Great Starts: Orientation Ovation
September 16, 2008
A comprehensive orientation program can help new employees hit the ground running while building a solid foundation for their new role
By Mike Neag
"If you don’t know where you’re going, when you get there…you'll be lost."
So says Hall of Fame Yankees catcher Yogi Berra. An unfortunate truth, "lost" aptly describes the first days on the job for many new hires. Although psychologists such as T.H. Holmes and R.H. Rahe tell us that career change (along with marriage difficulties and death) rank among life's most stressful events, the experience of nearly 90 participants in a 2006 American Laboratory Managers Association (ALMA) roundtable discussion in Portland, OR, on "Great Starts for New Employees" indicates that businesses continue to fail to recognize the needs of new employees and do little to help them build a foundation for their new role. The roundtable examined a breadth of first-day experiences—ranging from heart-rending inadequacy to "the way it should be done"—and concluded with a detailed program for integrating a new employee into a new community.
Our Most Important Asset?
So why do so many companies fail their new employees when it comes to new hire orientation? The specific reason appears to stem from several sources, including:
• A company's "cultural inertia: "It's never been done before."
• A lack of resources: "There's no one in human resources to do this."
• A shift toward "bottom-line" economics and the concomitant emphasis on short-term return.
Companies that fail to offer training programs for new hires tend to be small, with limited resources and little interest in training programs, Kathryn Tyler noted in "Take New Employee Orientation Off the Back Burner," HR magazine, May 1998. And those that offer programs typically use ill-defined, ad hoc orientation programs that are little more than hurried introductions layered over a mind-numbing stack of paperwork.
Most businesses recognize the importance of orientation—even 11 years ago, upward of 90 percent of all businesses with more than 100 employees had orientation programs for new hires, according to Training magazine's 1997 Industry Report—they just fail to implement them well. Business leaders tend to neglect orientation programs, driving them with little enthusiasm or appreciation for their companies' long-term needs or for those of their often hard-won new hire.
According to Jason Averbook as quoted in a January 2005 Computerworld article, "HR Gets Strategic," "HR's own budget is 0.5 percent to 1 percent of the company's overall expense, whereas people are 70 percent. [Managers] want to decrease the cost of HR’s 1 percent expense as opposed to optimizing the 70 percent cost."
Where's the logic in minimizing cost on what's commonly referred to as our "most important" asset?
In fact, this shift toward short-term, "bottom-line" business thinking—focusing on tangible results and maximizing stakeholder value—is perhaps the most important reason for waning interest in new hire training and the swift ascension of business process outsourcing. These changes in employment and other related business practices in North America directly reflect sweeping changes in geopolitics, such as China's 1997 entry into the World Trade Organization, along with an exponential expansion of Web-based business activity, creating a new, highly competitive global economy, according to Thomas L. Freidman in "The World Is Flat—A Brief History of the 21st Century."
Successful businesses understand that survival in this new economy depends on focusing people and resources on functions seen as core to their organization’s success while eliminating or outsourcing those that reduce effectiveness. Whether designing a new widget or improving customer service, businesses continuously must evaluate, reposition, and restructure their business processes. As a consequence, business functions (for example, HR programs) viewed as "tactical" rather than "strategic" are being disaggregated and outsourced to vendors with a record of success in a given functional area, according to Doug Brown and Scott Wilson's "The Black Book of Outsourcing."
While there are risks associated with business process outsourcing (BPO), such as losing control of the outsourced process or receiving poor value for price, there are also benefits to this approach. The primary benefit for outsourcing business processes is that BPO allows businesses to refocus their energy and resources on core business needs such as customer service, product innovation, or improvements in product consistency while simultaneously controlling costs. Little surprise then that by the end of 2005, 80 percent of U.S. companies were outsourcing at least one business process, according to Cnet Tech News.
Whatever the reason underpinning this shift, structured HR programs such as those aimed at new employee orientation seem to have disappeared—whether intentionally or unintentionally—into the expanding "ether" of the non-essential business activity. As a consequence, the responsibility for acculturating and training new employees is now almost always the province of the hiring manager or—more typically—the group's team members.
Why Bother?
"I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, but...the direction we are moving." —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
So, why have a new employee orientation program? From an organizational standpoint, the aim seems simple: develop exceptional or at least effective performance as quickly as possible. The faster new hires understand their responsibilities and the culture underpinning the business, the faster they will contribute to the business' success.
It is difficult to overstate the value of a well designed and enthusiastically promoted orientation programs for new hires. Among the many benefits as cited in "Assimilating New Employee Development," T&D, 2006, and "A Better Welcome Mat," Training magazine, June 2005:
• loyal, knowledgeable workers
• reduced "search" costs
• reduced overall training expenses
• reduced turnover
• greater employee job satisfaction
• improved performance
• employees with a clearer understanding of performance expectations
• happier, more satisfied employees
Continue reading, Great Starts: The ALMA Program" to learn how to create a new hire orientation program.
Mike Neag is a technical manager at ICI Paints. He offers thanks to Dan Bode and Michele Whited, ICI Paints, for their editorial comments and suggestions on this piece and to Dr. Jim McCargar, Baldwin Wallace College, for a painstaking editorial review of the article. Contact Neag at c_michael_neag@ici.com.
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