First impressions are powerful and, at times, powerfully awkward—just ask Greg from Meet the Parents. The stakes aren’t just high for sweaty-palmed boyfriends vying for parental approval; employers also have one shot to make a good introduction to a new employee through onboarding.

But there’s no guarantee that an employee’s onboarding experience will turn out as beautifully as the wedding altar Owen Wilson’s character hand-carved out of a single block of wood. According to a 2021 study of over 700 US employees who started a new job during the pandemic, 71% finished onboarding unsure of who they should “build relationships with,” 62% didn’t have a “clear idea of the organization’s culture,” and over half didn’t have a clear idea of “how to be productive in their role.”

In our June series, we’re exploring how companies structure their onboarding processes in hopes their new hires want to come back for day two…and three…and 3,000. Today, we’re taking a look at how employers can fall short of that goal.

Onboarding Island, population: one. Taylor Kartavicius, a marketing strategist, told HR Brew he felt unsupported when he joined several startups as their first marketing hire. (Only one of these companies, Kartavicius said, had a dedicated HR staffer at the time he worked there.) 

Kartavicius said that in the past, he often reported to CEOs or others who he believed lacked marketing experience; he recalled feeling like some of his bosses had no clear vision for his role, much less his onboarding.

“I think oftentimes, when they hire their first marketer, it’s because they’ve realized that they need someone to kind of step in and do all the work for them, but they don’t really understand the scope of that work,” Kartavicius explained.

Kartavicius said in these experiences, he felt like he was “on an island,” left to sort out his responsibilities without collaboration or communication about expectations.

“You get the initial [documentation] everyone seems to have…where it’s like, ‘Read this, read that,’ then that basically is your onboarding. It basically only took like two or three days to get on board,” Kartavicius later said. Keep reading here.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.

Juneteenth, a day of remembrance commemorating the day the last enslaved people in the US were freed in Texas, is fast approaching, and as we’ve already seen, corporate attempts to mark the occasion have the potential to backfire. This year, as more organizations prepare to honor the holiday for the first time, some advocates and educators are urging employers to go beyond what they see as merely performative allyship.

Juneteenth was declared a federal holiday in 2021 by President Biden, and ahead of the proclamation, just 9% of employers surveyed said they planned to observe the holiday, according to data from asset management firm Mercer. Regardless of whether employees have the day off, DE&I experts said employers can still use this as a moment to have transparent conversations with Black employees.

Step back. Joquina Reed, founder of J. Reed Consulting, which brings a justice component to workplace DE&I efforts, said that recognizing Juneteenth in the workplace can be complicated. “What people often want is, like, a checklist. There is no checklist that easily sums up 400-plus years of oppression…They need to acknowledge that this one day cannot account for all of those things.”

While some employers have seen firsthand how their attempts at acknowledging Juneteenth can be perceived by some as tokenism or worse, Kim Crowder, founder and CEO of Kim Crowder Consulting, which focuses on DE&I employer consulting, told HR Brew via email that there are sensible ways for organizations to observe Juneteenth. Outside of giving employees the day off, companies should, in Crowder’s opinion, provide employees with space to observe the day in a way that is most healing for them.

“Some team members do not want to discuss the impact of this day with other team members,” Crowder explained, adding that “it can also be painful to face the reality of the fact that some enslaved people did not receive freedom for two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.”

Reed says that employers should reflect during this time and start having what she calls “the ugly conversations.” She explains that the concept of “transformative transparency” goes beyond companies’ disclosing things like charitable giving and should extend to potentially more uncomfortable topics, such as pay transparency, that allow Black employees “spaces [to ask] tough questions.”

Zoom out. Reed points out that one of the ways organizations get it wrong is when they expect Black employees to educate their non-Black peers. Keep reading here.—KP

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @Kris10Parisi on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristen for her number on Signal.

What do NYC Mayor Eric Adams, Elon Musk, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings all have in common? They want this era of remote work to end faster than a streaming service abruptly canceling a beloved TV series despite fans’ earnest objections.

New York City municipal-office employees were recently told in an email that “hybrid schedules of any kind are not permitted,” the New York Daily News reported. Elon Musk made headlines by calling all Tesla employees back to the office for at least 40 hours a week. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made it very clear back in 2020 that he doesn’t “see any positives” in WFH. But while unequivocal marching orders may get results for some leaders, others are finding that employees are willing to push back.

Tug-of-war. While companies such as Verizon, Uber, Spotify, and others say they are committed to flexible work long-term, other organizations are summoning employees back to the office full-time—or potentially face “severe consequences,” according to one recent survey of US managers. But when it comes to successfully implementing RTO requirements, there appears to be a no-size-fits-all approach.

Bank of America brought back all employees for the first time since the start of Covid in the first week of June, but is still largely leaving specific RTO requirements to individual divisions, Insider reported. The result so far, sources told Insider, has been some frustration over low in-person attendance and confusion on where to go next.

“There are areas [on the trading floors at One Bryant Park] that are completely empty and areas completely full. It is very binary,” one Bank of America employee told Insider. ”That creates a lot of tension.”

Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the Time 100 summit on Tuesday that he doesn’t yet know what office model will work for his employees, and that he needs to balance his preference for in-office work with what workers want, conceding that virtual office meetings are “not inferior, just different.”

The HR dilemma. Pushback to RTO has potential implications for HR managers who handle everything from the physical organization of a workplace to staff disciplinary measures. Keep reading here.—KP

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @Kris10Parisi on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristen for her number on Signal.

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: A compensation analysis of the 300 publicly-held US corporations that paid the lowest median wages in 2020 found that the average gap between the earnings of CEOs and median worker pay was 670-1 last year. (Institute for Policy Studies)

Quote: “When you have an internal dialogue that goes, ‘I don’t have time, I’ll do it later,’ that’s when you end up with people who are starving by 4 pm and their energy is completely drained,” Katia Verresen, an executive coach, about why workers in the US can have trouble taking lunch breaks. (the Wall Street Journal)

Read: Mai Ton, chief people officer at the retail technology company Fabric, wrote about the widespread burnout affecting HR professionals as a result of the pandemic and its effects. (Time)

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