Page 157 - Retaining Top Employees

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Making the Difference with Orientation 145

are giving out about work-
What Content
ing with your organization.
Would You Use?
List the promises that Flip back to Table 8-1 and
they’re making, implicitly compare the orientation program
or explicitly, to prospects. objective in that table with the pro-
Using the information gram content that was used to achieve
you’ve gathered, summa- that objective.
Now look at Table 8-2. If this were
rize on a sheet of paper
your organization,what orientation
what you think would be
program content would you design to
reasonable for a new
achieve that objective?
employee to expect from
your organization on Day
1. Then answer these questions:
• Does your orientation program meet or address those
expectations?
• Are your new employees suffering from a “commitment
dip” because their expectations are either ignored or
deflated?
• How might your orientation program fail to live up to your
new employees’ expectations?
• What aspects of the design and content of your orienta-
tion program might clash with the promises your new
employees believe have been made to them?
• Does your orientation program jibe with the description of
your organization being presented by recruiters and your
recruiting materials? If not, what remedial action is
required?
• What implications do your employees’ expectations have
for the redesign and content of your orientation program?
Cultural Integration
The third way in which your orientation program will help with
retention in the medium term is by accelerating the cultural
integration of your new hires.
In addition to an alignment of expectations, retention is inti-
mately linked with an alignment of values and goals between