'They tend to feel like their skills and abilities are not as well suited or fit to the role'
Newly hired employees are showing low er levels of engagement, wellbeing and inclusion compared to other employees, according to a recent report by experience management software company Qualtrics.
The company’s 2024 Employee experience trends report found that globally, 65% of employees with less than six months of tenure felt engaged, compared to 68% of all other employees. Newer hires reported a lower rate of wellbeing (66%) compared to other workers (72%), and lower levels of inclusion (66%) compared to other employees (73%).
Feelings of inclusion reached 66% for new hires, compared to 73% for other employees.
“When we look at the indicators of employee experience, generally we're seeing them stagnate or decline in Australia, year on year. And that's a real concern,” Dr Crissa Sumner, senior manager – experience management advisory services, Asia Pacific & Japan, at Qualtrics told HRD Australia.
The report also found that 39% of employees who have been with a company for less than six months, plan to leave within the next 12 months.
Factors affecting employee experience
Sumner described how ‘role-fit’ is a major factor when it comes to a new employee’s experience within a company.
“It may be one of those drivers that is contributing to lower engagement and a lower intention to stay,” she said.
“Our data suggests that new hires – and when I say new hires, I'm talking generally 12 months or less in an organisation – they tend to feel like their skills and abilities are not as well suited or fit to the role. And that is driving down their engagement and their intention to stay.”
Sumner mentioned a hypothesis Qualtrics has about why engagement is down and it is linked to what happened during the peak of the Great Resignation.
“We saw a lot of organisations competing for talent, offering quite significant pay and benefits packages as the drawcards to get the talent that they were critically looking for,” Sumner said. “And I think in some cases, people maybe decided to make the move for that significantly larger pay packet at the end of the day, and placed less emphasis on the other factors that are really important in terms of having a job that you're engaged in, that you're committed to, that fulfills you.”
And now that these employees have been with a company for 12 months or less, Sumner believes factors other than pay are now coming to mind for them.
“Maybe I am earning a bit more than I was in that previous role, but am I finding that fulfillment? Am I as engaged? Am I as committed? And our data would suggest that they're saying no because they're more likely to look elsewhere for the next opportunity,” Sumner said.
A focus on onboarding
Sumner suggested that HR teams focus on onboarding new hires more effectively to empower them to achieve the performance their company is looking for.
“Some organisations, for example, might just send out a survey at 30 days and ask a range of questions about the person's onboarding experience,” she said. “What we've been doing with customers that are more mature and that have had particular business reasons to focus on onboarding, is do that in a much more sophisticated way.”
For example, tuning into the onboarding experience on day one, Sumner said.
“Some of the research we've done shows that the experience a new hire has on day one can actually have a really long-standing impact on their engagement and their retention,” she said.
“So tune into the day one experience. Tune into the week one experience, which is often that corporate induction process that’s run more centrally. Make sure that central team has the insight they need to improve that first week of onboarding. And then beyond that, tune into 30 days, 60 days, 90 days as we move from a more centralised approach to onboarding, to more manager enablement and manager lead onboarding.”
