Employee retention: The first 30 days

We are all painfully aware how difficult it is to find qualified or high-potential people. I’ve discussed the reasons for this in previous columns. There is no quick fix, and managers continue to expend considerable effort to find the right people.

In my business experience, one of the more frustrating things has been losing people during a time when skilled talent and even people with potential are scarce. You spend all of this time and money recruiting to realize a net gain in capability and capacity, only to find your gain is zero or less because somebody left. If that person was a key long-term employee, the loss can be painful and sometimes devastating. If it was a new person who you spent months to get, the loss may not be devastating, but it’s still really maddening. In either case, you are not even back to square one. You feel like you’re back to square minus one.

Long-term employees leave for various reasons. Sometimes it’s a personal situation, sometimes it’s to advance their career, but sometimes it’s because they have been lookin g to escape for some time. In the last case, these people have had lingering grievances or notions that somewhere there is something better, but they quietly soldiered on because they felt that was in their best interest at the time.

If new hires leave within six months to a year, they do so usually for one of two dominant reasons: They felt that the on-the-job reality they experienced was far worse than what was “sold” to them during recruitment, or they never really felt that they were part of the team. In the latter case, they never integrated into the culture successfully. The company remained sort of foreign. These two issues, in fact, often contribute to losing not just a new hire, but also a longer-term employee.

I am proud that the companies I ran, after a first-year “scrubbing,” had turnover rates of less than 3 percent—that’s everyone, including people who retired. Some HR professionals told me that this rate was too low, but they backed up their assertion with some dubious socio-babble that only succeeded in whipping me into a lather. Like you, I’m into results, and a big part of achieving those results is finding the people you want, continually developing and challenging them, and keeping them.

The First 30 Days

Remember when you started a new job with a new company? Lurking underneath the sunshine and roses were two significant uncertainties. First, would you perform to the company’s expectations? You knew that your performance and behavior would be closely scrutinized. After all, despite all of the interviews and discussions, you knew that the only way people at the company could really “know” you was by observing how you did on the job. No surprise here.

But you also had a second, perhaps bigger uncertainty: You didn’t really know the company either. All of the preliminary stuff was a blur: the quick plant tour, the interview, even the HR routine. Frankly, you based your excitement about this new job far more on hope and supposition than knowledge. It was here that the first seeds of retention (or not) were sown.

I believe most companies are right to focus heavily on a hire’s job performance during the first 30 days. Is this person going to be able to do the job? If those first positive signs are missing, then the 60- and 90-day reviews will be very tenuous.

But let’s flip this to the other uncertainty. Most companies either don’t address this at all, or if they do, they do so only in a cursory manner, like arranging for the HR person to having a coffee break with the hire to ask, “How do you like us so far?” Managers must address the hire’s uncertainty about the company as aggressively as they monitor the hire’s early job performance—especially when finding good people remains so difficult.

Remember, people’s early experience on the job is never exactly what they hoped or perceived it would be. These new hires will hear “facts,” some accurate but others delivered by the self-nominated critics every company has on the roster. Who do you want explaining the day-to-day reality of your company? You or Mr./Ms. Doom and Gloom? Once an early notion or attitude sets in, it tends to stick, and it all occurs in the first 30 days.

I’m going to suggest a 30-day format that I have used, and it mimics best practices from some of the world’s best companies. Most important, these companies use the format for all new hires, regardless of position.

The First of the 30 Days

Start with a detailed walk-through of the company’s products and customers, its philosophy of quality and customer service, and its measures of efficiency and success. In other words, show what defines a positive result from the company’s overall point of view. This sets the table for accurately describing the company’s culture and the background for its decisions. Usually this is a much more detailed and nuanced redo of what may have been covered briefly during the interview. This first step is extraordinarily important. The hire and indeed everyone in the company should know these fundamentals by heart.

The second step, which is just as important, is to have a serious walk-through of the shop and offices. Outline the flow of information and products, and introduce key people and decision-makers. These people should describe their function’s purpose, what they do, and how they do it.

The third step is to introduce new hires to their work area, thoroughly explain its purpose in the grand scheme of things, and how their job fits into the company’s overall success. Review how things are measured, and broadly outline challenges and difficulties that the work area or specific jobs may face. Demonstrate the importance of the job, its expectations and general challenges, and how a good or bad day is determined.

This exercise should take at least one full day, usually two, and include handouts for reference. Most important, it must involve people who actually do or manage the tasks described.

Integration

At this point the new hires begin their jobs, with their direct supervisor providing the usual training on procedures and methods. So far you have controlled the message and set the tone. Now comes reality, and you need to sense and expect what comes next.

What comes next are the things new hires see that deviate from the plan. They see the actual challenges and their severity, and they listen as the Mr./Ms. Doom and Glooms rear their heads. This is when new hires develop their perceptions about the company, and they start making decisions based on those perceptions.

During the first 30 days, plan to reinforce the company story. New hires don’t get that queasy feeling about the company simply by facing challenges or difficulties, but they do get queasy if they feel ignored, especially when the challenges they face seriously hinder their success on the job.

This is when serious thoughts of leaving first happen. At this point you need to show the new hire (and everyone else) first that people recognize the challenges and are addressing them; and, second, that the company uses formal methods not just for resolving difficulties, but also for hearing, prioritizing, and acting upon improvement suggestions from anyone in the company. In other words, demonstrate that you are walking the walk and not just talking about it—and that the person you just hired is part of that improvement. This is powerful and a real differentiator.

The final step is a 30-day review of how the hire views the company. You can do this as a companion to the performance review. Take it very seriously.

I believe that following this format—and, if necessary, extending it retroactively to longer-term employees—will help your retention rate significantly. It sure worked for me.