How To Give New Hires A Head Start In 2023

The Great Resignation is far from over. The new talent you hired with great hardship is ready to jump the gun and quit your company if they face the slightest of Herzberg’s Hygiene Factors or even find some of his motivators missing from their new workplace.

How bad is the attrition problem?

In April 2022, Gartner predicted the annual employee turnover was likely to increase by nearly 20% this year above the pandemic average of 37.4 million employees. As we get closer to the end of the year, the CIPD Good Work Index found that over 20% of workers were planning to quit their jobs in the next 12 months, a rise from 16% in 2021.

What is causing people to quit their jobs?

McKinsey’s Great Resignation survey reported in January 2022 more than half of the people who quit their jobs in the six months prior said they did not feel valued by their organisation or managers. Other major reasons for quitting included a desire for mutual trust and care, stronger relationships, and a sense of connection.

Attrition in new hires.

The attrition problem is particularly severe in case of new employees, with around 40% of them leaving their jobs within their first year with a company. Such high attrition can sink ships as the cost of replacing a single employee can range from one and a half to two times the employee’s annual salary.

How can you reduce attrition?

Fortunately, 75% of turnover can be prevented. The Work Institute’s 2020 Retention Report created ten categories of reasons why people left their jobs. Seven out of the ten categories were labelled as preventable.

For example, major reasons for resignations are related to career development (20%), work-life balance (12%), manager behaviour (12%), job characteristics (10%), wellbeing (9%), compensation & benefits (9%), and work environment (6%).

All of these reasons can be prevented if a company makes employee success its priority.

Ways to Give New Hires a Head Start

Organisations must make an effort to inculcate a culture that prioritises employee satisfaction. McKinsey research concludes you must give new employees a sense of purpose and provide them room to grow. The research firm suggests three “levers” to increase employee retention.

1. Clarify career paths and development plans for each role within the organisation. New and old employees should know their next opportunities and the skills they need to fulfil their future roles.

2. Create a transparent internal job marketplace. Make it easy for your people to find their next role in the organisation. Enable internal talent mobility and provide employee journey maps along with recommended future roles and skill development paths.

3. Provide opportunities for employees to fill their skills gaps before making their next internal move. Think beyond workshops and virtual sessions and include on-the-job apprenticeship and trainee assignments a part of your career development mix.

Connecting New Employees to Company Culture

Once you make employee success a pillar of your organisational culture, you should think of ways to communicate that culture with your new hires. Gartner researchers have three ways for HR leaders to connect new hires to organisational culture during onboarding.

1. Prioritise building connections over asking for productivity. Help new hires build trust and reaffirm their decision to join your company.

2. Apply values to on-the-job decisions. Functional leaders should know how to demonstrate to new hires how the organisational values look like in day-to-day working.

3. Enable new hires to form cross-functional networks. Provide them with visibility into employee profiles. Offer conversation starters and communication tips or pair new hires with mentors.

The Role of Technology

Of course, none of what we have discussed could be possible without technology. Every organisation needs software to attract, recruit, onboard, and retain talent. That’s where tools like SuperReach come into play.
SuperReach gives you the ability to pinpoint what it is that makes your current top performer’s outreach top and then makes it easy to replicate and scale that across your team.

This gives new hires access to proven outreach strategies, templates and techniques from day one, setting them up for success and helping them to generate revenue quicker.