Successfully onboarding your new hires is make or break. Succeed and you can enjoy motivated and engaged employees alongside greater employee retention.
But fail? Well, you can expect a loss of employee productivity, high attrition rates, and expensive re-hiring costs.
In this article, we’ll give you 5 tips on how you can make your onboarding process as successful as possible.
Why is Onboarding so vital?
It’s time-consuming to recruit and onboard new employees. After spending hours searching for, interviewing, and identifying the right talent for your company, the real challenge begins. How do you ensure your new hire stays with your company?
All your hard work can easily go down the drain if you don’t properly onboard your new hires. In fact, after a negative onboarding experience, new hires are twice as likely to look for other job opportunities than those with a positive experience.
Therefore, it’s crucial to create an onboarding process that helps your new employees feel well-equipped for their new job and ready to perform.
A good onboarding experience not only makes new hires feel welcome but will also help them adjust to organizational goals, future strategies, and company culture much faster.
By implementing a comprehensive and successful onboarding program, you can increase your employee engagement and invoke a sense of loyalty from your new hires. In fact, a great employee onboarding program can improve your retention rates by over 80% and your productivity by 70%.
5 simple Ways you can Onboard New Employees
Here are 5 easy ways to make your employee onboarding a more successful process:
1: Structure The Process
First of all, you need to completely structure your process. This means you need to clearly lay out an onboarding plan, from hiring to pre-boarding, their first day, right up until their onboarding training is complete.
Having this thoroughly planned out will not only make it easier for you to know where your new hire is at in their journey, it will also help them to clearly understand the process and what is expected of them.
A structured process will also be easier to implement in your organization than a more haphazard or ad hoc system that varies from employee to employee. The onboarding journey should be engaging, educational, and create a sense of excitement for your new hires.
Related: Learn about the importance of an effective onboarding here.
2: Automate The Journey
By automating the onboarding process, you can avoid using printed paperwork that can easily get lost, misplaced, or destroyed. This also will make the journey easier to adapt to any changes or updates.
And, an automated process creates a more manageable experience, ensuring consistency across the board. This means all new hires will receive the exact same experience with the same level of quality rather than varying information depending on who’s training them.
With the Relesys platform, you can digitally onboard all of your employees in one app. You can build an engaging journey with features based on intelligent software that helps motivate all new hires, resulting in better working performances and more proactive mindsets.
3: Assign Relevant Training
When you automate the onboarding process, you should also think about implementing skills training into the mix. By ensuring that training is a vital part of the journey, you’re involving your new hire in the meatier organizational aspects at an early stage.
This will not only create a sense of responsibility for your new hire but will also make sure they are fully prepared to be working from their first day, or as soon as viably possible. See it as a license to work if you will.
This training can consist of anything from legal compliance like GDPR, to product knowledge, or anything related to company administration. Training prepares your new employee for their work tasks and makes them feel aligned with your organization.
Our platform is built on the idea of gamification. This takes elements from video games to create a more engaging training experience with rewards like points and badges.
This interactive feature keeps everyone on top of their game and supports your employees in their professional growth in a fun and encouraging way.
Insights: Read about the differences between employee training and employee onboarding here.
4: Create Good Content
When you hire a new employee, communication is key. You need to create enticing content that showcases your company and organizational culture in the best way possible to provide a great first impression.
It's also important that your new hire feels well informed. This can be ensured through streamlined and targeted communication.
What exactly does this mean?
Streamlined communication means your internal communication is in one place. This makes it easy for new hires to access the information they need, rather than searching for it in various places such as emails, paper handbooks, or via in-person interactions.
And targeted communication? This means the information is directly intended for them, so they only receive what’s actually relevant and aren’t overwhelmed or drowning in a mass of information.
The Relesys app assists with targeted communication through the news feed and social wall functions where management and employees can share information, accomplishments, and best practices with each other.
The interactive nature of this communication flows both ways between HQ and employees, strengthening the connectivity of your business.
5: Create a Genuine Feeling of Belonging
The social aspect of starting a new job plays a very large role throughout the onboarding process. In most cases, a new employee won’t know anyone in their new workplace.
These interactions can be awkward and somewhat scary for new hires at the beginning of their journey with your company. Including them in more informal social activities can also quickly strengthen bonds.
Make sure you welcome and introduce your new employee internally, so they experience a great and supportive working environment and feel comfortable right from the very first day.
The Advantages of Successful Onboarding
Even though the advantages of onboarding are plentiful, 35% of companies don’t have a formal onboarding program.
If your company does not have an onboarding procedure, you risk your new hires having a negative experience during their initial employment with your company and may even regret their decision to join, or in the worst-case scenario, quit.
By implementing and streamlining your employee onboarding process, you'll not only impress your new employees by making their program as simple as possible but also reduce the workload of your HR team- increasing both employee productivity and retention.
