Nowadays, many organizations continuously lose valuable employees, and the core reasons behind this are improper communication and a poor onboarding experience.
According to a study, around 10 percent of employees left their jobs because of a bad new hiring experience. Without an effective onboarding process, employee engagement receives a significant blow.
Moreover, this reduction in employee engagement costs companies a considerable amount every year. So, to ensure your business isn't among them, you should dig into what effective onboarding is, its role, and how it can lead your organization toward success. Let's dive into the details!
What is Effective Onboarding?
Effective onboarding typically refers to making new employees aware of their roles or responsibilities through training and regular information briefs.
This helps new employees to understand the company's environment quickly and possible employer's expectations and allow them to contribute to organizational goals actively.
In simple words, effective onboarding means integrating new hires into the company. This starts as soon as you say "yes" to a newcomer and continues until they have fully picked up the pace and adequately engaged with other workers.
Let's look at the step-by-step procedure of how to ensure an effective onboarding process:
Effective Onboarding Process
The HR managers or the company's middle senior management involves in effective onboarding and grooming newcomers into being the company's responsible employees. Sometimes, they use onboarding tools for communication, instructions, and engagement.
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While in some instances, managers prefer to carry out the whole procedure themselves. In both cases, knowing the effective onboarding process or strategies is essential to ensure you get the full benefit from your workers and take your organization toward success.
1. Create a Well-Defined Job Offer
The first step of effective onboarding is creating a job offer and sending it to potential candidates. Ensure the job offer has everything the employee needs to know before applying, such as salary, benefits, minor details about the company and their future team, etc.
2. Make a Pre-Onboarding Chart
Now that you have the right candidate, it's time for a pre-onboarding chart or process. This refers to the steps or tasks the new employee can follow prior to their first work day.
These include signing employees' handbooks, filing tax forms, and sharing insurance documents with the company. The execution of this step is a sigh of relief for managers who can utilize this information to check the employee is ready for everything from payroll to security badges.
3. Onboarding Technology
Organizations utilize different types of technologies to make the effective onboarding process more direct and streamlined. Newcomers can get their hands on these tools to get familiar with official work while getting advice and guidance from management. Here are some of those tools:
- Project management tools to keep up with deadlines (e.g., Asana, Trello, Kissflow)
- Performance tracker to check the overall performance
- Communication apps and software to ask questions and stay in touch with others (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat)
All these tools are excellent for employee engagement and making the onboarding process smooth. So, organizations need to get the best onboarding technology tools.
According to an SHRM study, 69% of employees working in a company with a good effective onboarding process are likely to stay in their jobs for a minimum of three years or more.
4. Create the Day One Schedule
An effective onboarding process goes swiftly if both employees and managers are aware of what they can expect on their first day. To clarify this, it's essential to create the day one schedule for the employee and give it to them.
This helps newcomers to understand what responsibilities they have to complete without any confusion.
5. Keep them Engaged
There's always a difference of at least one week between the hiring day and the joining day. So, during this time, an organization needs to keep its newcomers engaged by sending periodic emails and social event invites. This lets the newcomers know that the company values their presence and looks forward to their contribution to the organization.
Doing this keeps the new employee excited and interested in their new job. 87% of employees are less likely to leave their jobs if they are occupied properly, so ensure you utilize the best employee engagement activities.
6. Make a Productive Schedule
This is one of the essential effective onboarding strategies because a productive schedule is your employee's key to achieving certain objectives. A suitable plan gives the newcomer a sense of urgency and boosts them to make progress.
For this, you need to provide them with full access to the resources and information that can help them ace their tasks. This includes basic knowledge about navigating the learning management system, directions on signing up for remote or in-office training, etc.
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7. Keep a Check on Employee's Progress
Onboarding isn't only limited to the first few days; it typically lasts around 12 months. Effective onboarding means guiding the newcomers throughout and regularly checking their progress.
To assess the overall progress, keep a check day every 90 days and see how the new employee is doing in the organization. In case there's any issue, discuss it with the employee and adjust everything early on.
Now that you know how to keep up with an effective onboarding process, it's time to learn the benefits of effective onboarding and its role in your business's success.
Role of Effective Onboarding in Organization's Success
Let's discuss different points that tell us how efficiently effective onboarding makes your business an ultimate success!
1. Increase productivity
Typically, new employees will need almost a year to understand the working environment fully and function accordingly. However, effective onboarding speeds up this process and quickly makes the newcomers familiar with their new role, which results in 70 percent improved productivity.
Onboarding also helps new employees acclimate to the organization and builds new relationships. It further assists them in goal setting and employee development and ensures the employees know what's expected of them.
When newcomers know employers' expectations and have a proper road map to follow, they come up with the best results that boost the organization's productivity.
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2. Attract Strong Candidates
To make your business known and successful, you definitely need new talent. This is easily attainable if you provide effective employee onboarding to candidates that allow them to adjust to the new environment quickly.
Not doing this can tarnish your organization's reputation, as people are less likely to recommend their friends or family to a company with poor onboarding and a less engaging workplace.
So, make sure you follow effective onboarding strategies and ask new hires to leave you a review. You can use those reviews to get stronger candidates for new positions who can contribute to the company's success with their unique ideas and designs.
3. Strong Team Building
Starting a new role in an organization comes with stress and anxiety. An effective onboarding program is helpful as it allows newcomers to understand their role and take time to fully settle into the new position by providing thorough information and giving employees access to tools and resources.
Employees who aren't stressed can build strong relationships with other workers and do their job efficiently. This good workspace relationship means you can expect strong teams in the future that can take different projects on the road to success.
4. Better Communication
Effective onboarding can result in better communication between entry-level employees and senior management. It also allows the newcomers to discuss their concerns openly with management.
Listening to concerns early on can prevent future feuds and keep the workspace atmosphere friendly. Additionally, it also encourages new employees to share their ideas regarding a particular project, resulting in versatility.
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5. Employees Retention
Companies face major financial loss when new employees don't stay for long, and the recruitment process needs to be started all over again. However, effective onboarding ensures your employees stay long and reduces your recruitment spending.
According to Glassdoor, a strong onboarding process boosts new hire retention by 82 percent.
6. Builds Trust
The active connection and engagement of new employees with managers or other workers build the trust and loyalty of newcomers toward the organization.
When employees are loyal to you, they give their best to your organization and try their best to beat your competitors by helping you with tasks. Research reveals communicating development during the onboarding process revamps overall employee satisfaction 3.5 times.
Conclusion
Effective onboarding can be easily streamlined when managers take their time out to focus on newcomers' needs and utilize effective onboarding tools and strategies perfectly. Moreover, it’s an easy way to keep your employees engaged and get the best out of them.
When employees know about their responsibilities, they manage their tasks timely and propose new ideas that result in better product creation which is different from your competitors.
Nothing can be more effective than a customized onboarding software solution. At Apptension, we share unique ideas and guide you throughout the full journey of product development. As a result, you optimize your onboarding process in the best possible way and with the best tools.
So, don't wait; contact us now to get the best solution for your organization!