Often in the workplace, regular employees find themselves paying a hefty emotional toll (stress, anxiety, depression) and physical toll (obesity, high blood pressure, cardiovascular events) for situations beyond their control. For instance, many contemporary workplaces suffer from high employee turnover rates, caused by a combination of constant high stress and a detached corporate culture. Thus, remaining employees are often burdened not only by their own hefty and stressful workload, but with the additional task of assisting a constant stream of new employees to learn the ropes. Another example can be found when managers propagate a stressful, cold, or detached workplace culture which causes team members to feel alone, isolated, insignificant, and miserable.

Employees in these situations often feel powerless to change their current state of affairs, especially if their organization or direct manager doesn't seem eager to bring about any change whatsoever. While systemic change might appear unattainable, local change is indeed possible: Individual employees can still create significant positive changes with significant impacts through acts of kindness and care, even without managerial support. One such instance is social onboarding.

Traditional, technical onboarding often neglects important social aspects: If asked to demonstrate a skill you just acquired and are unsure about, most people would do much better in front of caring and sympathetic friends rather than strangers, as they would feel less anxious, more supported and therefore more confident. So, the quicker new team members feel socially accepted the quicker they will improve and reduce the added burden from the shoulders of the team's veterans.

Additionally, recent research has demonstrated that we are actually programmed to learn better from people we like. So, befriending new employees and helping them to feel socially accepted and secure from the get go, and behaving towards new employees in a kind and friendly manner, enables them to learn from you more efficiently, hit targets quicker, generally feel better, perform better, and consequently stay longer. And finally, behaving kindly towards people in need makes us feel good about ourselves and acts towards creating a team culture of caring and support amongst team members. Indeed, social onboarding should be considered best practice for teams that wish to lower their individual work burden while bolstering their social cohesiveness.

Even though most employees are not managers and do not necessarily wield any formal power, everyone has the option to better their situation at work. Facilitating new team members onboarding by focusing on the often-neglected social aspects will not only improve attrition and long-term engagement of the new team members; it will also empower and improve one's sense of efficacy and agency, thus contributing to overall emotional health and well-being.

References

Lund University. (2024, February 15). The brain is 'programmed' for learning from people we like. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 30, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240215113642.htm