Mind the helping curve: How to aid trajectories during role transitions

Everyone gets bored with handholding the newcomers and instead starts to quietly pull back. The new staff, who never really got a chance to stand on their own two feet, receive a formal process of orientation, resulted in them stopping to ask questions or offering support to even newer employees as they came in.

Some of those staff retreat into their screens and just keep quietly to themselves while others try to prove their worth to the team by saying yes to every request and, in turn, burn out and start looking at online job ads over each lunch hour.

Zawadi notices her staff working late but still taking long to fit in with the office vibe and existing staff. She cannot quite understand why performance and retention do not improve and then remain stable.

Researchers Liangting Zhang, Peter Bamberger, Man Wong, and Ningyu Tang last week published a study where they followed a large group of employees throughout their first year in new job roles.

Interestingly, they discovered that how other staff help acclimate the new employees during that year matters more to success and satisfaction than most managers realise.

They studied both brand new staff hired to join the organisation for the first time as well as existing staff who moved into new positions, either as promotions, or laterally inside the same company.

Over five different survey iterations, the staff were tracked on how much the same staff then onward helped their colleagues. The research then linked those patterns to famous organisational behaviour variables of task performance, social integration, and intention to quit one year after the initial job hire or job move.

The results statistically proved an otherwise obvious point. When someone starts a new job, their helping of others tends to follow a predictable curve. It moves up as they help more and more and then shifts dramatically down and they assist less and less.

At the very start, most new staff do not help others very much because they do not yet know the systems or politics or who to trust. But as weeks and months pass by, the new staff gain confidence, build relationships, and begin to help out their colleagues more.

After several months, however, that upward climb stops as helping levels flatten and often drop as regular core work tasks increase as more expectations are placed on them and people feel stressed with the crushing deadlines of the workplace. The pattern appears for both newly hired staff and internal staff transfers.

However, there exist some subtle differences in staff who move inside the same organisation and those coming in from the outside. Internal transfers usually start at a much higher level of helping.

Read: Engage and retain employees in order to survive

They already know the culture, the shortcuts, and who inside the firm to call for what. So, they can help others earlier. But their helping curve is also flatter. It rises a little after the transfer, then stabilises, instead of swinging sharply up then down like newcomers.

In contrast, new hires coming into the firm often show a steeper jump. They might help little at first and then surge to push very hard to prove themselves and be seen as good citizens.

The newcomers then later pull back once their probation period ends or once they feel tired or taken for granted.

The type of organisational and departmental leadership and peer culture changes the shape of the newcomer’s helping curve again.

In departments where the boss is seen as genuinely supportive, and where long-serving staff frequently help one another, then both new recruits and internal staff movers show a higher and steadier helping pattern that lasts much longer.

Supportive leaders go above and beyond to model care, create space for people to ask for and offer help, and do not punish staff for spending time helping colleagues when it serves the team’s needs and goals.

Regarding colleagues, those that have a strong team norm of helping out, then those newcomers quickly see that helping is part of being a full and valued team member rather than viewing it as an extra favour for colleagues. In such teams, people keep helping each other at a healthy level rather than spiking up and then crashing down.

Importantly, executives must remember that helping fellow colleagues does not exist merely as a way for newcomers to be supported but it actually has a trickle down affect that then supports the whole team.

When new staff members feel that they can only take from their colleagues and never give anything back, they often feel embarrassed and struggle to feel like part of the team.

But when they are also encouraged and enabled to contribute to others, even in the smallest of ways, they build confidence, reputation, and relationships. All these dramatically improve team and firm performance which in the ends makes the company more money.

Have a management or leadership issue, question, or challenge? Reach out to Dr. Scott through @ScottProfessor on Twitter or on email [email protected] .