Page 161 - Retaining Top Employees
P. 161
McKeown08.qxd 4/10/02 12:35 PM Page 149
Making the Difference with Orientation 149
• Encourage cultural integration.
—are equally important at all times to all organizations.
For some companies, the major cause of dissatisfaction
may be mismanaged employee expectations. For others, the
real issue may be that it’s hard for new employees to feel like
part of the team (cultural integration).
It’s important to be clear about which aspects of retention
really are issues in your organization. Putting emphasis on the
wrong aspect of retention can be worse than ignoring the issue
altogether. Misjudging the climate within your organization and
putting processes in place to deal with cultural integration, for
example, when the issue is really managing expectations will
confuse your employees and leave them believing that the
organization is out of touch and insincere.
To make sure you deal with the right issues, use Table 8-4 to
weight the relative importance of each area to your organization.
1. Not a 4. There is no
2. We only 5. People are
problem at all— 3. We face this doubt this
Retention occasionally leaving in
we’re issue fairly contributes to
Imperative have a problem droves and this
completely on with this. regularly. employee is the reason.
top of this. dissatisfaction.
Retention
starts here
Manage
expectations
Cultural
integration
Table 8-4. Prioritizing orientation program imperatives
For each retention imperative you marked as 3, 4, or 5 in
Table 8-4, draft an orientation program objective specific to
your organization in Table 8-5. Use the examples given in
Tables 8-1 and 8-2 as guides.
Design Specific Orientation Program Content for Each
Objective
Finally, for each program objective in Table 8-5, write three spe-
cific content elements for your orientation program that will ful-