Beyond Onboarding Integrating People with the Organization Date:   Monday , April 04, 2011 Organizations and managers invest a lot of time and effort in selecting and offering right candidates with the hope that the selected candidate is excited about the role and the opportunity and will settle down and contribute for a fairly long time. But experience shows that no more than half of new hires, particularly, in the management roles really “settle down.” This is increasingly becoming the trend also with hiring individual contributors. What a wasted effort! I would like to discuss this key issue in this column to explore how business and HR leaders can work on this to save precious time and money and induct people better. This reminds me of what the world witnessed with the Apollo 13 launched in April 1970. This spaceship was crippled by a major failure in the cryogenic oxygen system. The planned lunar landing had to be aborted. The Control station in Houston decided to ‘slingshot’ the spaceship using the gravity of the moon. Lunar excursion module was modified to become the sort of “lifeboat” for the astronauts. This module designed to sustain two people for two days now had to sustain three people for four days. In short, this was a situation that had no room for any error either on the ground or in space! If the spaceship’s trajectory was even a bit off, it would skip away from Earth’s atmosphere beyond redemption. On boarding key employees (or any employee for that matter) is no less challenging than the scene described above. It has all the challenge, excitement and uncertainty requiring careful attention. Often times, it is left to the recruiter to handle this. The recruiters do their best which more often than not turns out to be not good enough for the challenge. Of all the reasons why early exits take place despite great moments of truth during recruitment, one can recognize several traps that organizations walk into, out of their ignorance or more often their underestimation of the task of integration. Seven Deadly Integration Traps: Studies in the area of new employee integration suggest that there are several traps that must be recognized and avoided to “soft-land” the new hire. Many of these are present in almost all the organizations, irrespective of size and geography. Let us list them here: * Trap 1: Minimizing the challenge: Often done with good intention not to intimidate the new hire, this becomes even more complicated with the candidates’ often noticed tendency to exaggerate their capabilities! * Trap 2: Thrown into the Ocean: New employee comes on board and discovers that he is required to swim across the ocean and not a swimming pool * Trap 3: Team – leader styles mismatch: Excessive control or hands off style of the newly hired manager creates a set of challenges for the team and managers themselves * Trap 4: Relationship with Key stakeholders: The newly hired manager requires building strong relationships not only with the team that reports, but with peers and senior managers and other key stake-holders in functions like procurement, finance, business development and sales. Underestimating this can reduce effectiveness * Trap 5: Living with the legacy actions: The new manager often has a plateful of issues either created or left unaddressed by his or her predecessor. This is one of the major issues in our organizations today in the absence of defined processes for documenting discussions and promises before an incumbent manager leaves the company * Trap 6: Lack of organization support: Quite common, this involves a precarious situation where the new manager goes through euphoria for the first few days of joining and thereafter all the smiles and support vaporize! It is business as usual for everyone else, except the new hire! The new employee is left to fend for themselves or told that “you should catch up fast to be successful here, understand?” * Trap 7: Finding the right balance Trap: This involves a situation where the manager is told either his actions are too much too soon or too little. Not recognizing the fact that the new joiner needs encouragement and guidance rather than discouragement and criticism is often the cause of this trap. In reality, there are many more traps, but I have only listed the most common ones that newly hired managers go through in the first 3 months of their association. Not paying attention to these traps leads to precious loss of hard-hired talent. Who owns the induction any way? Many HR and business leaders will answer this right even in their sleep: The immediate manager! Well, the good news is they are right. Bad news? It stops there! More often than not, the integration beyond the induction is left to the junior most HR executive or worse still to a buddy assigned to the new employee. In organizations where a buddy system exists, both the line manager of the new hire and the HR leave it to the ‘buddy’ to induct and integrate. It is important to realize that the buddy’s role is critical, but does not substitute the role of HR or the immediate manager. Headwaiter Mentality! Sir, how is everything? When you go to dine in any decent restaurant, you are often approached by the head waiter with a question: “Sir, how is everything?” Often the immediate manager takes on the role of headwaiter. Well, not quite really. The headwaiter actually is much more sincere in asking this question! The next level manager just goes through the motion to get some guilt off his chest! Recognizing the importance of integrating the key hires is the first simple step towards arresting the hemorrhage of the talent even before they spend 6 months into the system. Our organizations have systematically underestimated the importance of employee integration and have paid a huge price. Lessons are as obvious as sun light on a bright day, but sitting in air-conditioned offices, we do not seem to understand the lessons either! In the next couple of columns, I will cover this with more insights and ideas