The First 90 Days: The Importance of Creating Strong Employee-Employer Relationships Early
On average, for every 25 employees your organization hires, seven of them will quit within their first 90 days. Jan Johnston Osburn reviews this likelihood in an article that cites a 2018 survey conducted by Jobvite. The survey showed that 28% of new employees quit within their first 90 days. Osburn points to key survey findings related to the root of high turnover among new hires.
These findings center around new hires having issues such as:
- Day-to-day roles that did not align with original expectations
- Negative incidents or bad experiences that made them want to leave
- Company culture that was not a good fit
- Unclear guidelines and expectations for responsibilities
- Ineffective training
- Unfriendly working environments and unhelpful coworkers
These findings are highly unfortunate – recruiting and hiring talent is an expensive and time-consuming process. When new hires leave within 90 days, all of the time, effort, and resources that went into hiring them goes to waste.
Instead, companies need to effectively meet new hire needs so as to ensure that they want to stay. One of the first steps behind this is to ensure that your recruitment process accurately depicts the role being filled. If many new hires are leaving, they may have had drastically different expectations for their roles. In order to remedy this, your organization needs to review the role for which you are hiring and the way in which you are portraying that role to recruits. Then make adjustments as needed so as to ensure that the two things closely match.
A key follow up step to that is to develop an effective onboarding process. Depending on an employee’s role, onboarding should take place during an employee’s first 3 to 6 months in his or her role – it should not be a one-day-only process.
However, it is still important to remember that an employee’s first day is key. For every single new hire, your company should prepare everything that the employee will need prior to his or her first day. When your new employee arrives, he or she should have:
- A dedicated physical space
- The tools needed to work such as a functioning computer and phone
- An email address
- Business cards
- A human resources package and any necessary forms
Having these prepared in advance helps new hires to feel valued. It communicates to them that they are welcome at your organization and that you want them to be empowered with the tools they need to get to work.
Over the next several months, your company should continue to invest time and resources into the new hire onboarding process. Some of the key pieces of this include a well-designed training program, clearly-stated goals and expectations, and multiple opportunities for the new hire to provide feedback. While this may seem like a big commitment, instituting an effective onboarding process will have a profound effect on employee retention rates, which will in turn have a highly positive effect on your company’s bottom line.
About the Author
Justin Goodman has spent the past 20 years in insurance. He is the co-founder and CEO of Total CSR and co-founder and Managing Director of Project 55. By the age of 29, he was recognized as one of the top five construction insurance experts nationwide by Risk and Insurance Magazine. He also was named to Insurance Business Magazine’s Hot 100 and most recently the 2024 Insurance Journal Agent of the Year. Justin has trained over 50,000 CSR’s, account managers and producers through his work at Total CSR. He has a passion for developing the next generation of insurance professionals. When not with his family, he devotes his free time to speaking engagements and advising agency owners across the country.
