How To Improve The Employee Onboarding Process
Employee onboarding is a critical component in establishing a prodigious corporate brand and repute. You’d be surprised to know that around 84% of respondents on Glassdoor reported that they’d contemplate quitting their job to join another corporation that has an exceptional repute.
In fact, around 69% of employees are more probable to stay with an organization for three years if they undergo a smooth onboarding process [1]. According to research conducted on more than 250 employees, it was revealed that the first ninety days of work are critical to developing a relationship with the company, corporate leaders and contemporaries. The study also identified that when high support levels are experienced from the management, new hires often exhibit a more optimistic approach towards their work and are more prolific.
Therefore, in order to improve your company’s reputation and to retain your human talent, it is vital to treat your employees right. One major step in this regard is to improve your onboarding process.
Despite all this, around 60% of businesses are incapable of setting milestones or objectives for new employees [2]. A hospitable, well-organized and effective onboarding process can advantage both the new hires and the company, in not only the short term but also in the overall employee growth.
Ways To Improve Employee Onboarding
Here are a few ways you can smoothen and enhance your employee onboarding process:
1. Promote Social Engagement
The first step toward improving your employee onboarding process is to develop a talent acquisition strategy that focuses on social engagement. With the increasing popularity of social networks among the masses and more than 79% of job searchers actively using it in their job hunt, it is vital for companies to implement a social outlook to staffing and onboarding.
For successful corporate branding, reliable brand messaging is the key. Hence, from the initial phases of aspirant engagement on social networks to the final phases of the onboarding process, companies should make efforts to guarantee an all-in-one experience for all those involved.
We all know how starting a job at a new corporation can be intimidating for everybody. Therefore, presenting your company in an amicable, welcoming and social light will comfort your new employees throughout their onboarding experience, while strengthening your business culture.
Here are a few examples of how you can make your onboarding process more stress-free for the new hires:
- Share employee success stories to build confidence in new employees.
- Arrange informal gatherings with senior staff members to break the ice for new workers.
- Share fun facts about the company and the workforce to present a friendly picture of your business.
- Share photographs of social undertakings as well as a video overview of the business from the corporate heads.
- Create a friendly atmosphere by taking the new employees out for lunch on their first day.
This way, inculcating a social culture within the business will allow everybody to communicate more effectually, be more straightforward and feel at ease while working together with the coworkers.
Regardless of how gifted your workers are, they will perform to the best of their capabilities when encircled by a reassuring atmosphere that treasures them.
2. Foster A Knowledge Sharing And Corporate Learning Environment
The best way to speed up and smoothen the employee onboarding process is to instill a knowledge sharing environment in the company. This way, new hires will be able to learn about the company and its policies right from their peers and coworkers. Moreover, they will not only have access to the corporate information but will also be able to learn from the past successes and failures of their counterparts.
Investing in a dedicated Learning Management System (LMS) can be a vital success factor in this regard. This is particularly important when research suggests that nearly one-third of the corporations either do not have a formal onboarding procedure, or their onboarding practices do not include well-organized training.
Typically, classroom-based training is time-consuming and costly. In fact, some studies reveal that Instructor-Led training often results in poor knowledge retention. Therefore, Virtual Instructor-Led training can be employed to overcome the problems found in traditional classroom-based training as it allows the instructors to record a course. Consequently, learners can access course content whenever and wherever they want.
An LMS facilitates new hires to access content from any device. Furthermore, it allows instructors to recycle content across diverse courses, thereby, saving the time and cost of developing a new course for every new batch of employees. Some other benefits of using an LMS include tracking and reporting features that help companies know how much the employees have learned and whether they are understanding the content or not.
3. Seek Feedback To Learn And Improve Your Onboarding Process
Bill Gates once said:
“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”
This holds true for onboarding as well.
Onboarding new hires can be an excellent opportunity for companies to learn what works well in the process and what does not. Seeking feedback from the new recruits, in the form of an appraisal, opinion poll or meeting at the end of the process will assist you to recurrently progress and improve the methodology, contents, and competences.
New hires should be recognized as the distinctive resource for refining the onboarding process that they are a part of. However, honesty should be stimulated and all positive criticism should be considered by those engaged in the onboarding practice. Moreover, requesting for such criticism early in a worker’s time with the company will also help to inculcate an environment of conviction and ingenuousness among workers.
In this regard, focus groups can be an operative substitute to one-to-one feedback meetings as the majority of employees are more comfortable in offering feedback as part of a group discussion rather than directly.
Final Word
An efficacious onboarding experience means that your new employees will remember more work-related information, and be more ardent and involved with the office. Moreover, it also significantly decreases the chances of your employees leaving the organization within their first year.
In contrast, an inefficient onboarding process naturally pushes new recruits away before they reach their first work anniversary. This occurs due to a deficiency of that same desire and information that can help develop a sound professional rapport in every phase of employment.
Therefore, whether you’d like to confess it or not, smooth onboarding is a make-it-or-break-it requirement for your new employees. If correctly implemented, the above mentioned three ways can help you improve your onboarding process.
References:
[1] Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success (https://www.shrm.org/foundation/ourwork/initiatives/resources-from-past-initiatives/Documents/Onboarding%20New%20Employees.pdf)
[2] Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement (https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/Documents/2016-Employee-Job-Satisfaction-and-Engagement-Report.pdf)