Blog #5 - Organizational Socialization and On-Boarding: Avoiding uncertainty

In my research for my blog post this week, I found a short but fairly comical video showing how NOT to go about the on-boarding process, also known as organizational socialization or introducing a new employee to a company:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwelYJLsF6U

I found that this short video included several ideas discussed in class and the text reading last week that are important when it comes to being socialized into a company as a new hire. I can relate these ideas to some of my experiences of what I went through prior to joining an organization and being on the job for the first time.

Firstly, the video depicts Millie, the new hire, coming into a work situation where she presumably doesn't know anything about the job that she's been hired for. Obviously, without having worked there before, its hard to know what to expect, especially on your first day. What we witnessed in the video was the encounter phase of socialization, where Millie actually comes in to join the organization. There are several types of uncertainty that play a role in a newcomer's first day of work at an organization and Millie showed examples of each.

The first type is called referent uncertainty, which is uncertainty of the specific tasks that the new employee is required to perform. Millie asking Frank what her job actually entailed was a prime example of that type of uncertainty. 

The second type is called appraisal uncertainty, or the ability of the new employee to perform those tasks. Obviously, poor Millie likely didn't feel that she could perform the tasks appropriately given that she hadn't been told what the tasks actually were. 

The third type is relational uncertainty, or the uncertainty that follows regarding the creation of connections and relationships with the new employee's boss and coworkers. Millie found the communication style with Frank rather unappealing, which I think is completely acceptable given that it was her first day on the job. Instead of introducing himself face-to-face, Frank opted to speak with her via personal message indirectly. Although for the purpose of comedic effect, the communication style exemplifies a mistake that likely many organizations make when introducing a new employee.

I have experienced several early-job situations where I was asked to perform tasks that I hadn't been properly trained for, let alone having any idea of how to actually perform the task. One such example involved the routine required when emptying a bottle-return machine, one of the main duties of my job at a local grocery store chain, which I was asked to do on my second or third day on the job by myself. Although I had watched another employee do it on my first day, I had watched him perform it on a machine that had a broken lock, which did not require a key. He did not explain to me that the other machines needed a specific key to unlock them. In addition, when you took the collection bins from the bottom of the machine, he had simply taken them to the loading bay and dumped them into the larger collection totes, which are categorized by recycle material (glass, plastic, aluminum). He had emptied the bins into the larger totes but didn't stack the totes using the hydraulic pallet jack, which is required when a tote gets filled. He didn't tell me that I could be asked to perform a hand-count of bottles and cans by a customer. 

Ultimately, this resulted in me screwing up my first experience doing the task myself. I went out to a machine that was reported to be not working, only to learn that the machine was locked. When the customer asked me to do a hand count of the bottles since the only glass machine was malfunctioning, I told him that we were not allowed to do hand counts. He got frustrated with me and left angrily, and I went back to the store and found a person in charge that gave me the key I needed to open the glass machine. After emptying the bins into a glass tote in the loading bay that was full, I returned to the store to perform my other tasks. The customer had complained to an assistant manager that I had refused to hand count his glass bottles, and after that I had to end up hand counting the bottles anyway. In addition, the next day I was asked why the glass tote was not stacked properly alongside the other totes. When I responded that I wasn't aware they had to be stacked a certain way, my supervisor told me that he had to go out to the loading bay and move the tote himself because it was in the way of a loading truck, which wasn't technically his job. This resulted in a negative conversation that made my first couple of days on the job rather disappointing. It was not a easy conversation to have so early in my career at this organization, and it resulted in uncertainty about the relationship between myself and my supervisor that easily could have been avoided if I had been properly informed of the particulars of my task. But it provides a great example of the kinds of uncertainty that can occur when a new employee joins an organization.