4
“CONNECTIONS THAT
COUNT”—EMPOWERING
EMPLOYEES BY
NURTURING VALUABLE
RELATIONSHIPS

An HR executive for a leading corporation headquartered in the northwest had a vexing problem. New campus hires (i.e., college recruits) were leaving corporate positions at a rate 30% greater than the industry average, and he could not figure out why. The company was a premier employer. It performed better than the industry average in its recruiting, was in an enviable competitive and financial position, was considered progressive, and had a youthful culture that rewarded innovation and creativity. In many regards, it was the ideal place to launch a career. Why, then, were so many campus hires leaving?

Culling through attrition data, our client found that 70% of exiting campus hires left at the 11-month mark. He investigated further, walking the halls and pulling aside several new hires to ask questions. How did they like working there? Were they enjoying their assignments? How was their work-life balance? He received glowing responses.

So what in the world was going on?

Over lunch, the executive shared this mystery with a 25-year-old team member. “You almost lost me after 11 months,” the junior employee offered. “As much as I liked my job, this town is cold, and I mean that in more than one way. Our winters are frigid, and it’s tough to get to know people here. And collecting friends in college was easy; everyone was in the same position when they first arrived, and we all needed people to hang out with. When I came here, I was mixed in with a far more diverse group, both culturally and also where everyone was in their life (married with kids, divorcing, second career, nearing retirement, etc.), and at the end of the day everyone went their separate ways. It was exciting being here at first, but I spent a lot of winter nights alone in front of the TV, wishing I was back on the East Coast.”

“Why 11 months though?” our client wondered.

“Simple,” the team member replied. “I took my apartment lease two weeks before my start date, at 12 months my lease is up, and I need a few weeks to pack up and move.”

“Aha,” our client thought. After using a series of objective interviews and surveys to test the story’s validity relative to many other hypotheses, our client realized he was on to something. The company was recruiting from West Coast and East Coast schools, given the specific talent it was seeking to attract, and it was importing people into a foreign, culturally different, and (some might argue) challenging environment. The “isolated feeling” responses collected in our client’s research were astonishingly high. Taking other HR executives through the evidence and explaining the cost of attrition, our client proposed a series of socialization opportunities for new hires—experiences that would help new hires cement relationships early in their tenure. He hoped to replicate the intense and personal networking environment found at universities. Starting at Day One, new hires would engage in a series of activities with peer cohorts and more senior leadership interaction would make them feel more supported and connected. Our client also determined that it was not sufficient to help make connections within the company. The new hires needed a larger local network, so he proposed organizing new employee networking events in conjunction with other local-area companies. His ideas, he thought, were a slam-dunk.

To his surprise, eyebrows rose around the conference table and a barrage of questions from his colleagues ensued: “Shouldn’t our recruits be personable enough to form relationships on their own? If not, are we hiring the right people? If we treat our campus hires like college students, won’t it set the wrong tone? Is this really our business? Aren’t we much better off using our budget on training?”

Fortunately, our client managed to win over this skeptical audience; the data were too compelling. As he pointed out, the company was wrong in regarding high attrition as a fixed reality. Although managers had written off Gen Y campus hires as self-indulgent “job-hoppers,” the reality was more complex. Gen Y sought satisfying, meaningful work more intensely than earlier generations had, and they also were moving around the country more in pursuit of their careers, both of which left them more eager to forge strong bonds at work. An opportunity existed for the organization to win comfort and loyalty among new hires by helping them become more socially connected. Enabling new hires to nurture social networks better would add value for new hires, redefining the employment compact in ways they found relevant, while simultaneously benefiting the company. Our client turned out to be right. The investment he was proposing dramatically reduced employees’ likelihood of leaving. It also did something unexpected: Connections created by the programs helped to enhance business performance.

State-of-the-art onboarding programs treat new hires not as a short-term resource but as a long-term asset, one with the potential to appreciate in value if nurtured with upfront and sustained investments. In the last chapter, we made a case for investing in cultural orientation. This chapter argues that investment in relationship building, at all levels of hire and for all generations of employees, is also critical if we are to achieve the Onboarding Margin.

Most executives accept that professional networking is a necessary and incredibly valuable business function, and companies have long supported networking in various forms. Since the popularization of the term in the 1980s, networking has thrived as a means of identifying new opportunities for sales professionals and business development executives and of strengthening professions and careers in general. In its early incarnation, networking took the form of socializing in informal groups (e.g., the golf course, barber shop, local charities, sidelines of children activities, etc.) and formalized associations (the local business association, formal networking clubs). More recently, online social networks like Facebook have become popular, with sites like LinkedIn focusing exclusively on business communities. Despite all of this interest, as well as significant scientific study of the nature and power of social networks in business contexts, most companies have not devoted significant attention and resources to drive relationship building. Moreover, management has neglected the special social needs of one group that requires support more than any other: New hires.

We commonly hear from management the idea that “relationships happen.” Although this is true, empirical evidence also suggests that companies can stimulate relationship building, just like it can acculturation, and reap the rewards. The point is to facilitate, hasten, and optimize the process and in this way generate new value. New hires need to make the right connections, and they need to do so in a timely fashion—before they have a chance to pass judgment on their decisions to join their firms.

To better nurture relationship building, firms should go beyond the scattered half-measures currently in place and embrace structured social programs that start very early and unfold progressively over the first year of the new hire’s tenure. These programs should embrace both professional and personal networking, help new hires build networks both inside and outside the firm, mobilize stakeholders throughout the firm, including senior leadership, and also include provisions to ensure that new hires’ families are comfortable.

Imagine how much you could affect productivity and retention if your new hires were connected to all the right people sooner; better understood the backgrounds, roles, and expertise of those people; and if they and their families felt generally happier and better adjusted in their lives. As an added benefit, this relationship stimulus not only helps satisfy new hires’ social needs; it also helps drive the acclimation and strategic orientation processes outlined in other chapters. Everything working together as one system—that is onboarding at its best.

Relationships and Networks: A Look at the Evidence

Five friends from the same college who moved to Washington, DC for their first jobs got together for Sunday brunch. All had been transitioning into their jobs over the past two to three months, so naturally the conversation settled on their first professional experiences. Of the five, three were already contemplating a job move. A fourth was seriously unhappy. Only one of the five reported still feeling satisfied with her job.

As the discussion continued, the four unhappy group members agreed that their social lives at work had proved disappointing, to say the least. After an initial week of training exercises with other new hires, these friends were mostly left alone in their cubicles with a stack of assignments. Co-workers were 10 or more years older, and it was sometimes difficult to enjoy a non-work-related conversation. The loneliness made work seem like a daily grind instead of something in which an employee could take pleasure and pride. When one of these recent graduates found her lunch missing from the shared refrigerator, she did not even know whom to talk to about it, much less feel comfortable raising the issue. This only led to a growing feeling of insecurity.

As we saw earlier, the psychologist Abraham Maslow listed social belonging within his hierarchy of basic human needs. It is recognized by social scientists and physiologists that when social needs go unsatisfied at work, people indeed become lonely, anxious, and depressed in their employment and at home. We also know that relationships can make you happier at work; hence, the very convention in many firms of holding “happy hours.” Empirical research bears out the wisdom of happy hour. According to research performed by the Gallup organization, 30% of workers polled strongly agreed that they had a best friend in the workplace. Among this group, 56% reported being engaged workers, 33% reported being unengaged, and 11% reported being actively unengaged. Compare this with the 70% of workers who didn’t strongly agree that they had a best friend at work: Only 8% of this group reported being engaged employees, 63% reported being not engaged, and 29% percent reported being actively disengaged. Relatedly, a separate study of workers at a California telecom company found that those who behave benevolently toward their fellow workers and receive favors in return are more productive than those who do not.¹ The title of the article presenting this research put it well, “Best Friends Are Good for Business.”

Recognition of relationships’ emotional benefits has motivated organizations to socialize new hires via welcome breakfasts, team building outings, and the like. Firms also provide social outlets in the form of softball leagues, affinity groups, and involvement in charity events. Yet as our five friends discovered, such scattered measures were hardly enough to help them nurture the healthy relationships they needed to feel healthy and happy at work. A skeptical manager might object that the burden of assuring a single new hire’s emotional well-being is huge, and attending to the sense of belonging of a whole cohort cannot and should not rest on an organization’s shoulders. That is undoubtedly true; however, firms could do much more to ensure happy workers, and it remains in their self-interest to do so.

The benefits of nurturing networks and strong social relationships among new hires go well beyond a happier, better-adjusted, more invigorated workforce. In the business world, progress depends upon connections and relationships. As people work in organizations, they form relationships that allow for work to get done, whether it is a traditional, rote task or the more challenging task of transforming processes at an organization. People realize a number of practical benefits by tapping into a network. They gain more information about and perspective on the challenges they face. They gain a chance to spread the word and get buy-in and feedback on their ideas—which in turn helps them build consensus and achieve results. Finally, they gain creative stimulation from exposure to the careers, success, and ideas of other individuals, leading to better job performance, more engagement, and stronger loyalty.

By enhancing the process by which new hires forge professional relationships, firms can help them work better on a daily basis. Knowing whom to approach for an answer allows you to address the issue quickly, minimizing problems or minor annoyances and frustrations. You know how to work the system, which as an ancillary benefit makes you feel happier and less frustrated. It also increases your self-esteem, confidence, achievement, self-respect, and value in the eyes of others—all of which taken together comprise the second highest category on Maslow’s hierarchy.

Sometimes connections allow employees to recognize problems proactively and come up with solutions. An operations engineer on a factory line is tasked with making sure the machines keep running. She notices that a part keeps breaking, or she spots an opportunity for improvement that might be applied elsewhere in the company. Rather than keeping this information to herself, she passes it along to a member of her network within the firm, who uses it to make improvements. This can happen in the first month of employment, the first year, the third year, or of course, not at all. When they do happen, collaborative relationships can develop into full-fledged partnerships over time, delivering measurable results for companies. Gallup research has shown that “those who have one or more strong partnerships at work generate better customer scores, safety, retention, creativity, productivity, and profitability for their companies.”²

We’ve noted that social networks have gotten a lot of press in recent years. Twenty years ago, we all were told to go out and network professionally as a business activity. More recently, Web 2.0 and social networking have become fashionable, whereas social scientists have established the power of networks by charting the social contagion of variables such as happiness, smoking, and obesity.³ How strange it is, then, that firms have not evolved more strategic programs for helping new hires build their professional and personal networks. If anything, the potential payback from networking inside a firm should exceed that offered by online social networking generally. As many people are finding, a service like LinkedIn offers somewhat limited benefits, since the members of a person’s network often don’t feel enough of a sense of shared interest to come forth with valuable exchanges. Online connections are easy to make, and so networking online often devolves into an exercise in collecting contacts (i.e., it becomes “a volume game”) rather than what it might be—a means to truly create personal and enterprise value. By contrast, people networking within a company have a much stronger shared interest. If social networks provide value in the broad environment, they should provide all that much more value within the bounded construct of a company.

The Connection Matrix

Companies should help new hires build better personal networks internally, but they should by no means stop there. Our research and work with clients has led us to identify two dimensions: internal vs. external and professional vs. personal, yielding four unique kinds of networks of use to new hires:

• Internal Professional Networks

• Internal Personal Networks

• External Personal Networks

• External Professional Networks

Let’s examine these four kinds of networks one by one, as well as their relevance for new hires.

Internal professional networks

Internal professional networks are relationships a new hire develops within a firm that bears directly on his or her fulfillment of job functions. Members of these networks include peers, subordinates, and bosses, all the way up to a company’s senior leadership. They include key support staff in other functions, such as marketing, HR, business development, or finance, or in the same function but across an organization’s business units. If you are an engineer at a firm like Mitsubishi with many kinds of technical businesses, you might want to network with other engineers who work in different business units but perhaps on similar problems or with similar technologies (i.e., Communities of Practice), or who work for your business unit at different sites around the world.

There is significant long-term value to establishing a peer network. Peers typically serve as the new hires’ colleagues as they progress simultaneously through the organization. Having a strong peer network and consciously developing it as a priority can make an enormous difference in establishing and expanding one’s influence over the long run. Not having a peer network can limit not only the new hires’ happiness and provide trusted and helpful perspective and support; it can also lead to not being “known” well enough later on, especially in cultures in which collaboration and a “one-company” culture is important.

We have already evoked some of the ways internal relationships can help new hires adjust to their jobs and work more productively. Here we observe that firms need to pay special attention to helping newly hired middle and senior management hires build internal networks. Unlike lower level hires, middle and senior manager hires have job descriptions that essentially revolve around connections with people. Whereas a customer service representative’s primary job involves performing a particular task, members of a company in managerial positions perform by interacting with and influencing others. Today, when every initiative involves a “cross-functional” team, new hire managers rely even more on the right network and relationships, and these relationships become even more mission-critical the more you ascend—or the higher you enter—the corporate ladder.

If your company hires its managers externally, then the social component of a strategic program clearly merits attention. However, for those firms that promote largely from within, a social component is arguably even more vital to include for the few outsiders these firms do hire; after all, these individuals will find themselves all the more behind their peers in understanding whom in a firm to leverage for their needs, both with regard to business needs and cultural orientation.

In all firms, a more comprehensive approach to building internal networks will prove helpful in allowing new hires entry into the perceived (or real) exclusive networks that seem to prevail in many workplaces. We found in our work, some of these networks might seem exclusive not because members of the network are actively preventing new hires from gaining entry, but simply because nobody has taken time to open the door and invite new hires in. To assimilate new mid-level and senior hires, firms need to integrate them into informal groups that exist within firms, understanding that existing employees are often too busy or distracted to recognize the need to do so on their own. A strong social component to a systemic onboarding program can compensate for the thoughtlessness or obliviousness of individual managers and help new hires gain access to a seemingly “closed” group of friends and colleagues.

Internal personal networks

A second kind of network that companies should help new hires nurture is the internal personal network. These are friendly relationships new hires develop with other employees within a firm. Personal internal networks might include members of a new hire cohort, employees who sit near a new hire, friends new hires might make in the company cafeteria, and colleagues the new hire interacts with regularly in meetings. Such relationships do not necessarily serve a specific business function; rather, they are nurtured on account of the happiness people find in having a “best friend at work,” and they are built upon perceived personal affinity; for instance, a shared view on topics such as sports, politics, or religion.

Most new hires are going to make friends eventually at work, especially in larger organizations, which contain many diverse personalities. There, though, the task becomes finding people. The sooner you can help new hires find their friends, the better. Younger workers often enter a firm with higher expectations about the social aspect of the work experience, given their recent experiences in college; it is critical to meet those expectations as fully as possible. Younger workers are also more likely to enter with preconceptions regarding excessive, cutthroat competition at work, depictions of which are popularized in movies and television. Fortunately, these negative and dysfunctional ideas can dissipate quickly as valued relations are formed and new hires begin to experience the benefits associated with support. For older and more seasoned new hires, onboarding allows a firm an opportunity to exceed expectations as the new hires achieve a sense of belonging sooner and more readily than they might have thought. For all new hires, these personal relationships assist with the process of cultural and strategic orientation.

External personal networks

A third kind of network, the external personal network, also factors prominently in assuring a new hire’s job satisfaction. Personal external networks include an individual’s broader network of friends and family, as well as those of their significant others and family members. Although people spend most of their waking hours at work, the personal relationships they develop outside the workplace can also affect their job performance, since happier new hires are more productive and less inclined to leave. This is an especially important component for recent college graduates and any new hire who moves to a new geographic location for his or her job.

A number of progressive companies are experimenting with innovative ways of helping new hires build new social relationships outside of work. Target realized that many of the hip young designers they recruited from design hotbeds on the East and West Coast were having trouble adjusting to life in Minneapolis, so they created a program designed to offer them more “big-city” cultural opportunities. Realizing that a minority of new hires were having special difficulties finding a place in that same city, General Mills linked up with other big employers and helped to foster a new hire group with that same ethnic background. As these examples suggest, it is important that firms customize their social network facilitation in line with their employee populations. Firms need to figure out who is moving to the area, determine their unique needs, and take steps to fill those needs. Employees with kids and families, for instance, might require help with things like finding schools, religious institutions, cultural opportunities, and employment opportunities for spouses, whereas a younger set of new hires may not.

External professional networks

A final kind of network pivotal to a new hire’s success is the external professional network. This network contains peers located outside of the workplace who nonetheless enhance a new hire’s ability to get work done. These peers could be functionally related to the new hire (e.g., other quality control managers), members of the same industry, or competitors and business partners (e.g., suppliers, value adding channel participants, or customers). All are part of the organization’s and new hire’s business ecosystem, and as such all can help the new hire get more accomplished with less energy.

Business Ecosystems Managers sometimes underestimate just how vital an ecosystem can be to achieving goals; a big mistake. Many years ago, Microsoft had a sales force of only a hundred people, a size clearly inadequate to achieve the firm’s ambitious goal of getting everybody to adopt Microsoft’s enterprise software products. Taking stock of the challenge, Microsoft realized that a number of independent technology businesses out in the market possessed the knowledge and local relationships required to sell the firm’s products. So Microsoft embraced a business model centered on “Value Added Resellers,” educating these members of its ecosystem and tooling and empowering them to sell Microsoft’s products on behalf of the company. This created extreme leverage for Microsoft, enabling performance exponentially higher than what would have been possible given the investment the company made in its personnel. This is just one example of development and exploitation of an ecosystem. Firms also rely on external networks when they get communities of third-party developers to add enhancements to platforms, or enlist customers to serve as evangelists for products or even act as product designers themselves. This general theme has been further popularized via attention to relatively new concepts such as “crowd sourcing.”

Given how vital ecosystems have become, firms must do as much as possible to help individuals develop external contacts. For a scientist working at a company’s R&D lab, this might mean going to a professional association meeting to cultivate leads that can serve as future knowledge sources. Firms should strive to get new hires out to professional communities bearing on the firm’s business—and do it early. Forging these kinds of professional relationships will instill a sense of pride of organization, and it can also have the added benefit of helping individuals simultaneously build their own personal relationships, since professional colleagues frequently become treasured friends.

Activating Relationships

Working with any of these four network types, companies will build new value by helping new hires forge more and better relationships. Because organizations cannot know exactly when networking will prove helpful in bringing about a specific business result, they need to increase social exposures to increase the likelihood of positive outcomes. Best Buy has recognized this, going so far as to design their corporate headquarters to stimulate random social interaction among their employees. The design is built around a central hub that connects a series of terminal extensions leading to individual office corridors on numerous floors. This design forces people to pass through the central hub dozens of times throughout the week—creating unexpected meetings between colleagues that are believed by most to stimulate conversations between individuals who would otherwise have minimal cause for interaction.⁴ Similarly, companies should design social components to their onboarding programs that maximize the chances that new hires will build relationships helpful to them and their employers. What follows is a list of best principles that some of the best-in-class firms we have worked with and studied have incorporated.

Best Principle #1: Encourage participation in affinity groups.

Affinity groups (e.g., running clubs, social action or charitable groups, outings clubs) bring together people from within and outside a firm who possess common interests. Many companies provide low-level funding to clubs to help sustain their activities. If your firm currently does not have affinity groups, this is an important area to explore; such groups provide even greater utility for new hires than for existing employees. Even small to mid-sized firms can nurture affinity groups at an informal level, encouraging existing and new employees to form or sustain them on their own. Diverse stakeholders have a potential role to play in making connections between a new hire’s interests and those of other people in the firm. At various times during a new hire’s first year, the HR recruiter, hiring manager, mentor, and new hire buddy could sit down with the new hire, exploring his or her social interests, creating awareness of existing affinity groups and providing resources and encouragement to start new ones.

Affinity can also serve as an organizing principle in the design of mentoring or orientation programs, particularly as relates to diversity initiatives. Citigroup’s Sponsor Family initiative integrates a diversity component into the firm’s mentoring program, creating core “families” of employees based on their social or cultural background. These families meet with a different member of senior management each month, a practice that creates mentor linkages and provides senior management with insight into the extraordinary challenges faced by many minorities. New connections are forged between the senior leader and “family” members—connections that could bring future benefits. Mentoring relationships serve as important conduits for the transmission of social, cultural, and strategic knowledge and for the bonding that comes with sharing personal stories. The use of affinity groups to support networking can also help build external personal and professional relationships.

Best Principle #2: Leverage resources in the larger community.

To help new hires build social relations outside the workplace, companies can draw on resources that exist in the local communities of which they are a part. Recognizing that many of its hires were young and coming from distant areas—and mindful, too, of being a grow-from-within organization—Procter & Gamble leveraged the cultural resources of Cincinnati in creating a web site for new hires that describes the many cultural and social opportunities the city has to offer. The web site offers discussions of the city’s nightlife, its geographic location relative to other cities, and its diverse neighborhoods in hopes of easing the transition for new hires moving in for the first time. The site also includes advice from recent new hires about how to get the most out of what the city has to offer.

As one employee quoted on the site suggests, “Have an open mind. No city is perfect. Set your priorities and find your happy balance. For me, bars, restaurants, or night life were the least important, so I decided to stay away from downtown or other relatively crowded neighborhoods. More important things were—grad school and work opportunities for my wife, cost of living (I didn’t want to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day trying to own a house), commute time to work and back (no more than 25 minutes each way), “intellect” level of the city (are there good schools around, what kind of industries exist in the city), and cultural diversity.” As this quote suggests, Procter & Gamble has become keenly aware of the broader needs of its new hires outside of work. The firm has drawn on the resources of Cincinnati, yet it has refrained from advertising the city, opting instead for the open and honest messaging advocated in the last chapter.

Another resource firms can look to when designing social components of their onboarding program is other firms. General Mills takes a lead in organizing and funding social events for new hires in collaboration with other companies in the same geographic location as their headquarters. The firm also funds corporate teams (e.g., softball, cycling groups, soccer) and encourages them to participate in community activities alongside groups from other firms. As our research has found, managers at General Mills believe this program has contributed to reducing turnover among new hires that have had difficulty relocating.

Best Principle #3: Build stakeholder maps.

To help new hires understand who should comprise their internal professional network, onboarding designers should catalogue key players, the value they provide to the enterprise, and the assistance they could render to new hires. At Johnson & Johnson Canada, an external onboarding coach collects business and organizational data, creating stakeholder relationship maps for new executive hires.⁵ As Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, has discussed, mavens and connectors play a large role in popularizing social ideas. New hires likewise should know the identities of “mavens” within a firm who can answer questions based on institutional and historic knowledge. At our firm, we do not have a formal knowledge management program, but everyone knows who the old-timers in the company are, and they can turn to these individuals to learn if we have ever worked on certain kinds of projects or with certain kinds of clients. “Connectors” might not have the institutional knowledge of mavens, but their own extensive personal connections allow new hires to more quickly locate the resources they need to complete important tasks. New hires’ managers should also create more individualized stakeholder maps to ensure that new hires understand who in the firm can best help them succeed in their roles. Managers should also instruct new hires to create their own maps over the course of the first year, drawing on the firm’s strategy and the nature of their roles for guidance. That way, new hires can one day serve as connectors for future classes of new hires. As we’ll discuss later, these maps can also serve as valuable tools for the teaching of strategy.

Best Principle #4: Make it interactive.

It is not enough to circulate lists of contacts or post information on the Internet; you have to make social relationship building, well, social. Mentoring and buddy programs offer an excellent beginning; not only can new hires gain the mentor or buddy as social contacts, but these individuals can take steps to help new hires engage with others (e.g., by arranging meetings with other employees or pointing new hires to other employees, leveraging existing opportunities for socialization). Lunch and Learn events with experienced employees allow new hires to interact up the organizational chart, developing contacts potentially useful not only for the performance of future work tasks but for future career development as well.

For their executive hires, John Deere pre-schedules meetings for the first three to four months with key functional heads throughout the organization. Bristol-Myers Squibb likewise organizes meetings between new hires and important colleagues, using HR and an outside consultant to monitor progress during Year One.⁶ With such mechanisms in place, hires get to ask the point people any questions they might have, and they also become familiar with the stakeholders who make decisions. PepsiCo tries to make acculturation and strategic insight learning fun by having new executives participate in an informational “scavenger hunt”—an intricate, daily/weekly challenge that executives handle by tracking down individuals who possess the right information. By participating, new hires establish a network across the company, and they learn the specific roles of network members. As a result, they can soon call on the right people to help with future real business problems.

Best Principle #5: Start very early, but do not end there.

Relationship building is an area in which firms can make progress before Day One—and the earlier the start, the greater the impact to the Onboarding Margin. Some firms offer social networking sites as a means of forging connections early on, presenting details on the backgrounds, interests, roles, responsibilities, reporting lines, and contact information of the firm’s members. New hires can search and sort (by keyword or tag) and identify individuals with common interests or career paths. Virtual workers, a rapidly growing part of the workforce at many organizations, particularly benefit from early exposure to online relationship building.

As part of connections made during the recruiting process, firms can also begin to connect new hires to current employees or the rest of the incoming class of new hires. Even the smallest of firms can set up a virtual group at no cost using tools like LinkedIn or a Google group page so that all new hires can see each other’s names, find out in which areas they are living, and gain information helpful to the moving process. We founded just such a virtual group at our firm, and as a result, at least a few of our new hires actually decided to live together, making this housing decision before their start date and creating a strong cohort support bond.

Universities such as UC Irvine and Dartmouth engage new students pre-matriculation using new-student extranet sites; firms can do the same with new hires, adopting tactics such as pre-start visits and relocation packets. On UC Irvine’s extranet site, new students make friends before even setting foot on school grounds, using functions like chatting and note-posting to share knowledge and ask peers for advice or help. An IT consultant for the school told us that “having one central resource that does everything really helps orient new students. Plus, it hasn’t required a lot of maintenance.” For companies and colleges alike, pre-start visits and other social events included as part of the recruiting process allow potential new hires to “interview” the city and not just the company. This ensures that the organization acquires people amenable to the geography and that individuals are relocated more smoothly, so they are better able to hit the ground running on their first day.

Like other components of systemic and strategic onboarding, the nurturing of social relations is not a one-off event; rather, it must be continued progressively over the entire first year of a new hire’s tenure. The childcare provider Bright Horizons re-welcomes employees for months after they join the company. As one employee was quoted as saying, “I never went to a meeting where I was not introduced and made to feel welcome.”⁷ Likewise, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a division of the United States Treasury Department, brings in new hires as a group and establishes a cohort identity for them, even though these new hires are scattered in offices across the country. The organization brings back these new hires at multiple times during the first two years, fostering the relationships built at the beginning and allowing new hires to share experiences they encountered in their regions. The extended time frame coupled with the small group approach helps with new hires’ cultural acclimation, as these employees have a chance to compare and contrast their cultural knowledge and experiences. Since the organization brings in more tenured individuals to offer advice to cohort groups, the onboarding process also contributes early career support, which we will dig into more in Chapter 5.

Best Principle #6: Think small.

Working new hires into small groups during the onboarding process is a great way of fostering more and deeper connections. Enmeshed in a small group during the first few days or week, new hires experience the firm in a personalized way and are more inclined to engage with the onboarding process overall. Assigning new hires into small groups or cohorts leaves them with a “go-to” peer resource group that can handle their questions or concerns, leaving new hires more comfortable and better able to engage in team-building. Working with small groups requires that firms devote more time and resources to onboarding, as it’s more efficient to onboard employees en masse rather than in multiple small groups. Small groups might also require additional planning around the composition of the groups. Still, small groups provide the benefit of simulating small work groups—the context in which most new hires eventually spend most of their work time, regardless of overall organization size. Small groups also force new hires to build relationships with individuals with whom they may not have a natural affinity. Relationship building is a necessary skill and one that the onboarding designer should stimulate right out of the gate. Even if you choose not to organize your entire onboarding program into small cohorts, you can take advantage of the learning and interaction that comes from small groups by breaking up your larger new hire class into small cohorts for different onboarding activities. The technology and strategy consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton divides its new hire start groups into teams of five or six for several group exercises and simulations. As one new hire noted, “I really liked the interactivity of the table teams and the collaborative work effort. I walked out of orientation knowing four new colleagues much better.” Not a bad first-day win.

Similar to the program cited earlier at the OCC, Best Buy has seen clear improvements in the assimilation of its employees through its use of small groups. The firm breaks its five-day initial orientation program into fixed groups of 15 to 20 people and then uses these groups as the central structure of the entire onboarding program. Group members naturally continue to support one another week in and week out. Groups come back together at the 6-month mark for a “celebration” event that provides recognition for early achievements and offers a forum for feedback on how well new hires have been positioned to succeed in their jobs. As the firm has found, individuals are more likely to ask clarifying questions and voice concerns in small groups, and they are more likely to create linkages across functional and geographic divides.

Even if you do not implement small groups, you can still incorporate something of the small group feel by taking steps to personalize the onboarding experience. Google gives its new hires a fun, collective identity by calling them “Nooglers” and lavishing them with special treatment the first week, including a campus tour, numerous lectures from special speakers, welcome balloons and bags of chocolate, “Google Buddies” who answer their technical questions, and special events at which their names are flashed on a television screen.

Although we caution you against going too far and offering new hires a premium experience that is at odds with real-life company (i.e., too much small group attention), taking some steps to recognize new hires and make them feel special can go far in offering the sense of intimacy that comes with being part of a small group.⁸

Best Principle #7: Leverage technologies.

As with cultural orientation, social orientation benefits from the incorporation of new technologies. At management and IT consulting firm Clarkston Consulting, the onboarding team deploys an online site to stay in touch with new associates during the months between acceptance of job offers and the first day of employee boot camp. New hires can find information about the company, training, and company culture as well as participate in a discussion blog.⁹

Social networking sites can also provide an informal and easy way for new hires to connect with one another. As of this writing, more than 15,000 firms are maintaining Facebook networks, and many best-in-class companies are creating internal networking sites with a familiar look for incoming new hires. Among these companies is Starbucks, whose cutting-edge networking site provides social and career development as well as productivity resources. Modeled after sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, Starbucks’ site includes employee profiles, blogs, and messaging capabilities, allowing new hires to interact with other employees and learn information about various teams and programs at the company.

Another, related technology that can potentially help new hires to establish social relationships is the virtual reality experience of the video game Second Life. IBM has begun making use of Second Life as a means of holding virtual corporate meetings. In the words of one reporter, “This isn’t the work of teenage gamers interning at IBM. Researchers are looking at the potential business impact of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games.”¹⁰ Incorporated into a best-in-class onboarding program, Second Life technology can allow new hires to interact with each other in real time before even showing up for the first day. The technology could also allow busy executives to mingle across geographies without spending the time or incurring the expenses required for an in-person social experience.

The good news on the social networking front is that a tremendous number of such tools are available off the shelf, many at no cost. Even if your enterprise neglects to use these tools, a very good chance exists that your employees are building these electronic networks on their own. Harnessing those already in place doesn’t only enhance the onboarding experience, it also supports the better building of networks for existing employees. To some extent, you can rely on these electronic networks to naturally form where there is the greatest need and value. But the enterprise can also garner attention around key needs by submitting content contributions that relate to those needs and having leaders participate strategically in online discussions.

Best Principle #8: Involve senior leadership.

In the book so far, we have been making the case for involving stakeholders across the enterprise, up to and including senior leadership. In helping new hires nurture relationships and build networks, senior leadership has a special role to play. Research has shown that new hires yearn to be inspired by the organization and its vision, and nobody is better placed to speak for the organization than senior executives. For many new hires, it is the charismatic and accomplished leader of a firm—a Bill Gates, a Sir Richard Branson, a Steve Winn, a Jeff Immelt, a Meg Whitman, or a Steve Jobs—who makes you want to join the firm in the first place. Senior leaders represent the opportunity that lies ahead for new hires; they ignite new hires’ imaginations by talking about their own journey to success within the organization and the challenges and opportunities encountered along the way. New hires benefit from potentially forging personal contacts with people at the top, and the firm benefits if leaders can focus their conversation explicitly on what they want out of new hires. It is not necessarily the senior-most leader (e.g., the CEO) who has the most impact. For many new hires, occupying second- and third-tier leadership positions seems a more realistic goal than becoming CEO, because so few people can achieve that honor. Many new hires are thus more inclined to feel inspired by the stories of lower-level leaders who have beat the odds and achieved satisfying successes.

Although their time is scarce, every leader must make some effort to engage with new hires, even if it is limited to, say, a monthly breakfast with a few specially selected new hires or a regularly organized “surprise” visit to an office with the names and backgrounds of the new hires in hand. At the non-profit IT consulting firm Mitre, new hires receive short personal notes from senior vice presidents.¹¹ Many professional services firms have successfully involved senior leaders in onboarding and are seeing great results; in this industry, leadership involvement has become the gold standard. Even if leaders only attend events for a short while, they can still have an impact. The onboarding program designer can handle the challenges of scheduling busy leaders by developing a pool of willing senior leaders well in advance of each event, by scheduling events several months in advance, by providing the executives with a one-page cheat sheet with guidance on the importance of and the best methods for engaging new hires, and by formally scheduling and tracking reminders with executive assistants to allow time to find replacements, if necessary.

The senior leadership’s participation has an added benefit: It conveys to the rest of the organization that the onboarding program has senior leadership’s backing and approval. Firms can give onboarding its stamp of approval in many ways. Yet having a chance to interact with senior leadership conveys the firm’s commitment to onboarding and the success of new hires like nothing else can. Hiring managers, mentors, IT personnel, etc. will all get the hint that onboarding matters and it represents a superbly important investment in the company’s future on the part of senior leaders. As many new hires as possible should have the experience of getting to know the people who steer the organization and who themselves model the successful maintenance of social networks.

Summing Up

A strong, nurturing social life is both a basic human need and essential for career success. Yet most companies do not help nurture relationship building among new hires as fully as they might, and the organization pays a price. As we have discussed in this chapter, firms need to take a more strategic approach to building relationships. Specifically, they need to include programs that help new hires nourish personal and professional networks both inside and outside the workplace. Such measures cannot guarantee that every employee will be perfectly happy and well adjusted. But a strong social component can increase the chances that more and better relationships will form, leading to higher productivity and lower attrition.

Over the long term, perhaps one of the most valuable functions a strong network can serve for new hires is providing a means of professional development. The relationships that new hires form—particularly within an organization—are available for leveraging throughout an individual’s career. This leads us to another pillar of state of the art onboarding: early career support (Table 4.1). As will be seen in the next chapter, providing new hires with the support they need to build successful, satisfying careers is another important way we can redefine the employment compact to benefit new hires while also carving out new value for organizations.

Table 4.1 Interpersonal Network Elements—Sample Tactics