First
Minutes are Critical in New Employee Orientation
Employee orientation programs ought
to be less about the company and more about the employee, according to new
research by Daniel M. Cable, Francesca Gino, and Bradley R. Staats.
The first few minutes of new
employee orientation, if done right, can lead to happier and more productive
workers and, ultimately, increased customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, a lot
of companies do it wrong.
In many firms, employee orientation
focuses solely on corporate culture and identity of the new workplace. There's
a lecture about the firm's history and another about standard operating
procedures. There's a packet of information from human resources, emblazoned
with the firm's logo, and maybe a coffee mug to match.
The underlying message: Welcome. You
should be proud to work here. Please fit in accordingly.
But research suggests that employee
orientation ought to be less about the company and more about the employee. In
their paper "Breaking Them In or Eliciting Their Best? Reframing
Socialization around Newcomers' Self-expression," published in the March
2013 Administrative Science Quarterly, a research team finds that
shifting the focus to an employee's personal identity leads to an increase in both
employee retention and customer satisfaction.
"Organizations will talk about
recruiting from outside the company because they need new ideas and new blood,
but then there is this tendency to shut off the new and basically transfer the
corporate culture over to the new employee," says Francesca Gino, an
associate professor at Harvard Business School who cowrote the paper with
Daniel M. Cable of London Business School and Bradley R. Staats (HBS MBA '02,
DBA '09) of the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School.
"It was interesting for us to think about how part of your identity seems
to go away as you go through that process."
“It was interesting for us to think about how part of your
identity seems to go away as you go through [the orientation] process.”
Previous studies have shown that
employees are especially productive and happy when employers encourage them to
use their individual signature strengths on the job, but historically those
studies did not consider the employee onboarding process, Gino says. The
researchers hypothesized that companies would see positive performance results
by emphasizing employee individuality from day one, testing their hypothesis
through a series of field and lab experiments.
For starters, they conducted a field
study at Wipro, a major business process outsourcing company based in
Bangalore, India, that provides telephone and chat support for its global
customers. Traditionally, Wipro's orientation for call center employees
consisted of an informational session about the company, followed by several
weeks of training in which new call agents) must demonstrate proficiency in
English, as well as an aptitude for following standard procedures during
customer calls.
Individuality was not just
discounted; in some ways it was expressly discouraged. "As a service role,
the job can be stressful, not only because employees must help frustrated
customers with their problems, but because Indian call center employees are
often expected to 'de-Indianize' many elements of their behavior—for example,
by adopting a Western accent and attitude," the paper explains.
Wipro was dealing with a big dropout
dilemma; more than half of its call center employees quit only a few months
after training. "Wipro presented us with the problem of figuring out
whether there was anything we could do to reduce turnover," Gino says.
"We thought it was the perfect environment to test whether we could make a
difference just by changing something minor in the onboarding process."
Identity
experiments
In the field experiment, the
researchers divided batches of new call agents into an individual identity
group, an organizational identity group, and a control group. The control group
went through the traditional process, focused on firm awareness and skills
training. The two identity groups received the same training as the control
group, but also an additional hour-long presentation, which varied according to
the group.
For the individual identity
condition, a senior leader at Wipro spent 15 minutes discussing ways in which
working at the company would enable the newcomers to express their
individuality. Next, the new call agents completed an exercise ranking the
individual strengths they would exhibit if stranded on a life raft at sea; they
also spent time considering how their responses might differ from their
colleagues'. Then, the agents answered a series of questions about their
individual strengths such as, "What is unique about you that leads to your
happiest times and best performance at work?" Finally, the agents shared
their strengths with their future officemates.
At the end of the session, employees
in the individual identity group received fleece sweatshirts embroidered with
their individual names, along with a name badge. They were asked to wear them
for the duration of employee training.
For the organizational condition,
new employees spent 15 minutes listening to a senior Wipro leader and a
"star performer" at the company talk about why Wipro was a singular
place to work. Next, the newcomers spent 15 minutes writing answers to
questions such as, "What did you hear about Wipro today that you would be
proud to tell your family about?" Finally, the group members discussed
their answers with each other.
At the end of the session, employees
in the organizational identity group received fleece sweatshirts embroidered
with the company name, along with a badge. They were asked to wear them
for the duration of employee training.
Seven months later, the researchers
looked into whether the orientation changes affected how long the
newcomers/agents chose to stay with the company. "Considering we just
changed one hour on the first day of orientation, the results were
amazing," Gino says.
The turnover rate in the control
group was 47.2 percent higher than that of the individual identity group, and
16.2 percent higher than that of the organizational identity group. And
turnover was 26.7 percent higher in the organizational identity condition than
in the individual identity condition. Additionally, employees in the individual
identity group had garnered higher customer satisfaction scores during the
seven months than those in the control group.
To further study the reasons behind
the findings, the researchers conducted a similar experiment in the controlled
environment of a university lab. They recruited 175 college students for a
three-hour study, conducted over two consecutive days. The students were told
at the start that they would be working on a series of tasks, including data
entry. All participants completed day one of the study (receiving $35 for their
trouble). They were given the choice of whether to return on the second day (in
which case they'd receive an additional $15).
As with the field experiment, some
participants were placed in a control group, others engaged in activities that
stressed individuality (creating personalized nametags, for example), and some
focused on the identity of the organization (such as creating a logo for the
research lab).
After the experiments, participants
filled out a short questionnaire about their experience in the lab, indicating
their level of agreement with statements such as, "Within this research
team, I felt like a distinctive person." These were meant to measure what
the researchers call "authentic self-expression."
Lab participants in the
individuality group reported higher levels of authentic self-expression than
those in the organizational group. Individuality group participants also
performed better and faster on data-entry tasks than those in the other groups.
Furthermore, those in the individuality group were much more likely to return
to the lab on the second day, indicating that the opportunity for
self-expression is indeed directly related to employee retention.
Lessons
for businesses
For employers, the implications of
the findings are pretty clear: "Given that the standard,
organization-focused approach of employee socialization is so common, it would
benefit managers to think about an alternative approach where there's more room
for newcomers' self-expression, Gino says. "This is a pivotal stage of the
employee/employer relationship, and there are ways to emphasize people's
individuality so they can bring it out into their jobs. To Wipro's credit,
after seeing the results of the study, the company redesigned its employee
orientation process such that personal identity socialization is a part of
it."
Carmen Nobel is senior editor of Harvard Business School Working
Knowledge. 1APR13
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