by Janus Boye
Tim Jessen is Senior Manager, Strategic Talent Management at SOCAR in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
“I add full value to my organisation at my uttermost capacity”
After how many days post-first day into your current employment were you able to convey this statement with confidence? And how many days does it take a new colleague in your team/company to do the same?
These are good questions to make you think and to help us with some of the answers, we recently did our very first member call with insights from Southeast Asia. Tim Jessen, who is a Boye alumni and our previous Member Experience Manager relocated from Aarhus to Kuala Lumpur a few years ago. Now, he’s working as Senior Manager, Strategic Talent Management at SOCAR Mobility Malaysia, Malaysia’s No. 1 car-sharing company. Tim is busy hiring and has been working on how to better address employee onboarding issues
In the call he shared how he closes the time and money-sensitive gap for new employees from being a ‘new-joiner’ to becoming a fully assimilated, high-performing employee. Actually, as he said, it’s not just about closing the gap. The bigger picture is that a bad onboarding impacts both turnover and morale.
Below are my notes from the call and further down you can also find the slides and the entire recording.
What’s better onboarding?
The presentation used the familiar metaphor of the journey. Tim illustrated it by going from the West Coast of the US to the East Coast, while he took us through the elements of a new joiner's journey at SOCAR:
The organisation's vision towards talent
How a job is ‘designed’ before the Talent Acquisition process kicks in
The candidate’s experience while being hired
Post-offer letter signing (which is more than the mere notice/waiting period)
The first day and week experience
2, 4, 6-month probation period
As with any journey, it might actually be the journey that’s the key and not the actual destination. In particular when it comes to ensuring a good employee experience in a workplace that is continuously changing.
Like a true expert, Tim early on said that onboarding is very dependent on context. What works in one instance, in one organisation, and in one part of the world, might work less well in another. The challenge is the same though:
How do we prevent a gap between the organisation and the new joiner?
Onboarding takes time and that’s okay. Better onboarding, according to Tim, is when there’s no major gap between the candidate experience and the employee experience.
Why does onboarding go wrong?
Getting us back to the journey from the East Coast to the West Coast, Tim asked us to think about changing our destination to Washington DC instead of New York City. That’s bad news if you were looking forward to a bite of the Big Apple, and it’s also what sometimes happens in organisations. When the new employee expects one thing, but something else happens, a problematic gap starts appearing.
Getting to the root cause of this is key according to Tim. Did you hire the wrong person? Might the organisation be too complex? Do you have a bad management vision? Or probably a combination of different factors.
Certainly the further we are on the journey, let’s say, your NYC flight is beginning the descent and almost landing in DC. At that point, it’s more disappointing, a bigger change and more expensive to correct course and get back up at cruise altitude and fly to NYC. The same goes for the new hire when the course needs to be corrected down the line. Tim showed the below slide to illustrate the problem starting from the beginning.
You don’t want to have a gap between the new joiner and the organisation - like Tim said: The more you move down the line, the harder the course correction becomes.
A better candidate experience
As you can also see from the illustration, it’s when you get to the candidate experience, that the potential gap really becomes visible to the human eye and can turn into a problem.
A screenshot from the SOCAR careers site - on what makes them great.
At SOCAR they’ve created a fair bit of content, so that candidates can self-assess how they might fit into the culture. A quick look at the SOCAR Careers site gives you a glimpse into their values and culture and is intended to help the potential candidate understand what it is like to work there.
You can read about their perks, learning and development and perhaps most importantly also connect with some of the faces at SOCAR.
They don’t rely on candidates to go to their website and naturally also push some of their candidate experience content to social media, in particular LinkedIn (see SOCAR Mobility Malaysia) and on Instagram with their Inside SOFAM account.
Impressive digital content doesn’t do it alone, and Tim also talked about their focus on removing administrative matters before day #1. He also touched on how SOCAR puts processes in place for the employees' experience that scales as they grow.
Finally, he also covered an illustration with the candidate journey. As he mentioned, this journey can last several months and his key tip was:
'"Keep in touch and use every opportunity to grow engagement and commitment"
Learn more about better onboarding
Tim actually opened his presentation with a reference to an interesting post that’s also relevant for onboarding. James Clear is the author of the NY Times bestselling book Atomic Habits and this post in an interesting excerpt: Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead. Spoiler: It’s about accomplishing more by focusing on less.
The conversation on onboarding, talent acquisition and much more continues in our community. If you are interested in expanding your network and meeting peers, do consider our Future Workplace peer groups.
You can also download the slides (PDF) or lean back and enjoy the entire recording below.