The link between on-boarding and engagement

I teach humanistic management and have a background in both the for profit and non-profit sectors. I am also on the USA chapter board for the International Humanistic Management Association.

I recently had an epiphany about on-boarding while discussing the on-boarding practices for Greyston Bakery – who practice open hiring – meaning – anyone who wants a job – gets hired. Their on-boarding procedures – reminded me of my volunteer management on-boarding procedures. And my volunteer management program was well regarded and I was loaned out to other organizations to help them set up and manage their volunteer processes.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said (and I am paraphrasing) treat your employees like volunteers. There is a lot to be said for this.   In volunteer management circles – we have a document titled – the 7 sins of volunteer management. These “sins” relate to what needs to happen to successfully on-board a volunteer. 

To put this “sin” list into positive terms a good on-boarding will.

 1.    Explain the work that needs to be done (clarify job descriptions – roles, responsibilities etc)

2.    Explain WHY the work needs to be done.  (mission orientation)

3.    Provide the tools for the work that needs to be done (what they are, where to get them, how to use them – how to navigate the organization if they have a problems)

4.    Ensure the staff is trained on how to use the tools properly

5.    Verify staff know how to do the job correctly in real life – not just – here is the training go

6.    Follow up  - check in for a month to make sure work is being done and that staff understand priorities and that anything unclear in the training is clarified for future trainings or changed if it turns out that in real life – staff do it differently.

7.    Thank them as part of the follow up – again- to help ensure they understand the importance of the priorities.

Recently asked questions about on-boarding and their answers:

1.    What are your best and tested methods to on-board new joinees? Is it orientation, training, first day experience or any other(s)?

a.    The orientation MUST include information on why the work being requested is important.  An orientation to the history of the organization and the mission and purpose of the organization. Most of the motivation issues can be addressed if the onboarding includes the moral imperative of getting the work done. What happens if your company didn’t exist and the customers didn’t have you all to help them? Why does what you do matter?

Examples:  I was in Japan a couple of years ago and toured the Inax museum. They make toilets and other porcelain products and have for a couple of centuries. While we were there -  there was a new employee orientation training going on. They new recruits learned about tile around the world. The history of toilets in Japan. How porcelain is made, all about soils from around the world and the properties of soil and how it impacts the final product, how the company helped rebuild Tokyo after the Ginza fire and more. This wasn’t simply – a – we need you to make sales calls for us orientation. This was a several day immersion into the history of the company and all aspects of production.  Only THEN could the employees go on to do whatever it was they were hired to do.

Greyston Bakery has a similar on-boarding. They bring people in as a group – and orient them to the bakery. What is the bakery’s history? How was it founded. What are the principles that guided the founders? Who all are the customers. How do all the parts of the organization work together to get the brownies out the door and to whom and what happens if they don’t get those brownies baked.  It’s not simply a – we need you to do accounting for us. Everyone – EVERYONE is given an immersive week long orientation. And if they don’t complete it – they don’t move on to the production floor. This is why they can open hire. The people who stay through on boarding – WANT to be there and re committed to the project. This is similar to volunteer on boarding. You make it exclusive – something that has to be worked for – and the people who rise to the challenge – are great.

2. Do you have any different onboarding methods depending on the position or department a candidate joins? 

No. You should not have different on-boarding methods. Everyone should go through the same orientation.

3. What on-boarding methods, even thought to be great, aren't as effective in driving engagement and why?

If you don’t include information on why the company exists, who the customers are and why it is important that your organization exist to solve whatever problem you are solving and how the company is organized and how the parts of the organization work together to solve those problems - your employees won’t necessarily understand all that and they are more likely to just view their own work in isolation – which is not very motivating and it doesn’t encourage collaboration or motivation. Understanding how a person’s work impacts other employees – is VERY motivating. Most orientations – cover the job- legal requirements and little else.

If you are interested in learning more - let me know - I may just create a - how to on-board effectively program. 

Hiring Biases

We all have our biases, the problem is that our biases limit our options and that’s not a good thing.

Think Progress had an article title: “People can’t be trusted to make unbiased hiring decisions.”  (http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/05/13/3657911/unitive-hiring-bias/) This is pretty much true. Our baseline for who we trust – is ourselves so we look for other people like us. And that’s not good for business.

Diversity in the workplace is challenging, but it brings many benefits. The most important benefit being that your decision making processes are improved when you allow diverse viewpoints to weigh in. Diversity isn’t a cure for doing stupid things, but it helps. People who don’t think like you are more likely to tell you when you are being stupid, if you let them.

And to let them, you need to hire them. You have to word your advertisements in such a way as to not discourage certain individuals from applying. Your hiring process needs to not take into account someone’s protected status, which is actually really hard to do. And then you try to be equal and still – your workplace is not as diverse as it should be.

So we use tools to help us avoid our biases. One of these tools is the personality assessment, which is designed to help us eliminate bias. But the tests are biased. In fact, they are generally rated as a good test if their bias level is moderate instead of severe.  The argument for such flawed tests is that if the tests are less biased then regular human bias, it’s a move in the right direction towards less bias.  (See: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2009/03/testing_testing.html)

Companies who use personality tests should at least make sure that their tests are scientifically validated to reduce not only the bias, but to ensure that what you are testing for are actual personality traits. (https://humanistlearning.com/personalityassessments/)

So what is the solution to hiring bias?  How about adding in random selection. Once the basic criteria for hiring are met – choosing between equally qualified candidates, when done by humans, reintroduces human bias. There is research that shows having bad reasons for making a choice yields worse results than making a random choice. (http://humanisthappiness.blogspot.com/2014/11/randomness.html) So why not chose randomly if everything else is equal.

Did you hire the right person?

How can you know whether the candidates you are considering will be a good fit with your company or organization or not?

Knowing what to look for in a candidate is tricky business. You need someone who has the knowledge and background to do the job, someone who is hard working, and you also want someone who will “fit in” to your company’s culture.  Basically we are all looking for someone with the “right” personality.

But what is personality?  How do we judge it and how can we know if any particular candidate has the “right” sort of personality?

Well, it turns out we humans are by and large, lousy judges of personality.  To help us be more objective we turn to personality assessments.

Workplace personality assessments are big business, like $500 million a year. Josh Bersin, principal of consulting firm Bersin by Deloitte, a unit of auditor Deloitte LLP estimates that 60% to 70% of all US workers have been subjected to a personality test in the workplace (see: http://www.wsj.com/articles/are-workplace-personality-tests-fair-1412044257)

The question hiring professionals need to ask is: do these assessments even tell us anything useful?  The answer is no. They don’t. Mostly because people don’t know what personality traits correspond to good work behavior. The problem of misused personality tests has gotten so bad that lawsuits have been filed against companies who are misusing personality assessments and the EEOC is looking into allegations that personality tests discriminate against people with disabilities.

 The other reason to consider how and whether to use personality assessments has to do with the fact that many of the most common tests have no science to back them up.

Yes, you heard me, most of the common personality tests (*cough* Myers Briggs *cough*) are not based on science. In fact, they don’t even use the same personality traits that are standard in the scientific community.  (see:  http://psychcentral.com/lib/types-of-psychological-testing/0005924/2 for a list of the types of tests that actual psychologists use when assessing personality).

So, what is a conscientious employer to do when faced with the need to determine if a candidate is good worker or not. Well, step one is to educate yourself. Find out what personality traits you should be looking for and how you might actually assess for that so that you can stop misusing personality assessments in the workplace.

What I can tell you is that according to Dr. Brittany Shoots-Reinhard a social psychologist with a focus on attitudes, persuasion, judgment and decision making, and personality: one of the best personality predictors of workplace success is actually rather simple: conscientiousness.  All things being equal, people who are conscientious are going to make a good faith effort to get their work done regardless of the conditions they find themselves in.

To learn more about how to stop misusing personality assessments so that you can be effective AND ethical – check out Brittany’s e-course at Humanist Learning Systems. https://humanistlearning.com/personalityassessments/

Why Neuro-diversity in the workplace is important.

Why the British Intelligence Agency hires neurodiverse individuals and why you should too.

GCHQ – which is the British spy agency - has over 120 neuro-diverse employees. These employees were chosen specifically for their neuro-diversity. (see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11111584/GCHQ-employs-more-than-100-dyslexic-and-dyspraxic-spies.html)

They hire these individuals because, even though they may not have a full range of skills, they are spikey – which means, while they are below average on some common tasks like reading and writing and perhaps tying their shoes, they are well above average in other areas, like problem solving.

Working with neuro-diverse individuals is a challenge. My son has dyspraxia and he’s highly gifted, which means he sees and experiences the world in a profoundly different way than his neurotypical peers.

Getting him to work on things he isn’t interest in is a challenge. Helping him to stay organized is a challenge. I’m his mom, so I worry about what sort of work he might be able to get given his challenges.

And yet, he’s endlessly fascinating and has skills the rest of us don’t. Like his sense of smell is really acute. He may have a photographic memory.  Can he write – barely? Can he remember the song lyrics of a choir piece he heard once? Yes.

Hiring and working with neuro-diverse individuals is a challenge, but it’s precisely what makes these people different that make them so valuable.  So the next time you interview someone “challenging” instead of thinking about how difficult they will be to work with, think about how much value their unique insight into the problems your company faces. You may just find they are worth the effort.

Randomness

Why embracing randomness is sometimes better than having a strategy.

There is a really cool article about the science of randomness over at: http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/is-the-most-rational-choice-the-random-one/  The tag is – if you can’t choose wisely, choose randomly.

Here’s a synopsis of the article and the research cited by the article.

Rationality is great – but there is often a randomness to what is going on and can’t be avoided. If we strive for perfect (which is not attainable), we often miss the good.

To make this make more sense.  If you can’t find a good reason for doing something, finding a reason, any reason, even a bad reason is our default as humans. That’s why rationalizing has a negative connotation. It means that in the absence of good reasons, we are making up reasons in an attempt to bring order to our decision making.

And while that’s normally a good thing, it turns out that  if we use bad reasons we often end up with bad outcomes.  Which means, we would have had better results if we had chosen what to do at random.  And yes, there is evidence this is true in some situations.

So, for a situation in which choosing randomly is better, it’s best to accept that and embrace randomness through a process called, sortation.

Let’s take hiring for an example. Often our reasons for hiring people is arbitrary. We rationalize why we pick one candidate over another.  But actually, we would probably have better results if … once the criteria for basic qualifications are met – the person who gets the job out of several candidates is chosen by random lottery.  This would replace arbitrary bad reasons with randomness, which is actually likely to give us a better outcome, despite the counter-intuitive nature of this approach.

The benefit of adding randomness into the hiring process would be evident. Imagine what our work forces would look like if we did hire people randomly – assuming our basic hiring criteria were met.  We would probably have a more diverse workforce.

I think the key, like anything, is to know when to employ reason and when to give yourself over to random selection. And the solution, as always is to challenge our own assumptions. If we find ourselves searching for reasons we need to question whether we are rationalizing or not. And if we are, perhaps consider experimenting with random selection instead. What’s the worst that could happen? You already don’t have good reasons for making a choice. So flip a coin and see what happens.

Optimal Stopping

Turns out math can help you find a spouse or hire a good employee. I love science!

There was a great scientist named Kepler – look him up if you don’t know who he is. Anyway – he needed a wife, so he set out to do it systematically. He interviewed a lot of women.  The problem is – how do you know when to stop? He didn’t and missed the opportunity to propose to his 2 best candidates as they had moved on by the time he realized they were his best option. 

So, the question is: Is there an optimal stopping point.  And the answer is – yes. According to the author of this article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/how-to-marry-the-right-girl-a-mathematical-solution  This mathematical strategy called optimal stopping is “a way, not to guarantee success, but to maximize the likelihood of satisfaction.”  Mathematicians apparently claim that this strategy works for most “hiring” decisions.

Here’s how it works. Have a list of candidates. Interview the first 36.8% of the candidates. Then, the first candidate after that that is better than the best of that group – hire them.  What this lets you do is see what the average candidate is like by sampling the first 3^rd of your candidates. Then, knowing what the average is like, you are now able to recognize good candidates – who are better than average - when you meet them. This will save you the hassle of having to go through all the rest of the candidates and potentially losing your best candidate during the waiting process. Because really, if someone is better than average, they are probably going to get other offers.

I’m happily married, but I do know that one of the reasons I was able to recognize my hubby as a quality person was because I already understood what other guys were like. And again, will this get you the best candidate? Maybe not. But it will get you a better than average candidate and that’s good odds.