Please read, analyze the article, and answer as challenging the ways to hire a new employee.

ONE page for the question below.

Getting a New Team Member On Board You recently hired a new employee, Sarah, from a different area of your company.

The transition is difficult because Sarah will work part-time for you while she phases out of her other job.

The other members of your team have never met or worked with Sarah before.

Questions:

1. As a leader, why should you be concerned about onboarding?

2. What can you do to integrate a new member more effectively into the team?

Read:

The annual employment survey needs to be retired.

The reason companies do these surveysto find out what is going on in their workplace and with employeesremains as important as ever. But workers don't like the surveys and often won't respond to them, and most companies don't do anything with the results anyway. And now, management has access to a host of other data that can tell it what is going on in the workplace far better and faster than the annual survey can. Annual surveys became popular after World War II when it was thought that happy workers were more productive workers. But when research began to find that employee happiness doesn't necessarily lead to more productivity, many employers began measuring other things with surveys, eventually settling on employee "engagement." Engagement, however, is a vague concept with multiple definitions, and many of the drivers of engagement aren't things that can be changed easily. Engagement is going to be higher in a children's hospital, for example, where most everyone sees the mission as important, compared with an investment firm, where not everyone is as motivated to make more money for those who already have it. A second issue is that engagement on its own isn't a good measure of job performance, which is what most business leaders ultimately want to know. The old way One of the biggest problems with surveys is that about half of employees don't respond to themoften because they are too long. It isn't unusual to have 50 questions just on the engagement component, and most employers layer on other questions, as well. The workers who fill out the surveys tend to be different from those who don't, and when the response rates are low, the results aren't representative or useful. Many workers don't take surveys seriously because they don't believe management will do anything with the results. And for good reason. In a recent study , almost 60% of human-resources executivesthe people who conduct these surveysadmitted that their organizations either do nothing with the results or deal only with the easy issues. Another survey, this one of middle managers who are close to the action, found that 27% never even look at the results of their annual surveys, a figure that is probably understated. Sometimes, companies ignore survey results because there isn't an internal "customer" interested in the findings. I recall a conversation with a human-resources leader about a survey result showing that employees didn't like the food served in the company's cafeteria. While that might seem like a simple problem to fix, the group responsible for choosing the company's food vendor wasn't part of HR and hadn't asked for the survey results. The group also wasn't interested in renegotiating the existing vendor's contract because it wasn't up for renewal. Companies also don't act on survey results because the things that bother employees most are often too big or expensive to be easily addressed. I was recently part of a meeting of CEOs of roughly 40 midsize companies, and I asked them what they would do with a survey result showing that employees viewed their pay as inadequate. A few said they might look into the issue, but none said they would act on the information. They did indicate they would pay more attention to such a complaint if it was on Glassdoor because that could affect their ability to hire. Another knock on surveys is that the responses aren't always anonymous, and employees know this. Most employers match responses to demographic data they already have for respondents, such as where in the company they work and their job titles. And while almost all employers promise anonymity, every HR leader has a story about a manager wanting to know which employee was complaining about him or her in a survey. Considering these issues, why do companies keep doing annual surveys? It could be because they can brag about the results when they are good and hide them when they are bad, as there is no requirement that the results ever be reported. It also could be inertia. Companies have always done surveys, they are easy to do electronically and, most important, some companies don't know any other way to find out what is going on with their employees. A new approach There are, however, more efficient and more fruitful ways for executives to get this kind of information. To find out why people are quitting, for instance, companies could study the exit interviews of employees who have resigned rather than trying to draw inferences from surveys of current employees. To determine which benefits employees value most, companies could analyze their actual choices during annual enrollment periods. For more complex questionssuch as whether to implement a wellness planemployers could do what marketing researchers do and start with focus groups. Share Your Thoughts What do you think companies should do with employee surveys? Join the conversation below. Companies also can learn a lot from data they already have. Discussions on coordination and scheduling platforms such as Slack and Yammer can provide insight into whether employees are having trouble getting work done. Project-management software can assess where project bottlenecks are. Natural-language processing software can help make sense of more subjective things, such as summarizing trends in performance-appraisal reports. Information like this is far more accurate than opinions from employee surveys. Some companies create chat rooms and monitor them closely to learn what employees think about policies and practices. Amir Goldberg at Stanford University and Sameer Srivastava at the University of California, Berkeley, have done groundbreaking work assessing and measuring the culture of organizations by studying the language employees use in their electronic communications, such as emails, Slack messages and Glassdoor reviews. Up to 87% of companies already monitor employee email, although how much of that is simple checks for inappropriate content via scanning software isn't clear. Perhaps surprisingly, 77% of employees say it is acceptable for companies to monitor employees' work-related email, but the devil is in the details. Careful companies let employees know what they are monitoring. And as with surveys, necessary information should be gathered from email without identifying the authors, as it is only necessary to see average results. Surveys can still be useful, especially if they ask about actual behavior such as whether supervisors are talking to their teams about job issues or whether employees have received required job training. But it is better to ask questions in the form of pulse surveysonly two or three items at a time. Pulse surveys can be ramped up quickly, and response rates are much higher. A clever tool I've seen to raise response rates is to require employees to answer the pulse survey before they can log into their work computer. Employee surveys are now about 100 years old. The reasons for using them are as important as ever. But how many of us are still using workplace tools from a century ago to achieve workplace goals? Not many, I would imagine. Employee surveys should suffer a similar fate.