Kiyomi MGMT blog

In my last job, I received 1 day of training in the form of “shadowing” another employee, which meant them telling me what supplies I should buy, and then being allocated tasks to do independently. I only lasted about a month at that job because I did not feel adequately prepared to do my job well, and it lead to high levels of stress and conflict with my boss, who was unhappy with how many questions I had for him. In the job I had before that, I received extensive training, shadowing the manager and then another employee closely for the first few weeks. That job was far less involved and by the time training was complete, I felt very capable of doing my work adequately and really enjoyed my work there. In “Your New Hires Won’t Succeed Unless You Onboard Them Properly”, it says, “A new employee’s manager is one of the most important people in the onboarding experience, and gaining this person’s support may directly improve or undermine a new hire’s chances of succeeding.” I found this to be very true and learned first hand as an employee how important the onboarding process is to the job, not only in my confidence and ability to carry out daily tasks, but also in my relationship to my supervisors and my overall job satisfaction. I am starting a new job tomorrow which includes a week of training, and I am interested to see how it compares to the last 2 I had.

Today I had two job interviews. The first one was very informal, and it really felt like they were just trying to get a sense of who I was as a person, and whether they thought my personality was the right fit for the job. The second was very stiff, and I was asked really basic questions about my availability, work experience, and not much else. In reflecting on this week’s readings, it seems to me that the first place is more likely to find the kind of candidate they are looking for, because they were more focused on finding the right fit and less on things related to logistics and things that can be easily trained for. One big theme from this week’s learning was that personality is a really important factor when considering whether someone will thrive in a particular work environment. By spending the time getting to know me, I felt more interested in working for the company, and also more confident that if they hired me, it would be a good fit. The first interview also spent longer explaining their goals and expectations for the job, making it clear that they had intention around what they wanted in a new hire, and giving me clear expectations to work with. I believe some of this was because the first interview was through an HR department, while the second interview appeared to be less formal and the person doing the interview may not have been trained to know what questions would be helpful to ask or what they were looking for.

This week I decided to look at Intuit, The Cheesecake Factory, and Southern Ohio Medical center from the Fortune 500 list of Best Places to Work for 2020.

Common themes I noticed between the three companies I looked at were people, workplace culture, and feeling valued as employees and as people. All 3 had high agreement rates on the survey question “when you join the company, you are made to feel welcome. 2 of the 3 featured high rates of agreement to the question “I am able to take time off work when I think it’s necessary” and all 3 had strong emphasis on interpersonal relations within the company.

This highlights the importance of creating a positive workplace culture where people feel cared for and have a sense of community. Things such as benefits, access to resources, time off, and job security play heavily into this sense of acceptance, and security that people seem to feel at these companies, and are HR strategies that appear to have a strong impact on employee approval ratings when it comes to their jobs.

The HR strategies used to give people this sense of belonging and security in their jobs appears slightly different between companies based on the function and type of jobs people were working. Intuit had a strong emphasis on benefits, while Cheesecake Factory and Southern Ohio Medical Group placed more emphasis on people and family. Southern Ohio Medical group had more about job security and access to resources to do their job, which makes sense because access to resources is more important in a medical setting, as well as it being more common for people to face resource scarcity in this type of position, when compared to Cheesecake Factory or Intuit.

Overall, it appears that people value a sense of belonging in their workplaces, and HR has an important hand in creating the types of workplace culture that allow for this by tailoring business strategies to the specific needs of the job description, and by making strategic decisions about who they hire.

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