pair new employees with a “buddy” for the first few weeks to show them the ropes and help them begin building a social network.
Realizing that information overload is a real problem on day one—and that retention of content is often low due to nervousness or distractions—more companies are opting for a staggered approach to on-boarding. They hold a series of orientation meetings over the first month or two of a new hire’s tenure to focus on different topics and give people more time to digest material and to develop greater breadth of understanding about the organization.
2. They make orientation the joint responsibility of human resources (HR) and line managers. Specifically, the most effective on-boarding programs maintain that HR should take responsibility for communicating information of organization-wide, relevant-to-all-new-employees nature, whereas supervisors should concentrate on issues unique to the employee’s workplace and job. The job-specific training typically starts a day or two after the initial HR orientation.
3. They effectively manage the expectations of new employees. Two industrial psychologists, Kenneth N. Wexley of Michigan State University and Gary P. Latham, a Seattle-based consultant, found in their research that new employees, particularly those in first jobs, often have unrealistically high expectations about the amount of challenge and responsibility they will have on the job. Organizations, they suggest, must either make entry-level jobs more challenging or align new-hire expectations from the “get go.” There is a good argument that this kind of realistic expectation setting should begin even before orientation, in the selection process. It should continue through their initial experiences with the supervisor once they start doing the job.
Wexley and Latham have data to support the wisdom of making anxiety reduction one of the goals of an orientation program. They report that in an experiment at Texas Instruments, several groups of new employees went through a special six-hour, question-and-answer, give-and-take, getting-to-know-the-company session in addition to a traditional corporate orientation program. The focus was placed on understanding the “real ropes” of the organization and what to expect from the boss and peers on the job the next day. A year later, they found that these employees had learned their jobs faster and had higher production and lower absence rates than did employees who had gone through a more traditional new-hire orientation.
The hiring process may be all about survival of the fittest, but as you move from selection to orientation, it’s important to leave the Darwinian mindset behind and begin thinking more in terms of adoption, or how you can best assimilate new hires into existing groups. Consider using the ADOPT acronym as a guide as you develop or tweak your orientation process for improved results:
Affirm the new employee for making the wise decision to be part of your organization or team.
Debrief the new employee for service insights. New employees enter your organization with “fresh eyes” that allow them to see things in your service delivery system that grizzled veterans might miss or discount as “part of the furniture.” As the proverb says, a guest sees more in an hour than the host in a year. Asking for new hires’ input also sends an early message that you value their opinions.
Orient your new hires to the values, standards, vision, and norms of the organization, not simply policies, procedures, and benefits. People want to know what the organization stands for and how they should tailor their behavior to best support that mission.
Partner the new employee with someone from outside his or her work group to show them the ropes beyond their unit and act as a “big brother or sister” for a few weeks.
Tribe. Borrowing from a Native American tradition that gave young braves a special task or challenge to mark their readiness to join the tribe, identify an assignment or project that a new hire can perform that has special meaning and makes a contribution to the team. It’s critical that there is real work ready and waiting for people after the “Hi, how are ya? Glad you’re gonna be with us!” stuff is over.
“Nothing is more frustrating to someone full of enthusiasm for a new job than sitting around stacking paper clips,” say researchers Wexley and Latham.
There is an old shibboleth that states: “Well begun is half done.” When it comes to getting a new employee off on the right foot and tracking with your organization’s service focus, well begun is a lot more than half done. It may well be the most important first impression you can make.
An employee is never more focused, malleable, and teachable than the first day on the job.
—Horst Schulze
CEO of Capella Hotels and
Founder of Ritz-Carlton Hotels