Low-cost tactics that you can implement now.
There are three foundational building blocks that need to be optimized in order to consistently deliver engaging customer experiences over the phone: people, processes and leadership. Part 1 of this series, “Hiring Top Performers” (Pipeline, January 2016), offered a step-by-step process for improving your hiring techniques. This article will focus on low-cost tactics you can use during your new-hire onboarding program to quickly, socially and culturally integrate new-hires into your organization.
The onboarding process should be the starting point for combating high turnover and low engagement. However, to be effective, you need to understand the emotional side of the equation. New-hires are typically a little anxious and, at times, overwhelmed. Their experience in a new company is analogous to visiting a foreign country and not knowing the language: Everything is so new, including people, processes, systems and internal lingo. Therefore, expediting the integration process is critical. The following are a few low-cost tactics to transform your onboarding program to drive productivity and engagement from the start.
Gain Insights Before You Hire
Even before an employee starts, you should identify key motivating factors for the potential candidate. For example, asking what will keep the candidate motivated if they get the job, what their frustrations are and understanding why they left their previous jobs will allow you to collect invaluable information and determine if the candidate is a good fit for the position.
Keep The Promises You Make During The Hiring Process
During the hiring process, you likely sold the new-hire on your organization being a great place to work with several opportunities. Therefore, the worst mistake you can make is not having an effective onboarding program that begins as soon as the new agent walks in the door. According to the Aberdeen Group, organizations with structured onboarding programs enjoy a 60% year-over-year improvement in revenue per full-time employee and a 63% year-over-year improvement in customer satisfaction.
Set Crystal-Clear Expectations
A mutual understanding of what managers expect from agents is essential. Expectations should be set during the interview process and reinforced during onboarding. This includes job expectations as well as vision, mission, values and culture. Doing so will help your new-hires with time management and prioritization, provide them with an understanding of the impact of the work they are doing, and ultimately keep them more engaged.
Understand The Impact Of Workplace Friendships
One solution to high turnover is to help new employees make friends within the organization. The key to this approach is to act quickly: According to the Aberdeen Group, 86% of newly hired employees decide whether to stay or quit within their first six months on the job.
How can you tell who will stay and who will go? American psychologist and Gallup Inc. Chairman Donald Clifton developed a survey that measures 12 items that he believed to be the best indicators of employee engagement (the Clifton StrengthsFinder). Clifton found that the strongest predictor of productivity was the employee’s answer to the question: “Do you have a friend at work?”
Research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota confirmed that workplace friendships do indeed make employees more productive. The studies showed that friends are typically more committed, communicate better and offer positive encouragement. Conversely, acquaintances preferred to work alone, engaging with others only when necessary. Working in silos creates several issues. For starters, knowledge is not be shared across the organization. In addition, and perhaps even more importantly, it makes it more difficult to build trust, which is the foundational building block of a strong culture.
Workplace friendships also contribute to longevity on the job by increasing employees’ desire to stay with the company. In 2012, Gallup found that close work friendships boosted employee satisfaction by 50%, and that people with a best friend at work were seven times more likely to engage fully in their work.
Think Like An Event Planner
Traditional onboarding programs that include videos, lectures, extensive reading and completion of forms can get dull very quickly. Therefore, consider low-cost tactics used by event planners to help forge these crucial workplace friendships as soon as an employee has been hired.
Start by planting seeds of friendship. Introduce new-hires to others within the company who have the same interests—after all, similarity sparks friendships. SnagAJob, an online recruiting firm, requires all employees to complete a questionnaire that includes questions about their personal interests. This makes it easier for the organization to introduce new-hires to employees with similar interests.
New-hires at Zappos are required to participate in a scavenger hunt where they are assigned challenges to locate employees around the company. For example, they are instructed to find someone who owns at least three pets. By the time they find these people, they are already engaging with several “Zapponians” (which is what Zappos calls its employees). Other assignments could be as simple as finding the longest tenured employee in a particular department.
Another idea is to assign an initial project where new-hires can collaborate with others and quickly start building their social networks. You can even take it one step further by developing a buddy or mentor program to help expedite the process toward becoming a productive employee.
Feedback Is Just As Critical
While using tactics like those previously mentioned will help new-hires to feel more engaged from Day 1, checking in with regularity is just as critical. Frequent feedback, especially when new-hires are performing well, is central to their confidence and motivational development. Check-ins should come from all key stakeholders, not just their direct supervisor. Set key milestone dates (after one week, 30 days, etc.) to get feedback from new-hires and their peers. Zappos actually offers new-hires up to $4,000 to leave the company upon the completion of their onboarding program. They do this to ensure that new-hires are joining Zappos for the right reasons, and because it’s a lot less expensive to pay out than paying an unhappy employee.
Getting feedback from your new-hires will also benefit the organization. Doing so provides an opportunity to generate new ideas from a pair of “fresh” eyes. Specifically, ask new-hires to share their ideas on how your organization can improve both its customer experience and its new employee experience.
Finally, don’t forget about the opportunity to spread positive word-of-mouth among other potential job candidates. It’s likely that the new-hire’s friends outside of the organization will be reaching out to them during the onboarding process to find out what it’s like to work at your organization. Therefore, it’s imperative to make a strong impression. Doing so will help build your brand and put your company on the right path to becoming an employer of choice.