The shock of the new – how employees experience coming into an organisation

When was the last time you started a new role? Or a new job?  Can you remember how you felt?

Consider this (not impossible) example:

Ian arrived at his new job a bit nervous.  Eventually he was shown to the floor on which his new department was situated, having been issued with a visitor pass. Arriving at his desk, his manager suggested that as his new PC wasn’t going to arrive for another month, that he introduce himself to colleagues and arrange to share theirs. Ian asked about an induction. “That’s in six weeks,” responded his manager. “Read the company handbook in the meantime.” He then told him he’d be back at lunchtime and left. Ian ploughed through a quarter of the two inch thick file before needing the bathroom.  He had to ask for directions.  On the way back he attempted to get a coffee, but didn’t have any of the special tokens needed to get one, and it didn’t take cash.  Sighing, he returned to his desk and awkwardly asked if he could use a neighbour’s PC to look at the company intranet. The intranet asked for his user ID.  When asking his colleague about this, he was told that a User ID took about 2 weeks to arrive. Grimly, he continued to plough through the handbook.  At four thirty there was a fire alarm.  Ian filed out with the rest of his floor, found himself in the wrong area and therefore wasn’t able to respond to his name on the roll call.  The office was evacuated for the rest of the afternoon while the fire service searched the building for him.

Getting employees settled in their new positions – also called ‘socialisation’ by academics and ‘onboarding’ by business writers – is a focus for organisations as the try to recoup their investment in hiring as quickly as possible.  The problem is that, unless you arrive in a cohort of graduates, organisations often plan it very poorly.  Perfectly eager and enthusiastic individuals can find themselves battered coming into an organisation because they are, in the first instance, off-balance.

The key thing that characterises the academic research on newcomer employees is uncertainty – uncertainty about the nature and requirements of new tasks and uncertainty about how you’re going to fit in to the social network and how you’re going to get on with you colleagues.

Add to this, potential feelings of loneliness and isolation which are initially associated with a new location in an organisation (and even a new location geographically), performance anxiety and a lack of established routines and habits for the new role and you have potentially a very uncertain individual.

Academic research has identified that when people feel uncertain, they experience anxiety and they try to reduce this by either minimising the level or importance of the uncertainty (“I’m sure I’ll soon get the hang of it after a while”) or they look for information to help to increase their certainty.  Another danger of course, is that without guidance, even experienced workers guess, and make poor decisions which can go horribly wrong.  If this information is readily available, their uncertainty reduces more quickly. 

Which means that if people aren’t spending all their time worrying about where they are and what they’re doing, they can concentrate on their performance. 

Which in turn means that the organisation – which might have spent some considerable money recruiting them – can start to recoup their expenditure.

Organisations choose a number of methods to bring people into a company, or into a new role – people are socialised in groups (often graduate recruitment happens this way), or singly; they are thoroughly instructed in the ways of the organisation before they start work, or they learn on the job; they can be given a timetable for their induction, or they can be left in the dark about when they will be “qualified” as an organisational member.  It can be planned programme of events, discussions and activities, or it can be random, where recruits aren’t quite sure what to expect.  They may have a mentor or role model – or they may be left to make their own mark in the workplace.

In addition, they can be stripped of some elements of their identity to have them replaced by other, organisational attitudes (the armed forces is a good example of this), or they can be encouraged to bring their experience to the organisation and not be expected to change.

Regardless of how it’s done, all of the approaches can impact new recruits and what they subsequently do in their roles.  For example, someone who has been socialised in a group is more likely to conform to whatever the rest of the group does – it may hinder independent thought and action.  And for some types of organisation, that’s what is needed.  On the other hand, if someone is being socialised independently and “on the job”, they are reliant on their colleagues for help and support.  This can vary across organisations and may in fact be more hindrance than help.  In addition, because they are doing actual work, their tasks may be more limited because after all, this is real work with potentially real consequences if it goes wrong.  Which may lead them to be bored, or may lead them to build confidence, depending on the individual and the tasks.

So what are you doing to your new recruits? Have you thought whether you simply want them to tow the corporate line, or innovate?  The response to the induction should be considered as an outcome of the process.

And for young recruits in particular, are you providing enough information to calm their anxieties?  This doesn’t mean handing someone an induction pack and sitting them at a desk so they can read it cover to cover – it means leading them through the connections in their new role, helping them to understand how their role fits in with others – not just the nuts and bolts of it. 

For experienced workers, there is often the view that “they don’t need hand-holding, they’ve worked in other organisations before” – but actually, regardless of experience, there is always the need for newcomers to either a role or an organisation to find their feet.  

Is your organisation helping?  Or pulling the rug out from under them?

Karen Drury owns fe₃ consulting.  The notes on which this article was based were generated at a mindstretch® held on 28 April.  Karen runs these events on a regular basis.

Blogging, trolling and the art of petitions

It's quite possible that the internet brings out the worst in us - from pontificating on personal blogs, to saying hurtful and spiteful things without fear of the consequences to people we've never met.

The recent furore about trolling on Twitter puts how vile people can be to one another in the full glare of the public eye.  And glaring it certainly has been. 

Being a well brought up lass, I've been appalled by the language and crudeness of some of the responses to what seem to me to be perfectly harmless comments and campaigns. When all's said and done, if Jane Austen is finally to appear on an English banknote - well, fab. The vitriol occasioned by some fairly mild celebrations of the announcement was way beyond any reasonable response.  And I can barely believe that threats of rape, bombs and death followed in what seemed a mob-like mentality. And, no sooner had the clamour died a little, when the death of a young woman who committed suicide allegedly because of bullying on the internet brought this type of behaviour back into sharper focus.

But - signing a petition is not the right response.

It seems to me to be passive, lacking responsibility in the same way that unpleasant Twitter users don't seem to accept responsibility for their sexist and violent comments.

The threat of law may deter these idiots - but perhaps we simply encourage people to take less responsibility in this way.  By creating laws, those who witness this kind of behaviour simply believe that someone ELSE will do something about it, and therefore they don't need to.  In the meantime, those who are bullying, unpleasant and downright vile simply create false identities, harangue other users and then disappear into the ether. Wherever there's a law, there's someone trying to evade it.


I strain sometimes to catch a glimpse of that rare creature, responsibility in both life and work.  Responsibility is increasingly one of those things that belongs to someone else - the company, the Government or - as in the case of internet trolling - the Police.

But neither State nor employer can or should be expected to have the final say on everything.  In the last ten years, nearly 4,000 pieces of legislation have found their way into law, on everything from mobile homes to defamation.  A newspaper report I read noted that in 2010, 13.8 laws came into being every single working day.


Everyone has an opinion about what's right and wrong - but very few are willing to do anything about it. Which is why, apparently, we need the laws.  Someone needs to do something about it - "they", probably. The law gives that framework, but at the same time, puts the responsibility into someone else's hands - the police, the lawyers.

I believe we need to take action, to stand up, to not only voice objections, but get off our arses and do something. This something is not signing a petition, which I can do with little inconvenience and once done, absolves me of responsibility to anything else.  This is too easy an option, and involves too little effort. 

I'm conscious that writing this blog is another version of signing a petition, albeit with slightly more effort involved. So I have not only written this blog; I'm writing to my MP, and watching out for what I see as bullying on the internet and getting involved to point it out and stop it.  I may not always get this right, but at least I am doing something.

If everyone did this, perhaps we won't need to have so many laws.

Zero tolerance for zero hours contracts

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has underestimated by 50,000 workers the number of people on zero hours contracts, bringing the estimated total in 2012 to more than a quarter of a million workers.

The total number may easily be double that, according to The Work Foundation, that claims at least 400,000 people are employed on zero hour contracts by the public sector alone. Although the number of people on these type of contracts is small, the rise in use of them is not – more than doubling in the last eight years.

In other news, there is much hand-wringing about the levels of engagement, which came in at a lowly one-in-three from the US from Gallup. Apparently, levels are similar in the UK.

Zero hours contracts are just what they say they are – although you have to be ready and available for work at any time as an employee, as an employer, you’re under no obligation to give any work at all.  It’s true that the employee doesn’t have to take the work, but there are tales crawling out of the woodwork of employees being discriminated against if they don’t take work when it’s offered. According to research by the Resolution Foundation  http://ow.ly/nxWjG  those on zero hours contracts earn less, work fewer hours, and tend to be younger and less well educated than the average worker.

While some companies – Sports Direct, most recently – hail them as essential to business growth in an uncertain market, the devil is often in the detail.  In this case, the detail is in things such as whether workers should be paid the minimum wage while on call at or near the business or, indeed, whether someone on a zero hours contract has employee status.   Those with employee status have some protection in terms of the law – the right not to be unfairly dismissed, maternity right, redundancy rights.  Those who are classed as “workers” – don’t.

I understand that businesses need to be flexible; but to me it smacks of laziness that companies can’t plan their workforces sufficiently well to avoid the use of zero hours contracts, which can hardly be helpful to the UK’s appalling engagement figures.

This type of work is starting to resemble the labourers who turned up at the dock gates in the 1920’s looking for work.  Surely, we’ve come further than this?