Helping you set up your new employees for success.

At my first big boy job, at the Times newspaper in Northwest Indiana, when I was about 21 or 22 years old, I remember the organization went through a fairly traumatic reorg and employee engagement analysis. At the time, I had the safety net of going back to college in the fall, but I recall that for everyone else, the process was very intense.

One meeting that I remember in particular, anonymous feedback was being shared within the organization. One of the pieces of feedback dealt with onboarding -- entrance into the organization. The piece of feedback was a detailed description of what had happened to an employee on her first day. She basically showed up and the organization was completely unprepared for her. Nothing had been done -- she had no desk and no plans had been made for her -- she felt very unwelcome from moment one. This piece of feedback was read aloud, and the editor -- it was her boss -- realized in the meeting that this was a description of his employee’s first day. In a really dramatic fashion took ownership and acknowledged that this was feedback directed at him. He had failed his employee on her first day, that this was something he (and the organization) had to do better going forward.

I never forgot it. Twenty years later and I still remember it vividly. The message was: if you start off on the wrong foot, it can be really rough. It will color your entire experience at the company. But the other message: when someone starts a new job, they are inherently really excited. It’s up to the company to capitalize on that excitement and create a good experience. Starting a new job is, by definition, an optimistic thing.

At Holistic, one of our core beliefs is that the moment of entrance into an organization is an absolutely critical moment for the well-being and long-term success of an employee. As such, we have launched a new offering,  the Holistic Entrance Analysis. We are coupling this with our Exit Analysis technology, to create a bookend that will produce a tremendous amount of analyzable information and value for companies at two critical junctures, the point of entrance into the organization, and the point of exit.

I’ve already written about what I believe to be the most interesting thing about the exit analysis -- that it captures a data set over time, and that what is really gathering is a series of things relative to one particular point in an employee‘s experience in relation to the company, rather than capturing a series of experiences at one particular point in human history. I think this is very powerful, and this is a new way of looking at data that we are developing. And so it bears repeating: the data set that we are going to be creating for you is not all taken in one day in one place. Your organization will be different each time one of these pieces of data is collected. But what it will tell you is how your employee how your organization is doing on day one, and how your organization is doing on the last day of each employee’s experience. We believe that looking at these two sets of data will be tremendously valuable for organizations.

The entrance survey is going to measure all kinds of important things -- why the employee left her last job, and what she’s excited about at her new one; what he expects out of his position and what he is anxious or nervous about. It will capture the sentiment that folks are feeling at the outset, which will be valuable for three reasons: A) companies will be able to solve for any anxieties or issues; B) companies will be able to hold themselves accountable for making sure onboarding and the initial employee experience is thoughtful and top-notch; and C) companies will be able to see, over time, if they are improving in the care of their employees.

As it stands right now, companies are not able to do much beyond onboarding their employees. Certainly very few companies are able to collect any real sentiment data from new employees -- it’s hard enough to set up everything that they need, let alone do anything above and beyond. Same goes for exiting employees. We’ve already covered what a waste of time and energy and spirit exit interviews are. With this dual offering, we’re solving this problem -- giving companies the valuable information they crave while letting employees focus on their jobs and their work.

We are offering our Entrance and Exit Analysis together, and we are offering them free for 6 months to anybody who wants to sign up. We are looking to gather data, and we are looking to start to work with different companies on these critical points. We’ll be releasing a quarterly report to any partners that will cover both what we’re finding in the entrance and exit analyses.  You’ll see real data about how your employees (and former employees) feel and you’ll see how you stack up compared to other companies.

As a company, this is something you will want to know.

To find out more and sign up for the services click here.