People First - November 2007

Making New Employees Successful

Through Mentoring

by Mark Keays

It isn’t uncommon to hear the managers in organizations complaining about how difficult it is to find, recruit and retain good employees. What they often don’t understand is that they have a direct impact on their organization’s ability to find, hire and keep good people. New employees are typically put through an orientation process, overwhelming them with data, and then, are sent off to departments to start their new jobs. Next, the new employee is led to the work area with the expectation to begin working without being given clear performance standards and expectations. Additionally, employees are often left to fend for themselves when it comes to learning the organization’s operating norms, or they are teamed with an employee whom the department can spare to show the new employee the ropes.

Many times employees who can be spared aren’t necessarily high performing role models that the organization’s leadership would like the new employee to emulate. The United States Navy found out years ago that it was critical to make sure new sailors were teamed with experienced sailors who had good attitudes, a solid work ethic and were positive about the military and their jobs. In the 1980s, the Navy identified a disturbing trend in young sailors who were graduating from boot camp in San Diego. A closer investigation found that graduation was typically held on a Friday. The individuals who went on “boot” liberty tended to be more positive than those who reported directly to their first shipboard commands. The young boots who reported to their ships met two different groups of individuals on the weekends. One group, the duty section, was typically a small group of people who were standing watches, performing maintenance and repair with little time to spend with the new sailors. The other group of people found onboard on a weekend was the sailors on restriction for disciplinary reasons due to a variety of minor or major infractions. This group was typically not positive about the military, the ship itself and outspoken about the negative side of the military in general. The result was that the new sailors spent a weekend with these negative forces, and in far too many cases, by Monday, they too had adopted some of those same negative opinions and behaviors.

The moral of the story is that the new sailors, like new employees, need to be teamed with the best and brightest an organization has available. Getting your best people to help the new people adapt and adjust can have huge benefits in the long run. In the book, Semper Fi, former Marine officers Dan Corrison and Rod Walsh summed it up in just a few words: “Understand that employees who feel cared for will care about the company.” Historically, people don’t leave organizations, they leave people. The way they are introduced to the organization will have a long-term impact.

Mark Keays
Mark Keays is president of Desert Management Services, a Las Vegas-based management consulting firm, and a faculty member of the University of Phoenix, where he teaches in the areas of organizational change, human resources and management.