This is something I instituted for our UK population about 6 months ago. I felt that it gave a very mixed message to new hires – we put them through multiple interviews, make the decision to hire and tell them how important they are….and then give them a message that says “we’re not sufficiently confident in our decision that you’ll have the Sword of Damocles hanging over you for 6 months”, when the reality is that from a legal perspective a probation period doesn’t give the company any extra protection.

A number of our managers also liked probation because they felt it made it easier to remove people who didn’t work out – or at least it is an easier message for them to deliver! When we started probing a bit into what lay behind the decisions to terminate, it became clear that often it covered a lack of adeqeuate onboarding, coaching, short term objective setting, check-ins etc etc etc.

We have taken a couple of parallel approaches:

1) Reinforce management responsibility for the outcomes – more  focus on thorough selection and interviewing (with interview training too), 1 week/ 1 month/3 month/6 month goals and check-ins. Emphasising the importance of early intervention, use of buddies and so on.

2) Education  – helping managers to understand that we have all the legal remedies we need anyway. There is no need for probation and all it does is send a strong message of “we don’t 100% trust our own judgement, we don’t 100% trust you, and if either of us have made the wrong decision, you’ll pay the price”.

Some of our benefits don’t commence day 1 anyway, but the wait period wasn’t aligned to probation so is just an amendement to the onboarding messages and offer letters.

Happy to chat if that would help

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