Betting on Talent: Examining the Relationship between Employee Retention and Onboarding Programs

The expectations of employees in the United States continue to evolve as generational shifts occur in the workforce. The already raging war for talent has been fueled by the 2020 pandemic, which introduced new ways to work and different types of work opportunities. As a result, employees are re-evaluating their options and seeking ways to extract more value from their professional lives. In these circumstances, employee retention is a competitive advantage, and companies must consider how to retain their most desirable talent. Research in the organizational behavior domain shows that when employees hold values like those of their employing organization, they experience greater job satisfaction, increased organizational commitment, and higher intent to stay in the organization. Onboarding programs are widely accepted in the business community as a valuable opportunity to welcome new employees and introduce them to the values and culture of the organization, but organizations assign various weights and considerations to these programs as they can be costly to develop, execute, and maintain. In this article, we examine the relationship between employee retention and onboarding programs. We study whether a robust and well-executed onboarding program can mitigate employee attrition and can serve as a catalyst for employee retention in an organization

It Was For Me

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Balancing Focal and Client Firm Employee Identification and Acculturation Tensions: A Case Study Approach at a BPO Firm

Research in the organizational behavior and identification domains includes numerous studies examining how employees identify and acculturate with their employing firm. However, a dearth of research exists examining the identification and acculturation process for firms that employ individuals who support a client firm full-time for an extended period. This case study seeks to discover the identification and acculturation process of a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firm operating with this model. The research seeks to learn how the focal firm balances the tension of acculturating its employees while preparing and equipping them with the processes, procedures, and necessary cultural elements of the client firm they support to deliver the highest quality of service possible to the client. The research examines the actions taken by leadership to foster acculturation and the experiences and barriers of the focal firm employees which strengthen or weaken the process. Additionally, it considers the inputs of the client in the identification and acculturation process. Through qualitative investigation, the research explores how focal firm leaders seek to acculturate employees and how and why employees embrace and embody the focal firm’s culture. Empirical evidence was gathered through semi-structured interviews conducted with tenured and new individuals, including senior leaders, middle-level leaders, and employees. This evidence was supplemented with secondary data sources to provide insight into the focal firm culture. Five themes emerged from the empirical evidence as significant: Firm Culture, Leader Characteristics, Leadership Actions, Employee Responses, and other Identification and Acculturation Factors, including Employee Barriers and Client Inputs. Findings showed that a strong firm culture and leadership buy-in was paramount to the identification and acculturation process, and five specific leadership actions drove employee identification and acculturation with the focal firm. Findings also showed that employee experiences and barriers and client inputs moderated the acculturation process. As a result of the findings, contributions have been made to both theory and practice. A contribution has been made to theory by offering a detailed empirical account of how a BPO firm acculturates employees with the focal firm while balancing the tensions of client culture. Empirical findings led to the development of propositions and a conceptual framework that added to the academic literature in the organizational identity and employee acculturation domains. Additionally, the findings contributed to the creation of a Firm Identity Continuum to gauge the state of employees. As a contribution to practice, the study offers recommendations for how practitioners can aid the identification and acculturation process by applying the conceptual framework and using the Firm Identity Continuum to evaluate employees who work for one firm but support another full-time. Guidance is offered for achieving the appropriate balance of identification and acculturation for the focal firm

Optimization of resource allocation can explain the temporal dynamics and honesty of sexual signals

In species in which males are free to dynamically alter their allocation to sexual signaling over the breeding season, the optimal investment in signaling should depend on both a male’s state and the level of competition he faces at any given time. We developed a dynamic optimization model within a game‐theoretical framework to explore the resulting signaling dynamics at both individual and population levels and tested two key model predictions with empirical data on three‐spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) males subjected to dietary manipulation (carotenoid availability): (1) fish in better nutritional condition should be able to maintain their signal for longer over the breeding season, resulting in an increasingly positive correlation between nutritional status and signal (i.e., increasing signal honesty), and (2) female preference for more ornamented males should thus increase over the breeding season. Both predictions were supported by the experimental data. Our model shows how such patterns can emerge from the optimization of resource allocation to signaling in a competitive situation. The key determinants of the honesty and dynamics of sexual signaling are the condition dependency of male survival, the initial frequency distribution of nutritional condition in the male population, and the cost of signaling

Optical matrix elements in tight-binding models with overlap

We investigate the effect of orbital overlap on optical matrix elements in empirical tight-binding models. Empirical tight-binding models assume an orthogonal basis of (atomiclike) states and a diagonal coordinate operator which neglects the intra-atomic part. It is shown that, starting with an atomic basis which is not orthogonal, the orthogonalization process induces intra-atomic matrix elements of the coordinate operator and extends the range of the effective Hamiltonian. We analyze simple tight-binding models and show that non-orthogonality plays an important role in optical matrix elements. In addition, the procedure gives formal justification to the nearest-neighbor spin-orbit interaction introduced by Boykin [Phys. Rev \textbf{B} 57, 1620 (1998)] in order to describe the Dresselahaus term which is neglected in empirical tight-binding models.Comment: 16 pages 6 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Social media adoption framework for aged care service providers in Australia

© 2017 IEEE. The aged care sector has been a late adopter of social media platforms for communicating, collaborating, marketing and creating brand awareness. There is little research that examines the adoption of social media by aged care service providers for these purposes. This paper reviews the status of social media adoption in the Australian aged care industry, to understand in what ways social media can serve older people's needs, and to develop recommendations for aged-care service providers to adopt social media applications to empower older people. Through a review of the literature and interviews with Australian experts, this paper suggests aged care providers use a three-phase framework when adopting social media in the aged care sector. The first phase is to adopt a popular public social media platform such as Facebook followed by Instagram and Twitter. The second phase supports interaction by encouraging posts and feedback by locally hosted member forums. The third phase is the adoption of specialised social applications for closed groups and specific functions. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of the framework and proposes directions for future research

Hydrophobic gating of mechanosensitive channel of large conductance evidenced by single-subunit resolution

Mechanosensitive (MS) ion channels are membrane proteins that detect and respond to membrane tension in all branches of life. In bacteria, MS channels prevent cells from lysing upon sudden hypoosmotic shock by opening and releasing solutes and water. Despite the importance of MS channels and ongoing efforts to explain their functioning, the molecular mechanism of MS channel gating remains elusive and controversial. Here we report a method that allows single-subunit resolution for manipulating and monitoring “mechanosensitive channel of large conductance” from Escherichia coli. We gradually changed the hydrophobicity of the pore constriction in this homopentameric protein by modifying a critical pore residue one subunit at a time. Our experimental results suggest that both channel opening and closing are initiated by the transmembrane 1 helix of a single subunit and that the participation of each of the five identical subunits in the structural transitions between the closed and open states is asymmetrical. Such a minimal change in the pore environment seems ideal for a fast and energy-efficient response to changes in the membrane tension.

Topological Insulators with Inversion Symmetry

Topological insulators are materials with a bulk excitation gap generated by the spin orbit interaction, and which are different from conventional insulators. This distinction is characterized by Z_2 topological invariants, which characterize the groundstate. In two dimensions there is a single Z_2 invariant which distinguishes the ordinary insulator from the quantum spin Hall phase. In three dimensions there are four Z_2 invariants, which distinguish the ordinary insulator from "weak" and "strong" topological insulators. These phases are characterized by the presence of gapless surface (or edge) states. In the 2D quantum spin Hall phase and the 3D strong topological insulator these states are robust and are insensitive to weak disorder and interactions. In this paper we show that the presence of inversion symmetry greatly simplifies the problem of evaluating the Z_2 invariants. We show that the invariants can be determined from the knowledge of the parity of the occupied Bloch wavefunctions at the time reversal invariant points in the Brillouin zone. Using this approach, we predict a number of specific materials are strong topological insulators, including the semiconducting alloy Bi_{1-x} Sb_x as well as \alpha-Sn and HgTe under uniaxial strain. This paper also includes an expanded discussion of our formulation of the topological insulators in both two and three dimensions, as well as implications for experiments.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures; published versio

Many-body position operator in lattice fermionic systems with periodic boundary conditions

A total position operator $X$ in the position representation is derived for lattice fermionic systems with periodic boundary conditions. The operator is shown to be Hermitian, the generator of translations in momentum space, and its time derivative is shown to correspond to the total current operator in a periodic system. The operator is such that its moments can be calculated up to any order. To demonstrate its utility finite size scaling is applied to the Brinkman-Rice transition as well as metallic and insulating Gutzwiller wavefunctions.Comment: to appear in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General (reference will be added later