Blink and they are gone

If you are tired of spending months on recruiting staff, putting them through expensive induction and training programmes only to see them leave as soon as they have started adding value to your organisation, you may need to look at your EAP or Employee Attachment Phenomenon. Phoney as the title may sound, the concept is sound. Anyone who has come across Gladwell’s book Blink knows that when you meet someone for the first time, or read the first few lines of a this newswire, you will have come to a set of conclusions from around two seconds’ intuition. Psychologists claim we need this to be able to survive – you don’t want to hang around rationally processing the threat of a tiger in the jungle, you want to react instinctively.

Now that we tend to work in offices not jungles we still run the same processes. So your new staff will have made up their minds about you, your teams, and your organisation in their first few seconds. So you need to get the introduction right. There is just no excuse for a new employee turning up on their first day, having no one to greet them, no desk or allocated work space and equipment, no agenda for the first few days, and no one to show them where the coffee (or herbal tea) and the toilets are. If you are lucky, over time, you may able to change their initial assessment, but much better to get it right in the first place.

So what steps can you take? First, run a mini-survey of your current staff – you can do this in under 3 minutes. Ask them why they joined your organisation, what were their first impressions. Second, get your staff to work up an induction programme which includes the informal stuff. Finally measure your improvement. Ask each new employee to fill in a mini-survey on their first day and repeat this at the end of their first week, fortnight, and month. Your staff will have the best ideas for how to induct and keep new staff. Your new staff will have even better ideas. Want help with developing mini-surveys? More here