First impressions are critical, and I heard someone saying the other day, rather cynically, that the happiest day of your employment is your first day and it is all downhill from there.
It still pains me that organizations do a powerful job of building a compelling Employee Value Proposition and sell it hard during the attraction process and then fail to care-take the delivery on those expectations for the remainder of the new hires’ employment.
Keys for an agile and engaged workforce
For a truly agile and engaged workforce it is critical that early on, career expectations are understood, and the organization’s career expectations are communicated.
We need to understand the wants, needs, aspirations and expectations of our employees from Week 1, and empower leaders by giving them easy access to this information.
And equally, employees must begin to understand the organization’s career mind-set, particularly if you want to shape career agility into your workforce, so that your business is ready to tackle its strategic challenges with a workforce that is mobile, career-agile and motivated.
What the best-in-class are doing
Here is what we see the best-in-class organizations doing:
- Empower leaders to understand the career drivers of employees through the on boarding experience. Some of our clients are using the CareerDrive for employees as part of the attraction process and then giving the career engager insights to managers in the first week.
- Care-take more than just the procedural. Ensure leaders have a one-on-one conversation with new hires in the first two weeks to understand their career motivators and aspirations and what talents can be leveraged immediately to mutual benefit.
- Ensure there is a career check-in before 90 days is up. Ensure your leaders follow up on the early career expectation conversation with a 90-day check in conversation. If your leaders are fearful of that (as most are) download our 90-day career check-in guide.
- Build a career agility mindset from Day 1. Ensure your employees understand your organizations mental-mindset on careers, and intentionally communicate this to employees through all your social channels or leverage specialist career communications channels where you can leverage great content to support a career mindset transformation in your business.
Integrated onboarding based on the expression of personal identity, strengths and values has been shown to outperform traditional approaches. Early adopters who have already deployed integrated onboarding procedures are now reporting reductions in early turnover by up to 250 percent.