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4. Take time to integrate new team members.
For a long time, I didn’t think we needed to do anything special to integrate new employees. But as we grew, I noticed that new hires were spending an increasing amount of time trying to figure out how our internal processes and structures worked. And even worse, I would often talk to a new hire and find that she had accumulated a slew of questions, and she wasn’t sure whom she should ask.
Now, when a new hire starts at Stripe, we put a lot of work into helping her acclimatize and become as happy, productive and effective as possible. From day one, she is assigned an experienced employee to serve as a mentor. We ensure that lots of team members spend time with her, even if they don’t work directly with her. We aid her in exploring the space of possible projects she could work on, as well as spinning her up on the skills and tools needed to do the job.
There are several areas where I think HR and KM can work together.
In job interviews they identify candidates who demonstrate a propensity to share rather than hoard what they know. They look for candidates who maintain strong external professional networks that can be tapped into for knowledge and information.
In onboarding, they provide a map of what knowledge is critical to their business and where they can be found. Where tacit knowledge is concerned, they broker the necessary connections. They emphasise the employees’ role in updating staff profile and directory. By the same token they also stress “quality in, quality out” for information repositories.
That knowledge management is a line manager’s responsibility is promulgated through job descriptions. That knowledge sharing is an important competency is reinforced through competency frameworks.
In succession planning they help identify what knowledge the next cadre of leaders should possess, and figure out ways to bridge the knowledge gaps. They do this by reducing the responsibilities of would-be retirees and by tasking them to be mentors or coaches to their successors – with the blessing of top management of course.
Companies have a tendency to front-load the employee experience with the great expectations that will attract those workers to the organization and get them off to a good start. Then these companies seem to take their talent for granted. That is very risky behavior. As we see from survey after survey, a large percentage of employees are disengaged, which means they are not giving all they have to their work and their eyes are looking for greener pastures.
What do you do to re-recruit and re-engage your best employees?
Good practices can be summed up with three key lessons:
Connect People
Connect with Social Media (less hierarchical than other forms of communication).
Start the process as early as possible
It’s All About Culture
No matter what kind of company you run or work for, successfully onboarding new hires is important to your business and helps to shape and grow the corporate culture. Employees will always need resources and require training, and they want to be productive and look at the big picture. Lastly, they absolutely love to have fun. Therefore, it’s the HR department’s role to create a company culture that supports these things.
A group of HR executives recently shared a list of tactics they use in their on-boarding initiatives to get new employees integrated more quickly. All new employees:
· Are brought into the corporate office to experience the company culture. Big $ commitment.
· Are set up to do business their first day of work. When they arrive they find everything they need, from business cards and a nametags to a desk. You name it! Kind of a like a “goody box.”
· Are given a book about the company’s informal network: “how you really get things done around here.”
· Do a scavenger hunt on day one: self-guided tour. They may need to go get signatures from three directors, get a sign-off that they have talked to a non-accounting person about how to update your budget with accounting, and so forth. Or, do an on-line scavenger hunt to get critical information about the company.
· Have lunch set up with someone new every day the first week at work.
· Work one level down for a week to see how their work impacts others downstream.
· Have their pictures taken and posted along with employee events on a big screen monitor in the reception area.
· Have their name and photo posted in the elevator on their first day of employment.
· Get three letters: an offer letter, a letter of welcome sent to their home from HR, and a personal letter from the CEO talking about the company goals and values.
· Get a welcoming card from their department signed by all team members.
· Receive “Get To Know You” sheets that ask about what activities they like and how they would prefer to be recognized.
· Get paired up with a mentor.
· Get invited to a lunch with the Board.
· Get to see a very personal video featuring the founder of the organization (the video was put together in response to a contest in which employees were asked to submit video ideas).
"Go to the cafeteria, the break room and ask people to tell you stories," says Todd Hudson, founder of Maverick Institute, Portland Ore., which published the handbook, "My Personal Onboarding Plan: The New Hire's Guide to On-the-Job Success."
I asked a while back about great practices in hiring and welcoming new employees. I wonder if I can get more responses via Google+ ?
I know that there are no "best practices" in new hire development, also known as "onboarding", as each organization is unique and often rather complex. However, there are some practices that could make onboarding better in certain contexts. I've looked at several examples and am very interested in unique practices (outliers) beyond the corporate norm.
I'd appreciate any unique examples if you can share them.
Induction from the first day onwards can be radically re-designed and shortened if pre-joining learning activities are put in place. There can be significant savings in overall training time, of 50 per cent or more, where the induction experience focuses on application of knowledge and skills already acquired.
By extending the use of an online portal to include additional learning activities, further flexibility and personalisation of the induction experience can be achieved. This allows those, able and willing, to fast track themselves to a proven level of competency much faster than previously. While those needing additional support can be given the attention they need from the organisation's training and coaching staff.
To get really practical about this, one of the methods we created (Open Source and free, but this one is not documented yet so what follows is covered by a creative commons license) is to send people when they join an organisation on a treasure hunt. You give them some categories (A senior engineer with more than ten years experience, someone in accounts who has field experience) and tell them to gather in stories from those people. You don't give them names, they have to develop social networks to find them. Once they have gathered those stories, then, in front of their peers and after some training, they perform their own story, taking their own history, the stories of the elders and the current context to show how they stand in, not apart from the flow of history.
In effect that compresses around a year into 3-4 weeks. I got the idea from studying knowledge transfer in First Nation communities in Canada. Its a very different approach from trying to teach culture through explicit value and mission statements to which people can quickly learn linguistic conformance, but which they never really absorb.
I have been asking people, “How long after starting here did you feel you really knew the organisation and job you were doing?” Most people said it took them 12-18 months in a large organisation to really feel on top on things. Staff induction, therefore, needs to be more gradual and unfold over time as we experience the organisation we've joined. We need a slower and longer-term approach, one that better balances intellectual and emotional learning.
Here's how I reckon this might work.
Day 1—the basics of survival, security passes, floor plan, toilets, colleagues, managers, colleagues sitting down for coffee to let you know of the gotchas to avoid
Week 1—why you are here and how your work fits into the big picture, cycles of activities, people you need to know, show how to elicit stories from people, meet some of the people you need to know and get them to tell a story or two, where to find information such as policies and processes and the staff directory, team lunch
Month 1—how to get your expenses paid, stuff about pays, people you need to know, conversation about how to get ahead around here, know what managers to avoid, conversation with your manager about what you need to do to make a good contribution, understand the wider network (check out the social network charts)
Quarter 1—reflect of what you have achieved so far and discuss with your manager, ask “where do things happen here?”, understand your purpose and how it links to what the organisation is trying achieve, know who you can trust, have lunch and coffees with people, ask questions and stay curious.
Year 1—sit back and think about what you learnt, help a new employee get up and running, tell them your stories of how you started, wonder what you don't know,
W.L. Gore & Associates has been called the world’s most innovative company. For an introduction to Gore, and its weird but effective leadership model, see my previous post. Below, the second half of my recent interview with Gore’s CEO, Terri Kelly.
Gary: What does it feel like when a new associate joins Gore? They aren’t assigned to a boss, so how do you bring them on board? How do they learn about the culture?
Terri: On day one, they won’t know what to work on, so we work with each associate to develop their starting commitments. They’ll also get a sponsor, which is a very unique role within Gore and different than a leader. A sponsor makes a personal commitment to an associate’s success and development. A leader can also be a sponsor, but needs to be very clear about what hat he or she is wearing. If you’re the leader of a business, you can be conflicted, since your success is around driving business results; but one of your valued team members might need to leave your business to develop and grow. That’s a tension, but your responsibility as a sponsor is help the associate reach their full potential.
New associates rely on their sponsors since they don’t know how to get things done; they don’t know our language. A new associate will probably experience a lot of freedom they didn’t have in their last job, but also a lot more responsibility in terms of having to be self-driven and self-initiated. Even though the sponsor is there for you, you need to set your own career goals, and determine for yourself where you can make the biggest contribution. For a lot of people, this is very different from what they would have experienced in a more structured environment.
Gary: Another unique thing about Gore is your approach to locating factories. For the most part, you’ve avoided building large, focused factories in low-cost labor locations. Factories are clustered together. Gore also splits a business in two when it reaches a certain size. None of this sounds very efficient. What’s the logic?
Terri: There are a couple of practices that have served us well. First is the three-legged stool. We like to have the functions co-located because innovation depends on having research, manufacturing and sales all in the same place, where they can build off each other. This also helps us develop leaders. Our campuses are all cross-business, whether in the U.S. or Germany or China.
Secondly, if a plant gets too big or a business gets too large—more than 250 or 300 people—you start to see a very different dynamic. The sense of ownership, the involvement in decision-making, the feeling that I can make an impact starts to get diluted. So we look for opportunities to divide big business into smaller businesses. Bill Gore said that one of the most important responsibilities of the leader is to figure out how to divide so we can multiply. We look for opportunities where dividing a unit up and replicating some of its activities can accelerate growth.
In Gore, you’ll see a lot of small plants with fewer than 300 associates, because this drives a different level of focus and ownership. Large businesses tend to stifle smaller businesses by hogging critical resources. When you split a business up, the smaller unit gets its own resources and can set its own priorities. Another bonus: new leaders emerge because you no longer have a single leadership team under one big roof, but now have two distinct leadership teams.
The last thing that’s helped us in the current economic environment is that we co-locate different businesses together. If a particular industry has a downturn, you want to be able to move the associates to another opportunity. If our plants were all in isolated locations, this would be much more difficult. So we like the idea of campuses where a number of small factories are co-located within a 25-mile radius. This way, people don’t fear moving on to something else, and are less hesitant to take on a new opportunity. This lessens the risk the associates will try to preserve a business or product area that may no longer be so promising to the company.
Gary: To a typical hard-driving manager, the Gore model probably seems utopian, maybe even naïve. You don’t have a hierarchy. Leaders can’t command. Employees choose their own commitments. It sounds like a slacker’s paradise. No wonder the company is consistently ranked as a great place to work. But where does the discipline come from? Most managers view freedom and discipline as mutually exclusive trade-offs, but that’s clearly not the case at Gore. You sell to demanding customers like Nike and Procter & Gamble, and have made money every year since the company was founded. What drives discipline at Gore?
Terri: Some days things are chaotic. I don’t want to paint a picture of something that’s perfect. You have teams coming together, storming and forming and building relationships. But there are some fundamental things that hold Gore together. One is the values to which we all subscribe, in terms of how we’re going to treat each other—there’s a huge trust element in the Gore culture.
One of the more powerful things that creates discipline is that everyone in the organization knows that they will be ranked by their peers, and that their compensation will depend on this ranking. This peer pressure is much more powerful than top-down pressure.
Our associates get to choose what commitments to make. If they didn’t know they’re going to be evaluated by their peers, they might be tempted to take on an assignment that is personally interesting to them, a hobby, but one that’s not important for the company. But instead, every associate is constantly thinking, ‘I want to be viewed as making a big contribution to the enterprise,’ so they’re constantly looking for opportunities that will leverage their strengths, and that they’re passionate about. So there’s a natural, built-in pressure: every associate wants to work on something impactful.
Every associate knows that they won’t be judged by one boss or superior, but by all their peers, by individuals who know what they’ve done and how they interact with others on daily basis.
Typically, an associate will be evaluated by 20 or 30 peers and will, in turn, evaluate 20-30 colleagues. You rank your peers from top to bottom. It’s a forced ranking. You’re asked to rank only people you know. What we find is that there’s typically a lot of consistency in who people view as the top contributors, and who they view as the bottom of the list. We don’t tell our associates what criteria to use, we simply ask them to base their ranking on who’s making the greatest contribution to the success of the enterprise. You don’t evaluate people solely on the basis of what they’re doing within their team, but in terms of the broader impact they may be having across the company. And then beyond their contributions, are they behaving in ways that are collaborative? Are they living the values? Sometimes someone will get great results but at great expense to the organization. These are the issues associates think about when they’re putting together their rankings.
We have a cross-functional committee of individuals with leadership roles who look at all this input, debate it, and then put together an overall ranking, from 1 to 20, of those particular associates. Then, in setting compensation, they ensure there’s a nice slope to the pay curve so that the folks who are making the biggest contributions are also making the most money.
The process is a bit brutal, but it ensures that real talent gets recognized. This system avoids the problem of paying someone more because of seniority or title. New associates joining the organization, the scientists who don’t want to be people leaders—we want these people to feel highly valued, because the next invention may come from them. No system is perfect, but ours levels the playing field and allows real talent to emerge and get compensated accordingly.
We don’t need a bureaucratic system to hold people accountable. We don’t need time cards, because we don’t care when the person comes or leaves—we just care about their contribution. So you can deconstruct a lot of the typical bureaucratic processes that are typically used to measure and control performance. We’ve also found that by not having hard and fast metrics of performance we can avoid a lot of unintended consequences. You get a lot of negative behavior when you have narrow metrics that really don’t represent the complexity of the business. Instead, we ask our associates to view performance holistically, in terms of someone’s total impact, versus focusing on a few specific variables.
Gary: A lot of companies struggle to balance trade-offs—between growth and earnings, short-term and long-term, and so on. Often these trade-offs are made at the top. A CEO will say, “this year we need to focus on getting our costs under control”—and then next year the company discovers it has missed a big new opportunity while it was obsessed with slashing costs. Or a leader will demand growth and then later discover that this came at the expense of near-term earnings. So you get the pendulum effect. How does Gore avoid this? How do you decentralize the responsibility for managing tough trade-offs?
Terri: We introduce this sort of ambiguity and polarity to our associates early on. We don’t protect them. If you put them in a box and feed them a simplistic model of business, they won’t be able to handle these subtle trade-offs. We want to put these conflicting pressures on all associates and not just on the leaders, who often think they’re supposed to protect the rest of the organization from these tensions. Our associates have a very good understanding of how complex these trade-offs really are. That’s because our leaders take a lot of time to help associates understand the trade-offs. Leaders have to explain all the factors that need to be taken into account in making a decision. Rather than having a small population of individuals who are capable of making these trade-offs, we have a broad base of associates who are capable of making complex decisions.
We sometimes worry about how to scale this model. We asked that question at 50 associates; it was asked again at 500; and we’ll ask it again at 10,000. But what we’ve found is that our management model helps us scale, because we’re not relying on a few centralized, enterprise leaders to make all the key decisions. Instead, we push authority out to operating teams that are much better equipped to make the right decision at the right moment.
Gary: Gore is more than 50 years old and has been the subject of many case studies. Why hasn’t this management model taken root in other companies? Why hasn’t it been emulated more broadly?
Terri: First, I should say that we’re still evolving. We haven’t figured it all out. But what I’d tell another CEO is this. You have to look at the values that are embedded in your company: what behaviors have been rewarded and reinforced over the decades? Is it a culture that really believes in and encourages individuals? Does it foster a collaborative spirit? Does it encourage knowledge sharing? You have to tackle this first. One of the biggest mistakes an organization can make is to articulate all these great values but then not live up to them—then people get cynical, because the values are out of synch with what they experience every day from their leaders.
Second, you have to evaluate your leadership model. It’s incredibly important to look at the motivation of your leaders, how they’re rewarded, what they value. If you don’t tackle this, you’ll be in trouble. Our model requires leaders to look at their roles differently. They’re not commanders; they’re not lynchpins. Their job is to make the rest of the organization successful. They have to give up power and control to allow this chaotic process to happen—so you get diverse perspectives and teams coming together to make decisions.
Third, you have to be clear about the checks and balances. At Gore, it’s the peer review process, but it might be something else in another organization. What is it that will reward and reinforce the values on an ongoing basis? This needs to be embedded in your management practices. This is the sequence I would follow if I were trying to foster Gore’s culture in another organization.
Gary: In the past, someone might have looked at the Gore model and said, “well, that’s interesting, but it’s not essential—there are other ways to manage.” But when I think about the core elements of your model—a collaborative decision-making process, an organization where leaders aren’t appointed but emerge from below, associates that have the knowledge and authority to make the critical real-time trade-offs—it seems to me that these things are becoming competitive imperatives.
Terri: If you think about changing demographics, our young associates expect these things. They expect to have the chance to make an impact. They expect to know why they’re working on something. They expect to work in a collaborative network where information is freely shared. If an organization doesn’t have these things, my suspicion is that it won’t be able to compete. You won’t be able to attract the talent, and you certainly won’t be able to retain it. This is what it’s all about—getting the best brains together.
The focus of our effort to bring collaborative technologies to the organization's mainstream is not through using SoMe tools to solve a specific business problem, nor is it to work with middle management to drive acceptance both up and down the hierarchy. No, actually it's by leveraging the greenest, least entrenched, least empowered group in the whole organization, the Newly Hired!
It's wise to assign a sponsor to help the new person get quickly on board. But make sure that the sponsor is a person that you want the new employee to emulate. Too often the assimilation process is shuffled off to the first available employee, including the most cynical, burned-out, turned-off, and disengaged members of the staff.
* Give people public forums to introduce themselves, and talk about their professional and personal backgrounds (prior companies and hobbies are both fruitful ways of understanding someone). True trust and empathy starts to happen when there is the even a slight emotional bond, not just a professional one. I'm not saying you have to turn your workplace into one giant therapy session. But militaries around the world understand this deeply — the bond between soldiers is consciously built up to be very strong, because they have to collaborate and trust each other under the most difficult circumstances. How can you create camaraderie?
* In-person familiarity should be the default, but in large organizations this is hard to scale. Make use of social networking tools to faciliate the process.
* Find the people who are networking hubs in the organization, and introduce newcomers to them. Think of your organization as a party. Who can you introduce a new person to who will help them get to know the rest of the group the quickest?
* For more prolonged relationship building, have a mentoring program where a newcomer is paired up with someone who's been around a while. You may even have a "networking" mentor who is different from the usual expertise mentor.
After a candidate accepts a job offer from or promotion within Capital One, the HR department assigns an internal coach to interview a broad range of the candidate's "stakeholders," including not only her boss but her soon-to-be employees, peers, and customers. The coach asks interviewees to describe what they see as the key challenges associated with the candidate's new role, the job's goals and performance expectations, the history of how the role has evolved, and the political dynamics the new leader will likely encounter.
There are many theories on how to correctly "onboard" someone to an organization or a team. Most focus on how to provide the new hire with the information and skills she needs to succeed. But that can only take her so far. She will need connections and an understanding of the inner workings and culture of your company to be truly successful. Whether she is transitioning from another part of the organization or is brand new, you can get her up to speed more quickly by going beyond the basics and explaining how things actually get done.
New-Hire Welcome.
Learn. New hires can find links to free learning resources, including one of Willyerdÿfds flagship initiatives: digitizing literally thousands of books, magazine articles and white papers related to Sunÿfds businesses, as well as information relevant to employee development. The ÿfdparticipate areaÿfd synthesizes several social-networking components that motivate new hires to dive in and join the network. One goal of the New-Hire Experience is to have seasoned employees interact with new hires and show them around the office digitally through blogs, wikis, discussion forums and custom video tutorials.
Explore. This is akin to the Company 101 of any new-hire orientation. From here, new hires can access industry reports, view competitive data on Sun and investigate key industry competitors. Through hyperlinking, new hires can explore a gold mine of data about Sun that gives them a sense of context for their new job.
Play. The experience culminates in an interactive learning game called ÿfdRise of the Millennials.ÿfd The objective is to teach new hires about Sunÿfds core businesses through an engaging game. Willyerd is a proponent of gaming in learning and views the New-Hire Experience as an optimal opportunity to have employees learn about Sun business, strategy, mission and culture.
Onboarding, also known as organizational socialization, refers to the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders.[1] Tactics used in this process include formal meetings, lectures, videos, printed materials, or computer-based orientations to introduce newcomers to their new jobs and organizations. Research has demonstrated that these socialization techniques lead to positive outcomes for new employees such as higher job satisfaction, better job performance, greater organizational commitment, and reduction in stress and intent to quit
The Performance Specialist wondered if induction
shouldn't actually start BEFORE the new hires stepped through the
door on the first day, and the employees unanimously agreed that
this would be ideal. The Performance Specialist suggested
setting up a social network type space where new hires could go
before they started work as well as after they had joined up to find
information about the company (this might be in the form of
presentations, documents, etc), how to get set up in the first few days of being in the company as well as providing place where they could ask
questions and post their comments and views. Those in the meeting
thought this would be a good idea, so she asked them if they would
be prepared to
help with the project in terms of populating it with useful content,
as well as helping to answer the questions of new people. She
explained that as more and more people joined the group over time,
then their participation would be reduced.
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