Disclaimer: None of the thoughts expressed in my blog reflect those of BCG, LSE, Harvard, Douglasvillle, my ancestors, etc. In fact, the older this post is, the more likely it is that this no longer reflect those of myself.
Hello! Returning from an unintentionally long hiatus. Here is my final post in my exploration of workplace onboarding. Enjoy!
Typically organizations design employee resources to improve one of two metrics: engagement or retention.
In the context of designing onboarding resources, retention is not a relevant measure for obvious reasons, so companies rely on measuring engagement - typically through employee satisfaction surveys.
I explain here why surveys are not a good way to measure engagement for most employees, and especially not those who are in their first year.
Surveys are not a great way to gauge the experience of new employees
The biggest issue is that the questions assume that all responders have the same expectations for their workplace. If you’ve ever joined a new company, you can probably attest that this is far from the truth.
Typically, feedback/satisfaction surveys ask questions like:
How do you feel about work?
Would you recommend this company to a friend?
Are you proud to work here?
Do you see a path for career advancement?
Have you considered leaving recently?
…
I cringe a bit at each of these questions because they each implicitly require the respondent to compare their current experience to their subjective expectations, or what they think their experience should be like. Embedded in each question is at least two questions. One is about their baseline/expectations and the other (in parenthesis below) is about your actual experience.
How do you think you should feel about work? (Do you feel good enough?)
What makes a job good enough for you to recommend it to a friend? (Is this job good enough for you to recommend it to a friend?)
What makes you proud to work at a company? (Do we make you proud enough?)
How quickly do you think is reasonable to progress here? (Are you progressing quickly enough?)
How bad do things have to be for you to have to be willing to leave? (Are things bad enough?)
In summary, everyone is comparing their experience to a baseline. What makes surveys inaccurate is that many organization assume that all staff is working off the same baseline experience. This is a bold assumption. A convenient assumption, but a bold one.
A similar dynamic that we talk more about is salary negotiation. You may be satisfied with your salary until you see that someone else - doing the same work but with less qualifications - is getting paid more. The company benefits from your ignorance, but you do not.
But in the case of subjective workplace metrics like satisfaction or engagement, companies don’t actually benefit from employees’ ignorance; at least not for long.
An employee with a baseline that is lower than average will not be as productive as they could be since they are not fully leveraging all resources and connections.
An employee with a baseline that is higher than average will be disappointed by their employer once they realize their expectations will not be met. In psychological contract research, this is called a contract violation.
This means that a horrible workplace experience for one person might be blissful for another… it really depends on what their goals/expectations are. Take this example: New employees at your company typically have three mentors by the end of their first year. By the end of your first year, you only have one. In your EOY review, you say that you’re satisfied with your mentorship at the company. This is not because you have sufficient mentorship, but because you have never had any reason to question whether one mentor is enough. You previously had no mentorship at all. One mentor is an infinite increase… but is - in reality - not enough to put them on par with their colleagues.
I suggest two alternatives to surveys
In this series, I’ve explored what makes a good onboarding program. My takeaway is that in order to get a new hire where they need to be, the company must understand where the new hire is coming from (i.e. what their baseline expectations are). There are two ways I think we companies do this:
(1) Employers can ask explicitly about employees’ baseline/expectations for the job and track how these change over time. For instance, a company could have quarterly surveys that ask what that employee’s goals/expectations are with respect to…
Learning/development
Compensation/benefits
Psychological safety, and
Work/life boundaries.
(2) Employers can get their hands on some numbers. Companies might consider tracking salient people metrics (SPMs (pronounced “spims”)) such as…
Social Network: Who are your strong, intermediate, and loose ties?
Communication Patterns and Quality: How much time do you spend communicating with your team? With your manager?
Social Network Knowledge: A company could ask new staff to fill out a quiz periodically that asks about who they know. Questions might include…
Who are the 10 most important people for you to know at this company based on your role/tenure/goals? Do you know them and how well? Do they know you?
Institutional Knowledge: These questions would be about the institution and its resources:
What career development opportunities exist at the company? Which are most relevant to you right now?
What role do mentors play in this work environment? How do you find mentors?
Who can you go to if your mental or physical health is suffering? Is this resource confidential?
In conclusion…
organizations (or their HR leadership) may have no real gauge of how effective their onboarding is until they track either (a) the “baseline” goals/expectations of new employees and how well the onboarding program recalibrates these expectations and/or (b) what employees know about their workplace. This helps ensure that new people don’t fall victim to their blindspots, since a person is not going to ask about what they don’t know if they don’t know they don’t know it. By default, this also puts power into the hands of the lower-power members of an organization because they can seek resources they didn’t know they didn’t know were available to them.
I’m now very interested in how power-yielding members of organizations can unintentionally rob power from those with less power by limiting avenues of learning and knowledge sharing.