6 most common recruitment biases

First impressions matter. So being aware of the first impression of a new employee in your company is crucial to his or her future performance. That’s why in this blog I’m taking a closer look at onboarding.

Onboarding somebody into your company is a lot like welcoming somebody into your house. As with all welcomes, it is not just a first coffee and a short introductory chat. It is a continuous demonstration of cooperation and affection. A good onboarding process is paramount for the productivity of your employee and his or her integration with the team. It encompasses everything from the first small introduction over a cup of coffee until the more formal monthly one-to-one meetings. In this blog I will give some practical advice on how you can improve your onboarding process and the integration and engagement of your new employees. If you’re thinking: “well most of this doesn’t apply to us because the COVID-19 crisis is forcing us to work remotely”, think again. Onboarding is now more important than ever to create a well-functioning team, you just need to rethink your structures in a digital matter. More tips on that here.

Handbooks and more

Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first. As a part of any onboarding process, there are a lot of practical matters and questions that your newly hired employee has. Handbooks are a great way for employees to peacefully read through and find an answer for their questions, in the first turbulent weeks of a new employment. In the same line, make sure that the handbook has a FAQ as well, where the employee can find the most frequently asked questions, just to make it a bit easier for him or her.

It does not all have to be dull practical stuff, however. You can also include more interesting things in your handbook such as:

• A formulated version of your vision, mission, strategy, culture and values.
• An overview of your team members, including pictures, practical information and fun facts.
• An overview of your customers/clients and stakeholders, and a short summary on each and every one of them.  

Meeting the team(s)

If you want to feel at home, you need to know who are living in the house. It is therefore important to have meetings with the different teams. Now this is where things become a bit difficult to define. As companies differ in size, it becomes more difficult for them to involve everybody in the process. Meeting the team is a process that starts off large, with a lot of people involved, and is narrowed down over time.

Normally the process looks like this:

1. A (digital) announcement of the new employee, who he or she is and what he or she will be doing, for the entire company.
2. A short (digital) introduction of the employee to the entire company (or a larger part of the company).
3. A more thorough introduction with colleagues from different departments with whom the employee will work closely with.
4. A meeting with representatives from the HR, Legal, and Facilities/IT departments.
5. A meeting with the closest colleagues of the employee (or the entire department). Hold this meeting off-site, perhaps as a lunch meeting or afternoon coffee so that the team can really spend some quality time to get to know the employee.
6. One-to-one meetings with the manager.
   

Introduction and training

After you’re done with shaking hands, just like at home, it is time to take a coffee and sit down to talk about some more serious stuff. In this sense I am talking about more thorough introductions on what the company does and how they do things, what they stand for and how they communicate this. Employer branding is a big topic in these introductions and trainings. You need to give the newly hired employee a good idea of what your brand represents and how this translates in his or her activities.

This is also the moment when an employee gets their first introduction to the internal systems, ways of working and contact persons, including possible clients. In this sense it is good to have a training set up from a more senior employee or somebody from the IT department to make sure that the new employee can work with the systems you use. Client or stakeholder meetings are also a big part of the process. A senior employee should take the new employee with him to introductory meetings with the potential clients and stakeholders so they get an image of who you are working for/with.

Another part of this process are job-specific trainings which can be ongoing, but which get introduced in the onboarding process.

Feedback

So now that you have bombarded your newly hired employee with as much information as you possibly can, it is time to harvest some information as well. This means: one-to-one meetings with feedback. These are often meetings between the newly hired employee and his or her manager, where both parties can give feedback to one another. These meetings should be held regularly and continuously throughout the career of your employees over at your company. Try to have such a meeting roughly every month with your employees, even their first month. Of course, everything is still fun and games then, so there will not be that much feedback coming from your employee but try to challenge them even then already. Is there really nothing that the company can improve? How was the first impression? Was it well enough? Is there anything that should be improved? Remember, the image that the company gives of to its own employees often also translate into the same image that they give off to clients and stakeholders.

In conclusion

A good onboarding process is everything from the first handbook until formal meetings with clients and stakeholders. It is a large process which, if done correctly, can kickstart the career of your new employee within your company. In this blog we have given a brief overview of all the essentials. If you want to have a more detailed roadmap of what a good onboarding process looks like, click here.

If you need help setting up your onboarding process, just reach out to us and we'll set up a meeting to see what we can do for you!

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In the 21st century we have come a long way from the original working conditions of ‘free workers’ in the industrial revolution. Over time we have created working places which protect, motivate and empower employees. Employers are always looking to improve the workplace to increase productivity and wellbeing of their employees. We look up to tech giants such as Spotify, Google and Facebook and their creative working environments and see those as the current example of how the perfect workplace should look like, even the term ‘perfect workplace’ is clouded with mystery. In this blog we will take a closer look at 5 common myths about the perfect workplace and show you the reality behind them.  

Myth 1: Working 8 hours guarantees productivity.  

The longer you work, the more work you get done. That seems the premises behind this myth that has been around since Henry Ford introduced the eight-hour workday to his factory workers. Experiments here in Sweden with six-hour workdays show that the opposite is true and that 8 hours does not lead to more productivity. They argue that a lot of the eight hours spent at the office are spent inefficiently and that the six hours put down a healthy amount of pressure on their employees. Furthermore, they argue that their employees are happier to show up and leave the office and are in general less exhausted. While we are not arguing that all companies should switch to six hours of work per day, we are arguing that the normal nine-to-five working days should be a thing of the past as they are simply exhausting your workforce. Try to rethink what makes your employees productive and try to tap into their needs. Perhaps working from home is a viable (better) alternative, or shortened working days with shortened breaks. As always, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.  

Reality 1: Working 8 hours does not guarantee productivity.

Myth 2: The closer the relationship within teams, the less errors will be made.  

When you think about it, it makes sense right? If you have a good connection with your colleagues and your manager and if you got your relationship and work down to a routine, then there should be less room for errors. Nothing is less true. A study by Amy Edmondson shows that employees and managers with a close relationship reported significantly more errors than the test subjects who do not have a close relationship. So why is that? The answer is quite simply: the employees felt more certain to their managers to report errors because of their good relationship. This is important to note because failure is a part of progress. As an employer you need to know where mistakes are made so you can improve your business, therefore it is your responsibility to create the safe environment to be able to report these errors. You should focus on continuous improvement rather than perfection.  

Reality 2: The closer the relationship within teams, the more errors will be reported and the faster they improve.

Myth 3: Like-minded people work better together.  

On the surface this one seems to make sense. The more you are on the same line with your colleagues the faster you take decisions and the better results you will get, right? Wrong. A study by Kathrine Philips, Katie Liljenquist and Margaret Neale disproves this and argues that homogenous teams indeed take faster decisions, but do not make better decisions. The heterogenous teams performed best in terms of decisions as they kept questioning and challenging their partners to come to better results.  

Reality 3: Homogenous teams deliver speed, heterogenous teams deliver results.

Myth 4: Additional perks make for happy employees.  

We have all seen the examples of Google, Twitter and Facebook. Cafeteria filled with food and beverages (sometimes even entire meals), doggy day care services and even cleaning services are all perks which are supposed to make your employees happy. Although nobody ever got sad from a free meal, it is not a guarantee for happy employees. These perks will only be perceived as offerings and add-ons to their job if the working culture is healthy. If you are encouraged to work through your lunchbreak, but in exchange you do get a free lunch, that might feel more as a bribe than an actual perk. It is therefore important that you get a healthy culture first which empower your employees. Only after that fundament is established, can you think about adding additional perks. If you want to learn more from Google, read my blog on the 7 most important lessons here or if you want to find out what truly motivates employees in this day and ages, read this blog.  

Reality 4: Only if you have the fundamentals right, then additional perks will contribute to happiness.

Myth 5: Doing what you love is the best way to achieve the most out of your work life.

We all heard the conventional wisdom that you should strive to work with what you love to get the most out of yourself. This string of wisdom argues that your passion motivates you do great things and make a difference in the world. There is evidence which disproves this self-centred motivation. A study done by O.C. Tanner in 2015 shows that great work or results are not so much achieved by doing something we love but, according to 88% of the participants, it is more focussed on making a difference that other people love. That is where true productivity and great accomplishments lie. This is not to say that you should not try to find job wherein you can do what you already love to do, it is just a way of saying that it is not necessarily the best way of the most out of your work life or achieving great things.

Reality 5: Achieving greatness often begins with trying to make a difference that other people love.

Are you interested in finding out more? Get in touch with us to see how we can help you to:

• Increase productivity
• Open up to errors and improvement
• Create heterogenous teams that deliver results
• Establish a healthy culture which makes for happy employees
• Achieve great results with the right people

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Change management is important. We are living in a vibrant ever-changing world where what we call new today will be tomorrow’s yesterday’s news. Change will come more and more often, so it is important to have the leaders who how to deal with change.  

Change has been a part of everyday life for centuries. However, in the 20th and 21st century, with a global 24-hours economy, change seems to be a faster reoccurring process than ever before without any sign of this process reversing. Knowing that, you know that change will come to your organisation as well, sooner or later. You should therefore be prepared to have the right leadership-skills in your company to drive home certain changes. Why leadership? Because the success of change does not depend on which software tool you acquired, which consultants have advised you, or which market research drove you to change. The success of change is dependent on whether or not you can get your employees to accept and work with change.  

The necessity of a good story

The first step of creating leadership that knows how to deal with change, is that the leadership needs to understand the foundation of the change itself. Leaders and managers need to have a crystal-clear idea of why change is necessary and how it can help the company to achieve its vision, mission and goals. There should be no question or doubt in the mind of a leader or manager about upcoming change, or this might affect the effectiveness of the implementation. A newly implemented project or change often fails because a lack of managerial commitment through understanding the change and translating this to employees.  

Once a leader or manager thoroughly understands a change in the company and how it can improve the company, the leader or manager needs to connect this to the goals of the company. Change or improvement itself is not that inspiring. Your vision, mission and goals are tools to create inspiration. So, to convey an inspiring message about change which shows commitment and has the capability to persuade people into adhering to change. The manager or leader needs to show how this change or improvement will lead to the accomplishment of the goals of the company.  

Now that the manager or leader understands why the change is necessary and can formulate the argument for change, connected to the goals of the company, it is time to communicate this to your employees. The communication of change is often not done by a simple power point presentation in a singular meeting. You will need to address the upcoming change on a couple occasions, not only because some changes are quite big and therefore complicated to explain, but also to let change ‘sink in’. Give your employees the opportunity to overthink change, to understand what it will mean for them, and to provide an opportunity for their feedback to perhaps even add value to your idea for change. So, plan in a couple of meetings, coffee breaks, group discussions or presentations to bring across your points, because remember: it does not only take effort to convince people, it also takes time to get them on board.  

Communication in this sense is a two-way street. You should be in close contact with your employees throughout every stage of change. This brings us to our second, and perhaps most important, aspect of change: your people.  

People

Change is not natural for most people. Most people work out of routine and experience. It is not so much that they are stuck in their old ways, but it is more that they know what works for them right now. Therefore, change can be scary and spark certain concerns. It is important to address these concerns because they can be a root cause for unhappiness, demotivation and stress, even if, in hindsight, there was nothing to be concerned about in the first place. Concern itself is, although very important, relatively unharmful for your employees’ wellbeing. A side-effect of concern, however, is stress. Stress is very harmful for the wellbeing of your employees. Not only for their individual mental wellbeing, but also for the atmosphere on the work floor. Stressed employees have a tendency to emphasize the negative and ignore the positive, which deteriorates the work atmosphere in the long run. This should give you more than enough reasons to address concerns fast and continuously.  

So, from the moment you announce change, also simultaneously provide opportunities for your employees to express their concerns. Not only because you want to be a good boss and listen to your employees, but if you can even take away their concerns and show them the advantages, then you can transform those previously concerned employees to be your champions of change. Don’t see concerns as a problem. They are a sign that people care. Concerns are even an opportunity to transform concerned employees into change champions.  

Another component that you might encounter when working with your employees towards change is resistance. Resistance is the natural result of experience. People know how they have to work from the past and are cautious to give up their usual ways with which they have familiarized themselves. This is unavoidable and there is generally not much more to it than to engage with resistance. Debates during meetings are a good way to engage with resistance and just like concern, you need to either take resistance away or you can use it to create something better. Resistance in this sense is a useful tool to optimize change. The people on the work floor have the best idea of what they encounter in their daily work, so if there is something which will not work according to their views, then you need to address that. Use the experience of your employees in such a way to optimize your change. Do not just let them be idle bystanders, but show them that their input is valued and that it can improve the process of change. So instead of seeing resistance as a nuisance, accept and embrace it. It is a sign that people care and an opening to let experience shape and finetune the planned change. After all, your employees are the experts on your daily business, so use their experience to criticize and finetune your ideas for change. Their insights will drive improvements, but most importantly also the acceptance and engagement towards the upcoming change.  

Accountability and adjustments

Do we get everybody on board? Good. Have all the concerns been addressed? Good. Has the resistance been met and has everybody had a chance to ventilate their criticism? Good. So, then we are done here, right? Wrong.  During the process of change there can still be topics where your employees do not agree with the decisions being made. That is a natural part of the process. In this sense it is important to remain critical as a leader, also towards the decisions being made. If something is not working out, then this has to be addressed and the people involved have to be held accountable. This is not only important to ensure that there are no rushed decisions being taken, but also to uphold the legitimacy of your managerial team. Think about it his way, if managers consistently take wrong decisions and are not being hold accountable then this will not only upset your employees, but it will also undermine the general legitimacy and credibility of your entire management staff. Mistakes can be made, decisions can turn out to be wrong, that is a normal part of change. However, in this sense it should also be normal to hold the responsible people accountable. From that point onwards it is important not to let pride and stubbornness take over from reason and responsibility. If a decision for change turns out to be a mistake, it is time for an adjustment of the original change. This in and of itself is a new point of change in the organisation so it is again important to consider all the points made above when it comes to leadership.  

Conclusion

Change is a constant process. New decisions are made daily so it is important to have leaders who know how to deal with change. This starts with understanding change and knowing how to communicate it to your employees. They will subsequently respond with concerns and resistance. These are, however, not a bad thing. They are a sign that people care and they provide opportunities for improving and finetuning change. If it turns out that some decisions in change are not working, then you need to hold the right people accountable and take adjustive action. At this point, you are preparing new change, so it is important to again go over all the important points related to leadership and change management.  

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