RIG New Employee Onboarding

Research shows that purpose-driven employees outperform their non-purpose-oriented peers on every measure. While a person’s tendency to be purpose-driven is largely fixed at birth, if you maximize the value employees receive from relationships, impact, and growth (RIG) from Day 1, they’ll significantly outperform the average employee.

While RIG are the critical qualities of how fulfilled an employee feels on the job, the right RIG varies by individual:

• Relationships: Employees who have the number, variety and quality of relationships they find satisfying feel more fulfilled at work.
• Impact: Employees who are making the kind of impact that’s important to them feel more fulfilled at work.
• Growth: Employees who can take advantage of growth opportunities that challenge them feel more fulfilled at work.

Employee onboarding is a great place to start embedding RIG in work, given the dismal data about onboarding today.

We know that newhires worry most about how they’ll fit in the new organization, whether they’ll be able to do their job, whether their colleagues will accept them, and if they’ll enjoy working with their colleagues. Using RIG to integrate real work, social interaction, and career development into onboarding helps new employees and their organization get past those concerns.

Relationships

The more quickly new employees develop strong relationships with peers within and across teams, the sooner they’ll be productive and the better they’ll feel about the company. This statement is doubly true for purpose-driven people with high relationship needs, but every new employee needs to build strong relationships.

Consider ways to structure basic tasks (finding equipment, locating the bathroom, meeting teammates, testing passwords and internet access, making sure personal information is correct, etc.) to accelerate relationship-building:

• Instead of having staff come to orientation, hand out site maps and contact information and set new employees loose to find the resources they need. Let the team know that new employees will be among them, and encourage them to be helpful.
• Instead of having the manager review the new employee’s duties, plan a meeting in which all team members explain what they do, and the new hire draws a picture of what she’s hearing them describe. This activity typically yields several moments of hilarity and some great discussion about how the new hire’s role fits in to the group.

Impact

The more quickly new employees can make a difference, the better they’ll feel about deciding to join the organization. Include at least one opportunity to build intrinsic motivation in employees with a high need for impact:

• Create opportunities for new employees to share what they know. Coworkers will obtain useful insights into the character of their new colleague, and the new employee builds credibility.
• During the first few weeks, deliberately draw on the new employee’s previous expertise. As they provide real help in real work settings, employees who find fulfillment in making an impact will thrive.

Growth

Good onboarding programs put jobs in context. Introduce the new employee’s job assignments within the larger framework of the company’s business so they can see how their work impacts the entire organization’s ecosystem.

• When you present the org chart, talk about how leaders achieved their roles. Similarly, in team meetings, ask the new employee to talk about the growth she’s experienced in previous roles, and give her the opportunity to learn from new colleagues about their careers.
• New employees can also benefit from understanding different career paths. Ask people who have advanced to roles that are different from the new employee’s job to talk about their careers. This conversation provides inspiration and starts an informal professional network.
• Employees who thrive on personal and professional growth benefit from knowing about the social and professional networks you have available. Invite members of key groups to talk about how new employees can get involved.

Engaging the organization’s various communities in orientation can reduce the burden on the training and design staff. More importantly, framing onboarding around RIG can go a long way to showing new employees that their role will be fulfilling (and fun!).

A purpose-centered approach doesn’t have to change what you cover. Instead, make changes in how you deliver content to reach people’s need for intrinsic motivation.

Ceil Tilney has a career’s worth of experience with good and bad onboarding. She’s an expert in repurposing talent programs to drive performance, culture, engagement and retention by connecting work to individual purpose. Reach her at ceil.tilney@gmail.com. A version of this article appeared in Trainingindustry.com