27% of remote pandemic hires don’t feel embraced by their team

While some Americans have managed to land a new job during the pandemic, not all of them are feeling connected with their team.

That’s at least what a new study from Perceptyx, Inc. is suggesting, which sought feedback from 1,000 American employees in March about their onboarding and work experience.

The employee survey, analytics and consulting firm reports that 73% of new hires who were brought on in the pandemic say they feel embraced by their work team versus 78% of their tenured counterparts, who have worked at a company for two to three years.

Similarly, 72% of pandemic hires say they feel their new employer is good at making workers feel connected. Tenured employees felt more optimistic about their employer’s connectivity by a slight margin at 76%.

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"The past 18 months have been a grand experiment in remote onboarding," said Perceptyx Director of People Analytics Brett Wells, in a statement about the study’s findings. "Now the results are in, and unfortunately it seems most employers have failed to engage their remote joiners adequately. They’ve created a ticking time bomb of sorts, which will likely lead to higher turnover rates in the near future."

He added: "HR leaders need to rethink how they engage this cohort of employees as well as how they will onboard future hires."

While new 85% of pandemic hires say they feel welcomed by their manager more so than tenured employees (79%), only 7 in 10 pandemic hires say they would recommend their employer as "good place to work."

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Common complaints dissatisfied pandemic hires had about their employers were in work-life balance categories.

Thirty-six percent who are unhappy say think their employer doesn’t care about their health and wellbeing while 28% say their employer has an unreasonable pace of work. Meanwhile, more than one-third (38%) of these dissatisfied new hires say they weren’t able to "bounce back" and 29% say they weren’t able to overcome setbacks.

"Companies could have an unpleasant surprise when it comes to retaining those who joined during the pandemic. These employees are less connected to their company cultures and are less proud to work there compared to those who joined just before the pandemic," Wells told FOX Business via email. "This is true across a wide variety of connectedness and well-being measures; companies need to double-down on building relationships with this cohort. Normally we would see a ‘honeymoon effect’ for new joiners when they feel very connected to their employers, but that effect has been erased by the pandemic."

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Although not everyone has been happy with their remote onboarding or remote working experience, the U.S. is slowly reopening due to vaccination efforts.

Currently, the U.S. has administered more than 288.6 million doses of coronavirus vaccines, according to data from the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard. 

The dashboard also shows that more than 33.2 million Americans tested positive since the pandemic began, but daily transmission rates are significantly lower than what the U.S. saw in January 2021, a month when confirmed cases peaked in the hundreds of thousands.

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Whether remote pandemic hires will feel more connected when they return to the office has yet to be seen. 

However, FOX Business previously reported that a survey from global staffing firm Robert Half says one-third of remote workers may consider quitting their jobs if their employer requires them to work in an office full-time 

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The initial results of Perceptyx’s study were first reported by Bloomberg.