Contribution
Social workers in welfare organizations take care of and help society’s most vulnerable citizens. It is a high-stress job, and many newcomers leave after a short period of employment. Excessive newcomer turnover puts pressure on subsequent onboarding and senior staff.
This paper reports from an action research study in a Danish public social-pedagogical organization struggling with an employee turnover exceeding 30%. The organization provides housing and 24-hour pedagogical support to residents with an Intelligence-Quotient below 70. Some residents are placed indefinitely due to criminal convictions; others carry severe mental disabilities. Violence against staff and the occasional use of force to retain residents is sometimes part of the work environment.
Onboarding is a popular term for enrolling new employees in an organization. According to Jeske and Olsen (2021), it overlaps with induction, understood as arrangements for familiarizing new employees with the organization, its safety rules, and conditions of employment. Furthermore, onboarding associates to organizational socialization, where newcomers learn to resolve role uncertainty and become insiders to the organization; a concept dating back to Van Maanen and Schein’s studies of organizational culture and learning (1977). Both induction and organizational socialization require learning by the newcomer and the organization. To deal with onboarding in stressful work settings, establishing a mentor-mentee relationship is often suggested for the retainment and development of newcomers (Dirks, 2021; Szabo et al., 2019). Previous research has mainly addressed the mentor-to-mentee relationship with less attention paid to the mentor-to-mentor relationship in qualifying the organizational onboarding.
In recognition of the complexity and severity of the situation in the social-pedagogical organization, we propose mentors collaboratively treat the task of onboarding as a wicked problem. “Wicked problems exist in a context that is in flux and unpredictable” (Yukawa, 2015, p. 159) and have been studied in, e.g., health care delivery and educational problem-solving (Jordan et al., 2014). Rittle and Webber (1973) characterize a wicked problem as escaping definitive formulation and final solutions. Solutions implemented to a wicked problem generate but further waves of consequences over an extended time. Acknowledging the ‘wickidity’ of social work, Jordan et al. (2014) argue that social professions have been misled by the hope of traditional scientific approaches. They suggest instead for navigating the ongoing ‘wickidity’ where “problems are never solved, they are simply resolved over and over again” (Jordan et al., 2014, p. 419).
Treating onboarding in a high-stress environment as a wicked problem, we recognize that a mentor’s effort is related to an ongoing need to repeatedly resolve the onboarding problem. E.g., when mentees do not have time to become familiarized with the organization’s safety rules and are exposed to violence, this leads to management implementing guideline-forms for mentor-mentee to fill out, then overwhelming the mentee. The mentor needs time to explain the forms and a wish for adjustment of the form to save time arises.
Conducive to making progress via mistakes, communities of inquiry are fertile grounds for developing continuous problem resolving approaches (Shields, 2003). Rooted in the American pragmatism outlined by Jane Addams, building from Charles Sanders Peirce, communities of inquiry carry two key aspects: (1) participants must be willing to suspend belief systems and, when they do, listen carefully; (2) participants must practice an experimental mindset involving willingness to learn from experimental failures (Shields, 1999). With this paper, we aim to develop the idea of a mentor-to-mentor community to address the ’wickedity‘ of onboarding in high-stress work environments by addressing the research question:
How can an organization with a high-stress work environment develop its onboarding by treating onboarding as a wicked problem for its mentoring community of inquiry?

Method Responding to the research question, we take a pragmatist view of how organizations learn (Elkjaer & Simpson, 2011) by focusing on inquiry in transactions across practitioners and researchers following an action research approach (McKay & Marshall, 2001). The organization has approximately 280 employees distributed across five social-pedagogical residences and one joint administrative secretary. The research project has established a community of inquiry among mentors across the residences to understand if treating onboarding as a wicked problem can facilitate organizational learning to improve onboarding across residences. To this end, at the beginning of a three-year research collaboration between the university and the organization, three action research iterations drawing on qualitative data collection and analysis methods (Neyland, 2007) have been carried out. The first iteration from September to December 2021 consisted of 26 semi-structured interviews with 12 newcomers, 10 mentors, and 4 schedule planners to understand the organization’s onboarding process in practice. In addition, 5 group interviews with the managers of each residence went into the analysis. Feedback from these initial explorations was provided to the newly appointed mentors in a mentors’ workshop across residences. The workshop allowed for evaluating the initial shapes and aspects of a problem understanding, together with the organization’s mentors, exploring its role in developing a mentor-to-mentor community. In a second iteration, we use writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St Pierre, 2005) and abductive listening of digital recordings from interviews (Revsbæk & Tanggaard, 2015) to produce written assessments of the problem situation in each of the five social-pedagogical residences. The written assessments initiated dialogues of calibration between residence managers, employee representatives, and university-based researchers to sketch ideas for experimentation to strengthen the onboarding of newcomers in each residence. A third iteration focuses on facilitating the mentors’ cross-cutting community to explore onboarding as a wicked problem. In a workshop on March 1st, 2022, a theory- and practice-based exemplification of the onboarding problem’s inescapable wickedity will initiate problem-exploring and problem-(re)solving activities among mentors. Workshop dialogues between mentors, responding to the sensitivity of ‘wickedity’ in the onboarding process, will for the purpose of this paper be analyzed by listening to our digital recordings (Revsbæk & Tanggaard, 2015) while the researchers are sensitive to the concept (Kelly & Adorjan, 2020) of wicked problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973) to show how onboarding may have inescapable wickedity.

Expected outcomes The expected outcome presented in this paper is twofold. First, the paper will provide in-depth empirical insights on the process of mentoring newcomers to high-stress work environments. These accounts are of interest to organizational education researchers investigating organizations in challenging human- and financial resource circumstances, a not uncommon situation in health and welfare organizations. The paper will provide insight into mentor-to-mentor learning, which has received much less research attention than the mentor-to-mentee relationship in the advancement of organizational onboarding. Second, the paper presents an in-depth analysis of treating the task of onboarding as a wicked problem in a mentoring community supposed to deal with it. From this, practical implications for more generally treating a problem as wicked for a community that needs to deal with it are deducted as an approach to enhance organizational learning and development. In doing so, the analysis will draw on the extant literature regarding organizational learning and communities of inquiry grounded in American pragmatism (Elkjaer & Simpson, 2011; Shields, 1999; Shields, 2003). Particularly by discussing Jane Addams’ pioneering approach to the community-driven problem and experimental problem solving (Addams, 1930) in the community-constituting engagement with social problems. The findings will contribute to understanding how communities of inquiry in a workplace organization work according to the wickedness of their target problem.

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