Blog Post

Making your goals go to work for you

July 11th, 2022

The Magic Window for Retention

Introduction

When it comes to employee retention, how you onboard and engage with a new employee in their first 90 days matters significantly. Research shows there is a magic window of time when your employees are still new enough that they’re excited about their job, but not so new that everything is still overwhelming and unknown. The magic window can vary depending on the type of company you run or the type of employee you hire, but generally speaking it’s in the first 90 days. This article will explain why this is so important as well as how to use leverage this critical time frame to promote tenure > 1 year.

The Magic Window for Retention

Did you know that there’s a magic window for employee retention?
It’s true! And it’s called the “Magic Window.” The first 90 days are when new employees are most likely to quit, but they’re also the best time to make an impact on their long-term decision making.
So if you’re wondering why your company is losing so many people this might have something to do with it.

Why the first 90 days?

The first 90 days of a new job are crucial. In a large study by Fast, the reasons for leaving were varied, but solvable.

> Forty-three percent say their day-to-day role wasn’t what they expected, 34% report that an incident or bad experience drove them away, and 32% didn’t like the company culture.

But what is more interesting is that if an employee makes it past the three-month mark, you can expect that they will stay for more than a year. That means if you don’t get it right in their first 90 days there is no chance to develop them into a top performer.

Your Secret Weapons

  • Focus on Onboarding Well. Making sure new teammates have an onboarding conversation that involves working styles, personal preferences, team norms...etc. example: "you find out EOD meant 5pm for your manager, and you sent it at midnight!!!". Help them learn the little things will make them work effectively and set them up for success.
  • Set-up 1:1s. Start with 15, 30, 60 day check-ins. You’ll want to build at least one of these into your onboarding process, and the sooner the better. Having a conversation about what’s working and what isn’t early on will give you both time to plan for changes or additional training if necessary.
  • Recognize progress publicly. Recognizing new hire’s performance publicly with kudos (or even just letting them know how much you appreciate something they’ve done) is an easy way to boost their morale—and keep them around longer!
  • Monitor engagement and sentiment along the way If you’re not already leveraging people analytics, this should be an easy add - allowing you to set up alerts that trigger when issues with engagement or satisfaction are detected.

Get Set Up for Success

You need a tool to succeed during this time. Consider using teamble. We’d be happy to show you how to optimize for the 90 day window.