Overwhelming details (for employees)

I read this article1 with my morning coffee, and it’s been a while since I’ve come across something that resonated so strongly with me. The perspective of the article is Customer Experience (CX), but there are profound truths for almost every role within a company — and especially for product management.

Over the next few posts, I’ll share one particular truth that struck me, and how I’ve seen that bear out in my product management experience.

Here is my first: Onboarding employees is generally terrible.

During the first few days & weeks of a new employee’s experience, there is a firehose of information blasting at them with very little context or “experience” to organize it and make it make sense. Among the basics are things like tax withholding declarations, paycheck deposit details, healthcare choices, and so forth. With (likely) zero effective relationships with co-workers at this early stage, and no context on who’s opinion to trust, there is no meaningful way to discuss these options and make an informed choice. Often they just rely on the “facts” presented, and hope for the best.

While all of this is going on, they are also learning where key team members are located, where folks go to lunch, where the meeting rooms are located, etc. In the midst of this, they are trying to observe all of the unwritten norms that don’t show up in onboarding materials. Things like, how early do folks tend to show up to work, how late do folks tend to stay after, does everyone go to lunch at the same time, do people eat alone or in groups? All of this requires a lot of cognitive effort, and can be a bit draining.

Then they get to study & memorize company policies, department policies, job function rules & responsibilities, corporate ethics, anti-harassment training, anti-bribery & gift giving policies, and more. At this point, new employees are probably starting to feel a little tired, and none of that covers their actual job role yet.

Whether it is a list of videos to watch in a Learning Management System, or in-person workshops, or written documents, or some combination of all of these things, employees are then thrown into the details of their specific function — along with a list of company-specific acronyms and jargon. Depending on the complexity of the role, this could last several weeks!

In contrast, studies have shown2 that people can only remember 3 to 5 items in short-term memory at any given time.

When managers bombard new employees with dozens, or even hundreds, of bits of information each day during their onboarding, they are absolutely not going to remember most of it. Without an opportunity to practice a few chunks of information in isolation in a real (or simulated) environment and transfer that learning to long-term memory, it just fades away.

Without the solid foundation that managers expect, employees are left to “wing it” on their own, and rely on peers (or assumptions) about how things should work. That leaves everyone appearing to be aligned on the surface, but below that surface, everyone is pointed in a slightly different direction. While it might not be significant misalignment, it often provides just enough friction on productivity that results are meager and underwhelming.

This then gets reflected in the products & services provided by those employees, and customers begin to notice. More on this in a future post.

Other posts in this series:

• Post 1: Overwhelming details for employees

• Post 2: Overwhelming details for customers

• Post 3: Misaligned incentives

• Post 4: KPI’s at scale

• Post 5: Everything is connected

• Post 6: Empowered guidelines

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1. I originally read this article in Apple News+ which doesn’t provide direct links to articles outside of the News app. I tried to find the article on Entrepreneur Magazine’s website, but found 0 search results for the title of the article as well as the author’s name. (Both seem like bad user experience choices to me, by the way.) I ended up finding the article on the website I linked to above as a last resort.  ↩︎

2. This research publication (The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?) goes into some detail behind why this is true and it’s implications.  ↩︎