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.
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.
Here is what we see the best-in-class organizations doing:
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.