Meet With New Hires In The First Week – A Must

I was perusing through some old Harvard Business Reviews and came across an article in the June 14, 2018 issue called “To Retain New Hires, Make Sure You Meet with Them in Their First Week.” It’s authored by Dawn Klinghoffer, Candace Young, and Xue Liu. They conducted a study at Microsoft and they found that when those who had met with their boss in their first week of their hiring were compared to those in a control group who didn’t, three things were significantly different.

First:

12% had a larger internal network established. They also had double the network centrality of the control group. I wasn’t sure what was, but they went on to explain that network centrality is how influential the people within your network are. In other words, the more influential the people in your network are, the more network centrality you have. It seems that those who had had a meeting with their boss in that first week of employment tended to go on to establish networks that included people who had more influence. Not a bad thing.

Second:

Those who met with their boss in that first week tended to have meetings with other people that were more effective. That is, the meetings were more to the point, were shorter, and were more germane to whatever they were meeting about.

Third:

The group that met with their boss in that first week spent three times as much time collaborating with their teammates than did the control group. Which is also a good thing.

So it seems that if you want the people you hire to collaborate well with others, meeting with them within that first week after you hire them is a really good thing.

Click here to read more about onboarding on the USS Fox compared to onboarding on the USS Stanley. The differences in outcomes were remarkable.