5
PERSONAL PROGRESS
AND PROSPECT: EARLY
CAREER SUPPORT
An investment in education always pays the highest returns.
—Ben Franklin
Cynthia Mills is a role model for other hiring managers. A floor sales manager for an upscale jewelry retailer in New York City, she has done the unthinkable, transforming the high-stress and rapid-turnover sales assistant position into one that retains more than 90% of new hires for two or more years. Several of Cynthia’s sales assistants have even gone on to corporate-level management positions. What is her secret? Although it is not a part of a formalized HR process, Cynthia has developed a well-refined early career support program for her new sales assistants.
According to her employees, the early career support provided by Cynthia is unheard of for hourly wage retail sales roles. “On my first day,” one recently hired sales assistant told us, “she sat me down and asked me loads of questions: What attracted me to the job? What do I hope to learn? What are my biggest goals? What kind of support do I need? What are my greatest strengths? It was almost like she was re-interviewing me, but unlike any interview I ever had for a retail position, and this was after I got the job. I’ve worked retail for 14 years and have never encountered such interest in my career development.”
After conducting this initial session, Cynthia works with each new hire to create a personal development plan and match them with a more experienced mentor. Over the next 90 days, the new hire and mentor meet weekly to discuss progress, expectations, and goals. Once new hires have demonstrated proficiency in the core sales assistant competencies, Cynthia and their mentors identify “stretch goals” for the remainder of the year that align with the new hire’s personal interests and objectives.
What drives Cynthia to devote such time and effort to developing her new employees is her keen awareness of the employer-employee compact. “A manager has an obligation to the new employee,” she explains. “You’re making an implicit promise to give employees the opportunity to be successful. It’s a win-win for everyone. The more successful and happy employees are in their careers, the happier I am in mine. Beyond that, satisfied employees sell more and bring in more revenue for the company—and I do well when that happens. They also more easily and wholeheartedly embrace new initiatives and are more cued into our strategy, the good ones really want to prove themselves, and its best to get them turned on early.”
Unfortunately, many hiring managers do not think in terms of a compact between employers and employees. We often hear hiring managers remark that it is a waste to invest in career support and planning before new hires have demonstrated their worth as employees. But this is inverted logic. The truth is that investing early helps distinguish great employees and increases the chances that they will want to stay with the company. Effective early career support programs also yield a higher number of great employees who reach full productivity faster.
Larger and more progressive companies have long invested in high potential personnel, whether it’s funding MBAs or providing leadership development coursework. They have embraced the idea that helping employees develop their careers is worthwhile, and indeed, vital from a competitive performance standpoint. This chapter contends that firms should take three steps for Early Career Support in the context of an onboarding program:
1. Personal Progress. Engineer a support system that stimulates real and perceived progress throughout the employees’ entire first year.
2. Personal Prospect. Apply the development and career-planning concept earlier in the employee life cycle; i.e., in the first year.
3. Access. Extend the model to all new hires (not just the lucky few).
New hires today seek more than just well-paying jobs; they want meaningful, fulfilling careers. Providing true early career support stands today as the single most important thing firms can do to energize new hires and gain their long-term loyalty and enthusiasm, which is why we label it one of the two power levers. Companies cannot afford to enroll everybody in an MBA program, but they can and need to incorporate a vision of the future into the present. They should provide some measure of assistance—including mentoring, coaching, and counseling—to help establish goals and measure progress against them. They should also provide help assessing career paths and creating a personal plan to all new employees throughout the first year. Every month, your new employees should believe that you really care about their success and want nothing more than for them to reach new heights. By acknowledging and supporting new hires in their career aspirations, and by helping them gain a vision of their personal career prospects, companies can redefine the employer-employee compact in a new, healthier way. This is not a commitment for lifetime employment; rather, it is a commitment to personal development with the expectation of greater yield in return. It is a win-win; when new employees make progress, the company benefits in the form of reduced attrition, and higher productivity levels and business performance. Once companies create content and weave it into the fabric of the current business and personnel processes, the incremental cost of widening the net to additional employees is low.
Early Career Support—Where We Stand Today
Initiatives in career development date to the turn of the 20th century, when many companies began to establish in-house training programs for salesmen, engineers, and certain skilled workers. These programs served as a natural extension of orientation into the firm, and they also served a career-planning function, since recruits could expect that completion of training and their standout performance could lead to promotion to the management track and a chance to climb the corporate ladder. These early programs were quite limited in scope, focusing primarily on technical rather than firm-specific information.
During the 1920s, many large companies instituted formal management training programs that were pretty much restricted to college graduates. These programs typically gave each recruit a series of temporary assignments across the company. Graduates were exposed to the full scope and policies of the company, coming away with the broad, cooperative point of view a manager was supposed to have. Each manager also developed something of an instant network as well as an immediate sense of leadership. Although not called orientation, and certainly not onboarding, these training programs arguably served as an early best-in-class example of many of the Onboarding Margin principles.
Training programs came into their own during the 1970s, when some well-publicized strikes encouraged what came to be known as “job enrichment.” Personnel managers and trainers became increasingly professional in their outlook. Ideas about organizational development made their way from universities into personnel departments, encouraging managers to think broadly about how new employees fit into the company.
Despite these efforts, the overall picture was mixed. Many employees received little in the way of job training throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and virtually no attention was paid to their broader career trajectories beyond the deep entrenchment of defined promotion paths. A large majority of managers were falling through the cracks from a development perspective. Clearly the model of survival of the fittest was in play and considered by many as not only fair, but efficient. While big companies still often had special programs for high-potential employees, most of these had shrunk to only a few days, with little individual attention. A Center for Creative Leadership’s survey in found that only a third of newly hired managers received development in their new position, and even fewer got special attention from their bosses.
In recent years, companies have offered skills training to employees, hoping to get them productive in their positions more quickly and efficiently. This development was largely stimulated by a perceived shortage of skilled workers and an attempt by companies to distinguish their employer brands amidst the growing demand for knowledge workers. By 2001, some 2,000 firms were sponsoring corporate universities to disseminate cultural information, job skills, and workplace skills like leadership and creative thinking. And this number was projected to grow to almost 4,000 by 2010, exceeding the number of private US universities.2 According to the American Society for Training and Development, US-based organizations were spending over $100 billion during the mid-2000s on learning and development, with expenditures and hours of training per employee on the rise.3 A 2008 survey of more than 200 US employers found that almost half “provide training to improve new entrants’ workforce readiness.”4 Yet these firms primarily offered job-specific and readiness training, spending less than 20% of training budgets on career development. Among those firms that didn’t offer workforce training, spending on career development ran a bit higher—about a third of the learning budget.
To the extent companies across industries have invested in career development, they have introduced a number of useful tools and techniques, including formal and informal mentoring, career paths, career development planning, goal setting, performance feedback, and formal sponsorship within an organization. Yet these tools remain greatly underutilized for new hires. Companies offer them only sporadically and do not integrate them within formal onboarding programs. As a result, new hires still struggle to understand what they should do to build their careers, whether inside or outside the firm. Companies, meanwhile, fail to claim the full value that early career support could provide.
Some Common Career Development Tools
• Formal and informal mentoring
• Performance feedback
• Personal development plans
• Goal setting
• Company developed/led training
• Financed secondary degrees and certifications
• Networking support
• Performance feedback and direction
• Functional and industry conferences
• Leveraging diversity and affinity groups
• Career path support
• Formal and informal sponsorship within an organization
• Career fairs
• Coaching
• Introspective skill and personality assessments
• Identification and support of high potential employees
• Career pathing
A few progressive firms have ventured beyond traditional skills training, offering more intense initial training experiences relevant to a new hire’s career. The home products retailer The Container Store puts all new hires through a five-day “Foundation Week” that teaches them about products, values, and processes. New hires go on to apprentice with top employees in the firm, and also continue training in “different functions and units” to “gain a broader perspective and to learn about the company’s strategic challenges.” The firm provides a minimum of 241 hours of training during the first year—far more than the seven hours accorded on average to new hires in the retail industry.5 Yet as extensive as such training is, even this program fails to offer employees exposure to a broad range of career development resources that a state-of-the-art onboarding program would include so as to achieve the maximum impact.
A 1994 article in the Harvard Business Review called for business to move toward a “career-resilient workforce.” Observing that the “longtime covenant between employee and employer,” under which big firms like IBM offered lifetime employment in exchange for loyalty and decent job performance was a thing of the past, the article exhorted companies to enter into a new covenant “under which the employer and employee share responsibility for maintaining—even enhancing—the individual’s employability inside and outside the company.” In practice, this would mean providing employees with tools, opportunities, and an environment conducive to develop their skills and career potential, as well as managers who “show that they care about their employees whether or not they stay with the company.”6 It is quite clear that companies have not embraced this covenant as far as new hires are concerned.
The case for early career support
Today the need for a new covenant or compact is even more pressing than it was almost a generation ago. If the old covenant was on the way out in the early 1990s, to workers today it is on par with long-playing records or the Big Band sound—a relic of the past. New hires no longer think much about their long-term tenure with a company when they shop for jobs. Instead, they try to get the best salary as well as a job that sets them up for a better job with any employer down the line. In recessions, they take any job they can get or try to keep the ones they have, but when good times return they head to the door.7 Employee loyalty, in other words, has been utterly smashed. As employees, new hires are loyal to themselves—happy to give value to the enterprise, but only commensurate to what the organization returns back. The absence of organizational loyalty is reflected in a recent survey of 1,400 CIOs (the leadership group that oversees the greatest concentration of knowledge workers in our economy); 43% put retaining existing workers as their top priority in 2010. A great number of professional workers today are not even employees anymore, but part of the large and growing body of independent contractors and freelancers who sell themselves to the highest bidder for discrete projects.
Other numbers relating to loyalty are well known but worth repeating. As of 2005, Americans were projected to change jobs an average of 10 times between the ages of 18 and 37. More recent surveys taken during the global recession that began at the end of 2007 indicate widespread discontent with employers and specific jobs. One 2009 survey of 900 workers found that 60% intended to leave their present jobs and pursue new opportunities as the economy pulled out of recession.8 Almost 60% of workers in another recent survey reported that “work pressures were undermining their health,” whereas almost 80% of high-level employees reported “high levels of stress, more than twice as high as one year earlier.” A full 40% felt that relations with spouses and partners were suffering as a result of their jobs.9 One partner at a New York law firm summarized the situation: “The loyalty of the institution to its people, and vice versa, isn’t really there anymore—it’s a different animal from what a lot of us were used to.”10
If the employer-employee compact stands in disarray, starting a conversation and providing support beginning at the point of entry into the enterprise serves as a promising way to reset and redefine it. Disloyal workers did not become that way because of their preference for independence; rather, they were forced to take matters in their own hands as the idea of the corporation as a benevolent caretaker proved weak and unreliable. Pursuing long-term career progress has become a key priority for workers of all ages. According to one recent study, Gen Y and Boomers were looking beyond a paycheck and aiming at personal and career growth. The study found that members of the two generations placed other benefits—including “challenging assignments,” “a range of new experiences,” and “explicit performance evaluations and recognition”—higher than money. Slightly less than half (45%) of Gen Y workers reported expecting to spend their entire careers with their current employer, but a majority said they “also want work to bring a range of new experiences and challenges,” leading the authors of the study to conclude that these respondents “may be more susceptible to wanderlust than they realize.”11 A 2009 survey by Deloitte Consulting found that 40% of Gen X workers gave “lack of career progress” as a reason for their unhappiness on the job, ahead of job security and inadequate pay.12
All of this data, along with anecdotal evidence compiled through our work, suggests that companies would do well to stimulate early career planning and development during the first year—making it available to all new hires, helping new hires to identify better their prospects, and affording new hires opportunities to make gradual, visible career progress. The potentially pivotal role of career development initiatives like mentoring; coaching; career exploration; progress pathing and modeling using career development plans; and skills assessments becomes intuitively clear when we consider the kinds of questions and concerns new hires typically have when they join a new company or step into a new role within an existing employer. New hires wonder about the opportunities that really exist, beyond the entry position, for them at their new employer. They are not just thinking about the standard straight line of progress—staff position, supervisor, manager, and executive. Many new hires join a firm hoping to gain experience and move into a different function. Rather than feeling pigeon-holed in a job that does not reflect their long-term ambitions, they want a clear sense of how they can move from a position that their current resume qualifies them for into one that they dream about. If they enter a firm in finance, can they talk about a marketing role? If they are back office employees, is there any chance they can eventually get out into the field (or vice versa)?
New hires at all levels also expect that certain behaviors, actions, and proving competencies will lead to future career progress. But what are the specific requirements? Is it working longer hours? In other words, how does advancement happen? What are the criteria? Questions about career advancement merge with those about the culture, and specifically, the performance values that an organization prioritizes. Often it is the most ambitious, high-potential employees who concern themselves most intensely with performance values. For this group and for all new hires, being proactive and addressing career advancement can temper anxieties and focus the new hire.
Younger new hires harbor many questions about careers and work norms that older new hires might take for granted. Young people with technical backgrounds often feel overwhelmed by the “real world” just after graduation and do not understand how they can ever be effective in their careers. Younger new hires wonder what skills they need to get where they know they want to go. Is it a certification, or international experience, or specific work assignments? What specific elements of a new hire’s performance require development for him or her to progress? Younger new hires who happen to know how to build a career within an enterprise start to worry about how to go about obtaining career sponsors. All new hires worry about how to deal with difficult bosses and how to contend with perceived failures on the job. “If I do something wrong, how do I recover, and how seriously does the failure impact my future career prospects with the firm?” Finally, employees at all stages of their careers wonder about how to handle disappointment on the job. If they are uninspired by their current work, will it turn around? Is it worth it to them to stick it out a year or two if they are bored? What do they do to change their experience for the better?
Offering the kinds of career support tools listed in the preceding table addresses these concerns on a number of levels. Organizations help new hires discover the full breadth of the career options available both inside and outside the firm while providing the support required to explore and test those options. With resources such as mentoring and career pathing at their disposal, new hires can develop clarity early on about career path options, and they can begin to plan what they need to do to achieve their personal visions of success. Most importantly, perhaps, early career support helps new hires feel better about their work life, imparting the belief that their career journey will be rich, either within or outside the organization. Any mediocre company can become great, as can any employee, assuming they are on the right path. Offered enthusiastic career support early on, new hires are thrilled to discover their new employer is an organization that will support them on their personal road to success.
Early career support, as we conceptualize it, can be provided by the smallest of organizations. Centralized resources are powerful for larger enterprises, but in a small outfit of 10 employees, all you need is a manager or mentor to take a new hire under his or her wing, provide direction and guidance during Week One, and then keep the conversation going.
Early career support initiatives benefit the enterprise by serving as a catalyst for greater engagement and motivation. Just as companies reinforce consumers about their selection after they make an initial purchase of a given brand, so must companies reinforce a new hire’s decision to come onboard. Offering early career support helps new hires see the value proposition of their job from the outset. By demonstrating right away that the organization cares about what new hires themselves deeply care about—their success—firms can more quickly activate new hires to perform enthusiastically and at their best.
In the Harvard Business Review’s January 2010 issue, Harvard professor Teresa Amabile presented a study concluding that the number one driver of employee motivation is an employee’s experience of progress. As Amabile explains, “making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak.”13 Significantly, the feeling of progress ranked higher than four other attributes that have long been considered top factors—recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, and clear goals.
Given our earlier position regarding the new hires’ view of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we find it unsurprising that progress matters. Progress will lead to job security, the feeling of belonging and being appreciated, esteem, and ultimately self-actualization. When architected to align with the hiring manager’s needs, progress will result in recognition, appreciation, and energy for further investment in the new hire. From the enterprise’s perspective, progress means that the company mission is being realized—the very reason companies invest in new hires to begin with.
Early career support—understanding personal progress and prospect—can increase new hires’ productivity. New hires are motivated to perform better and reach peak productivity quicker, but they also receive help they need to raise productivity levels. Many new hires remain unaware of incorrect behaviors that limit their current progress and long-term potential. Early career support allows individuals to improve their reputations or personal brands within an organization. In many cases, a positive dynamic of productivity is created: The more effectively individuals perform, the more they develop reputations as stars, which leads in turn to still better performance. For younger and more experienced hires alike, greater self-awareness about minor behavioral tendencies that are having a negative impact, such as doing work out of order from a well-established and proven process, or a tendency to use certain language repetitively and to excess, could prove pivotal. Younger hires often do not know the finer points about how best to act, while older hires might retain ingrained habits or skills that do not work in their new organization’s culture. Organizations can get employees working most productively by offering early career support that identifies both progress and career-limiting behaviors, intervenes when these behaviors come up, supports employee efforts to transform their behavior, and recognizes positive change when it occurs. Most importantly, firms can help hires work productively by crafting how work is initially “set up” for them—the assignments, the support structures, and the guidance.
Early career support affects attrition by creating an opportunity to turn around new hires who might otherwise have left out of frustration with their current job situation, and also by helping identify lower performers sooner so that they can establish remediation paths. By learning about how they can best develop in the future, new hires can gain a sense of purpose and become excited again about the company. Our own firm hired a high-performing young consultant who had previously worked for another boutique consulting firm. This person performed exceptionally well soon after arrival, so as part of the routine mentoring discussions that occurred, we began having serious conversations with him about his future at the firm. We outlined the timing of different promotions, the compensation rewards he could expect to achieve over time, and the possibility that our firm would pay for his enrollment in an MBA program. Because of his exceptional performance, this employee became a manager in only 6 months. Around the one-year mark, he was so driven that he was already thinking about getting an MBA and was willing to leave the organization to do it. Through our ongoing mentoring process and other early career support initiatives, we were able to reassure this new hire that we would likely sponsor his MBA sooner rather than later. The result: Our go-getter remained happy in his job and has stayed with us. While this is just one person, the example illustrates how informing new hires around career development resources that are available to all can help motivate and engage them about their futures.
Initiating career development early for a broad spectrum of employees can offer firms considerable benefits by aligning strategy and initiatives with employee skills and interests; in effect, creating an internal employment market. Suppose your firm (a large company with a long-established channel) wants to adopt a strategy to develop new channels. You might already have new entrants with career interests in channel development. If you can figure out who those people are and match them to needed skills, you will save money on the external recruiting you would normally do to support this strategic initiative. The existence of an internal employment market unlocks new value for the firm because of the enthusiasm and energy created by making the match.
To see how this might work, consider the professional services firm Booz Allen Hamilton (Booz Allen). In recent years, the company has pursued a strategy of creating and growing a new cyber security business to meet growing market demands. Given the labor shortage that exists for what is essentially an emerging discipline, Booz Allen has had to work incredibly hard to find qualified external recruits. One option the firm has explored: training existing employees in the new skill set. Here the firm’s onboarding program has come in handy. As vice presidents participate in Week One onboarding and speak to new hires about their respective businesses, the leader of the company’s cyber security initiative can talk about the opportunities that are present for those who pursue additional career development to gain the necessary skills to play in this specific market. In this case, not only are employees gaining exposure to the strategy, with all the benefits to that in which we’ll discuss in the next chapter, but new hires learn that cyber security could comprise a promising career opportunity for them if they can get the special interests and requisite skills. Booz Allen is enabling the new hire to self-select and take actions, thanks not only to the information it is providing about the new strategy, but also to the complementary guidance they provide regarding performance values and culture.
Beyond support for a company’s strategy, early career support can work wonders for the firm’s employment brand, its competitive position, and employees’ long-term loyalty. Because career development is so important to new hires, and so few firms currently make the most of it as a part of onboarding, doing so can provide you with a point of distinction in the recruiting community. Firms should be aggressive and entrepreneurial about making career development part of their brands.
We recommend going so far as to put resources available on the intranet titled “If You’re Thinking of Leaving” and also to support a frank conversation of relevant issues. Senior leadership could help by taking an interest in new hire career development and talking about career opportunities in a welcome video. Senior executives should offer discussion of their careers, the key milestones, and secrets of their success. Firms might consider offering access to a specialist within the organization who can help new hires transition between roles and organizations. Finally, companies can distinguish their employment brands simply by offering far more extensive access to executive coaching than is currently the norm.
As for loyalty, one 2002 study published in the Harvard Business Review found that job security did not contribute most directly to employee commitment to the firm. Rather, “the executives who intended to stay with their companies the longest, and who voiced the greatest commitment, were those whose companies offered them ample opportunities to enhance their employability and to advance their careers.” The authors put the basic principle succinctly: “Groom your executives to leave, and they’ll stay.” They caution that firms cannot just talk about employability—they have to deliver, or else loyalty will quickly evaporate.14 These findings bring us right back to 1994, and the argument that was made then to create a “career resilient workforce” benefiting both organizations and employees. If offering career development could foster loyalty, it seems obvious that beginning the process early—within the first year of employment—would only help to achieve superior results.
Structural Requirements to Stimulate Progress and Achieve One’s Prospect
When a new hire joins an enterprise, how they are placed in the organization matters. We identified four structural requirements that affect individuals’ experience around progress and affect their ability to reach their potential, as noted in Figure 5.1; these are Assignments, Guidance, Insulation, and Remediation.
Figure 5.1 Structural Requirements to Stimulate Progress and Achieve One’s Prospect
Assignments
Assignments relates to the character, order, and pace by which tasks (defined broadly) are taken on by the hire, whether the most junior employee or the senior-most executive. The onboarding system should require that each hiring manager think through the character, order, and pace of these assignments with the general idea of progress in mind. Set up the new hire to win at every step of the game—in their eyes and in the eyes of peers and superiors. With a real sense of achievement, they will emerge energized, confident, and proud of what they are accomplishing for themselves and the company. Senior hires often enter with an ambitious agenda that they create for themselves or that is dictated by the enterprise. It is critical to counsel these executive or managerial hires to pace themselves. If they are going to succeed, they can’t flame out soon after entry. For any level of hire, first assignments should be carefully selected so that they are both valuable and relatively modest.
Guidance
Guidance entails the degree to which the system (and specifically, the individuals who surround the new hire) recognize that the new hire will do better with instruction and advice as necessary. A new hire at junior or mid-tier levels may need task instruction, but all new hires benefit more from the managers’, peers’ and mentors’ perspective on the organization culture, performance values, strategy, etc. Taking a “sink or swim” approach and leaving the new hire on his or her own is not such a great tactic. The only thing a hiring manager will likely prove by that exercise is something that requires no proof: that an outsider is far less likely to “get it” than an insider would. Instead, system participants should remain active observers of the things that the new hire is “getting” and the things that the new hire is missing. System participants should be more cautious when the new hire is performing a task or an experience (e.g., presenting in front of one’s peers for the first time) that carries risk of judgment by others, and they should provide an additional layer of counsel. Senior leadership should tell system participants that they bear responsibility for helping this new entrant to succeed (and again, everyone’s annual assessment forms should reflect this responsibility).
Insulation
New hires—at all levels deserve “insulation”—a layer of organizational protection to help avoid getting in too much trouble too early. Ideally, a new hire reports into someone who has time to take proper care to help the new hire succeed. Given organizational design constraints, a modest leader to direct reports ratio often does not exist. The onboarding design team should examine the enterprise’s overall organization and determine which new hire positions remain subject to limited oversight. In these cases, mentors should be made aware of the circumstance, and the system should ensure that the new hire is provided with alternative and sufficient resources and support. At the very least, both the new hire and the hiring manager should understand that the critical “firsts” associated with a given role (introduced in Chapter 2 and discussed further in Chapter 8) require more managerial attention so new hires can experience critical wins.
Remediation
The last piece of structural support is a mechanism for remediation. Too many good people fail because companies do not have the equivalent of an emergency room. Everyone is subject to making mistakes, and anyone may find themselves in either a difficult position or a position for which they were not prepared (sometimes because of weak recruiting and placement). When new hires are not getting the support they deserve, usually the local resource is simply too busy, has conflicting incentives, does not, him- or herself, have the right skills to assist, or is otherwise unavailable. In these cases, the new hire should have somewhere to go to get support. Mentor programs largely exist for this purpose, but in all too many cases, the mentor himself may prove to be disinterested or unskilled. The new hire should not pay the price. Onboarding designers need to provide for a centralized resource to seek assistance. It is simply unacceptable to spend the money that companies do on recruiting and placement and then allow failure because of organizational design flaws. The price is too great.
Effective Delivery of Early Career Support
Now that we’ve established the critical role of early career support as part of a strategic onboarding program and laid out the structural elements required, let’s consider the question of how to do it effectively. Our own experience working with and investigating effective programs across industries has led us to some additional best principles that can help you when introducing early career support as part of onboarding.
Best Principle #1: Take steps to centralize and systematize normally informal career conversations.
Centralizing and systematizing delivery of career information allows for some governance while simultaneously making it easier for new recruits in large companies to locate the information they need. Centralization also helps provide managers with guidance into the needs of new hires as well as into the most helpful ways to offer feedback. Firms like Caterpillar and Lockheed Martin offer centralized materials to provide “go-to” career support and a source of expertise for managers who are planning new programs. IBM and Booz Allen offer corporate learning sites and self-education curricula that provide learning tailored to new hires, making the information more engaging and timely.
An HR manager at the holding company of Sears reported on the benefits of systematizing its previously informal buddy program. In the old days, “no one was assigned as the official buddy [of someone else]—there was no process or list of responsibilities. Because of this, everyone involved thought someone else was taking care of a Buddy’s responsibilities, and the new hires suffered.” The firm’s new buddy system, by contrast, provides standards as well as training (called the “Buddy School”) for program participants. “This ensures a more consistent onboarding experienced for all new hires, leading to an accelerated timeframe in which they will be fully engaged, productive members of the organization.”
Another prime opportunity for systematization of early career support involves the mentoring programs that many firms currently maintain. Our own research affirms how helpful formal mentoring programs are in integrating new employees by teaching them how to succeed in the current position and how to assess and determine an exciting career forward.
You should remember that a lot of early career support simply involves managers taking the time to speak one-on-one with new hires and offer helpful advice. Just having regular conversation might be a step forward in many firms, and it can be a hugely effective tool for engaging a new hire. The opportunity cost of having conversations is small, as opposed to the large investment that some firms make in delivering formal performance review programs. Conveying one or two helpful hints—a suggestion to take a class, or cuing a new hire into a potentially damaging behavior quirk—can go a long way. If a firm can find a way to activate all managers to observe new hires, think about them, and intervene to help them, both the firm and the new hires will benefit.
A leader in our firm recently participated in a “pulse check” review with a subordinate who joined the company at a mid-management level nine months earlier. As a formal part of the process, the leader had occasion to offer a piece of advice. “You’re doing great in many areas,” he said, “and you have my support. Yet your career here might be limited, since other senior people in the firm don’t see you, and you haven’t yet demonstrated contributions to the firm more broadly.” This leader advised the new hire to find and take ownership of a project or initiative that, once completed, would give him visibility with senior management across practice areas. Informing the new hire that Kaiser Associates expects employees to make “firm contributions” outside of their client work was a key performance value for us. This new hire thought about it and came back a week later with the idea of co-leading a semi-monthly growth planning meeting. The leader gave him the opportunity, and as a result his profile improved and his career at Kaiser was in far better shape than it otherwise might have been. The initiative that this individual helped spearhead now has new energy and is experiencing progress where it had stalled before. We are realizing the Onboarding Margin in this one instance alone.
This story is a great example of an inexpensive investment making a real difference. All that the onboarding change agent really needs to do here is:
1. Talk to hiring managers about the opportunity and their responsibility to play a special role for new hires; and
2. Modify their company’s assessment process to take special consideration and provide special direction for new employees (as compared with tenured employees).
Best Principle #2: Systematizing is no substitute for authenticity.
Even as you take steps to systematize program elements that might already exist informally, make sure not to efface the authentic feel of these elements. Mentorship, for instance, should not be routinized to the extent that mentees lose a sense of their mentors’ genuine engagement. It is far better to have a genuine experience than a centralized one that is rote and uninspired. We want all managers to know what to do and when, but if it becomes a perfunctory exercise, all a firm is doing is adding expense without realizing a significant benefit. And given that you are working on a system here for the entire company’s benefit, you cannot rely on the goodwill of mentors to take their jobs seriously. For onboarding to be systemic, mentors should have their responsibilities written into their job descriptions, and their performance as mentors should factor into their broader annual assessments. If mentors are held accountable for their performance, they will care about doing a great job.
To understand the tangible difference authenticity makes, consider the case of Robert, a recently hired junior sales associate at a pharmaceutical company. Robert participates in a monthly meeting with his firm-selected mentor to discuss his career development. But because the mentor program is so rigidly specified, the meetings are meaningless. The mentor goes through a five-bullet checklist, and when the meeting is over he goes to his own development plan and checks off that he has conducted the meeting so that he meets his own performance objectives. Since the mentor is supposed to be in contact with the new hire’s manager, Robert’s mentor sends an email to the manager, yet when he does not receive a response, he fails to follow up.
Unfortunately, that’s not all Robert’s mentor fails to do. Even though he overheard Robert complaining in the firm’s cafeteria about something unreasonable Robert perceived his boss doing, Robert’s mentor neglects to talk about it in the mentor meeting because he’s relying exclusively on what the five bullets tell him. The mentor is totally unengaged, and so too is Robert. He does not get any real support and ends up with a very negative performance evaluation from his manager four months later. In addition, he feels turned off and isolated in his huge company. If his mentoring interaction had been more authentic, his mentor would have tried to reach his manager until he succeeded. He would have talked with Robert about the negative feedback he’d received from his manager, reviewed the deliverable that had received the criticism, explained the feedback to him, and reached out to the manager to let him know that Robert was working to improve.
So how do you begin to make systemic mentoring authentic? For starters, photocopy this story and share it with your mentors. Put them on notice of what poor mentoring looks like. Establish a standard of quality that you would expect from your company’s manufacturing line. Great companies produce great product because they genuinely care. The same needs to be done for mentoring and all other service elements of onboarding.
Best Principle #3: “Amp up” the performance review process during the first year.
While increasing the frequency and breadth of new hire evaluations requires the expenditure of additional resources, it can serve as a strong career support mechanism. Early evaluations can offer new hires an initial sense of accomplishment, something that is particularly important to younger employees. One approach is to offer reviews at the 30-day, 100-day, six-month, and one-year points. But note that the title of this chapter and the label for this pillar is Early Career Support, not Early Career Judgment. In amping up the review process, your sole purpose should be to render the new hire more successful and more excited. Increasing the breadth of feedback to include peers, the mentor, and other relevant employees provides a wider scope of information, leaving the new hire with greater guidance.
At the household construction products company Marvin Windows and Doors, new hires receive a “progress report” within the first 90 days. The report distills new hire performance into such categories as work quality, dependability, and judgment.15
At Starwood, new hires receive feedback from a circle of about 10 reviewers, not just a manager. Many of the additional reviewers are selected by employees themselves and include internal and external customers and peers. An online tool is used to make the submission of feedback and the aggregation of results easier and more accessible to managers at different levels. This “360-degree” system benefits all stakeholders by providing feedback that captures a variety of perspectives. Starwood can more easily identify individuals for progression planning using the online tool. New hires can better identify which internal career paths are attainable and which skill areas they need to improve so as to get where they want to go. They also gain access to a personal network of resources to help facilitate career support and social and cultural integration into the firm. Finally, multiple channels provide “second opinions” and mitigate the possibility of poor mentoring.
At Bank of America Corporation, executives receive a great amount of performance feedback during their first year on the job as a part of onboarding. During the first week on the job, new hires identify important successes to aim for during the first 90 days. Within three to four months, new hires participate in a “Key Stakeholder Check In,” receiving “written and verbal feedback from a select list of their key stakeholders.” At the one-year mark, after new executives have already made improvements based on stakeholder feedback, they receive 360-day feedback that helps them understand if their efforts have borne fruit. This feedback “is used along with other data and feedback mechanisms as input in the individual’s performance ratings and reviews.”16
Best Principle #4: Encourage new hires to take ultimate responsibility for their own careers.
Just because a firm accepts some of the responsibility for new hires’ career development as part of a redefined employer-employee compact does not mean new hires do not bear ultimate responsibility. They do, and state-of-the-art onboarding reinforces this message. At our own firm, we tell new hires that they drive their own development. We give them tools, but we do not hold their hands, and we stress that new hires need to be proactive, that they should actively use the tools available to them, and we expect them to help frame the agenda.
At the technology firm Teradata, development resources for new hires are available for self-service on a portal. The firm has managers use this portal to obtain assessment tools, a personal development plan, welcome packets, buddy checklists, etc. Although such a delivery system may not offer the governance of a state-of-the-art strategic program, it at least offers the content and the structure—an enormous gain over most of its peers.
Another company whose program offers new hires tools to manage their own development is Verizon Wireless. The company’s intranet provides new hires with individualized career support resources. The site’s “About You” section offers specific eLearning modules as well as mentoring information, “go to” resources, announcements of social/team-building events, and a “development manager” that helps new hires chart their career progress, plot career path next steps, and select and register for recommended classes relevant to the job function. This section allows the new hire to personalize and visualize the complete set of onboarding resources.
Starwood’s StarwoodONE intranet likewise serves as a central hub for new hires’ career development. Employees can reference their development goals in the “About Me” tab. Managers and employees jointly develop five professional goals (e.g., “secure 10 new customers”) and three personal goals (e.g., “Enjoy a better work-life balance”). They also access Starwood’s corporate training materials and sign up for classroom-like sessions. Learning needs are identified through review feedback, while the system also interfaces with Starwood’s software for career planning applications.
Best Principle #5: Encourage new hires to create career development plans.
While creating career development plans are certainly not a new means of supporting employee’s careers, not many companies regularly create such plans as part of the first-year onboarding program. We see this as a lost opportunity to take a proven tool and use it to help new hires identify personal prospects and ways they can measure their progress against career development goals.
At Wells Fargo, new bank tellers fill out career development plans at a point between 90 and 180 days, setting expectations and mapping out their future careers with the company. As one report has documented, “initial reactions have been very positive ... and turnover is expected to decrease substantially.”17 This is one of the few examples we’ve uncovered of a company that has wheeled out career development plans in an attempt to retain lower-level, high-turnover retail employees.
At General Mills, development plans are written out by new hires in their first month in consultation with managers to define the skills that new hires need to develop so as to reach their goals. The manager’s input serves as a valuable support mechanism and also a means of helping General Mills meet its own corporate goals. As one 2006 new hire remarked, “It’s really important that you write out your development plan because that’s what guides you in your growth as an employee.” New hires in general come away with a sense of owning their careers even as they benefit from managers’ guidance.
Best Principle #6: Make early career support collaborative.
In striking a balance between individual and firm responsibility, onboarding should strive to initiate dialogues and joint planning efforts involving new hires, their managers, and their mentors. Firms like Ernst & Young, General Motors, and Baird have all improved early career support by making it more collaborative. At Ernst & Young, the creation of collaborative career paths has resulted in higher satisfaction ratings for career resources among new hires. At General Motors, coaches work collaboratively with individuals to plan career paths, teach new skills, and improve competencies. The “coaching cadre” is comprised of a clearly identified group of executives, certified during an intensive four-day summit. This has enhanced executive development in career path planning while also helping provide personalized planning to suit the individual’s desires and needs.
Chapter 3 illustrated how the new onboarding program at Baird has been used to effectively instill a new strategic and cultural change for the financial services firm. At its core, a key element of this program is the collaborative nature of the onboarding experience. The joining of the new hire into a new team involves not only the team lead, but also the branch manager, the corporate HR “coach,” and other senior leaders at corporate involved in the business plan review. Involvement from such a diverse set of stakeholders ensures new hires are well prepared for their new financial advisory careers.
Best Principle #7: Offer a flexible system with multiple safeguards.
Experiences within organizations are often uneven when it comes to career development. Some managers might be open to working with new hires on a career development track even if it takes them outside their current career, whereas others are not. To account for variations across the organization, your onboarding system should offer different paths and put the focus on exploration. Firms should offer supplementary resources, potentially even independent career counselors like at a high school or university career center. Should the firm choose an internal resource to serve as a supplemental resource, this individual should be outside the new hire’s chain of command and operational role—someone in the talent management, learning development, or HR functions. That way, new hires with poor mentors and managers still gain the benefit of a third option. In many of the companies we have mentioned so far, centralized online resources can serve this function to some extent, as can content such as inspirational case studies for how successful career paths at the organization can unfold. Offering multiple safeguards supports both the guidance and remediation structural elements of early career support.
Summing Up
Remember Charles, the employee we met in the Introduction whose boss quit before he arrived? If his company had offered early career support, Charles would have met with his new manager during the first couple of weeks of employment. He would have articulated where he wanted to go, admitted that he had arrived with higher visions of leading the intended initiative, and informed his manager that he now he felt like a rug had been pulled out from underneath him.
In the wake of such a conversation and the creation of a personal development plan for Charles, his manager might have thought about some new ways to help him achieve his goal—perhaps helping Charles to network with people deploying the initiative, or alternatively, developing some different career paths that would have excited him. Charles might not have left the firm, since his concern about being promoted in 6 months might have been addressed, and he would have known exactly what he would have needed to do to make his promotion happen.
Early career support holds great potential for firms as a part of onboarding, offering not merely a chance to improve retention, but also to heighten new hires’ overall enthusiasm and productivity. Most firms today make only limited and late use of career development, seeing it as a reward for employee loyalty rather than what it could be—a powerful means of nurturing it. Even more than social networking, extensive use of early career support could enable firms to gain a competitive edge by redefining the employer-employee compact in a way meaningful to 21st century workers. Combine this with educating new hires on strategy, and providing associated direction (against that strategy), the subject of the next chapter, and new hires are poised to increase the value they can contribute to your company at an early stage in their careers.
Table 5.1 Early Career Support Elements—Sample Tactics
