Better Return on Investment for Employee Onboarding

Your employee’s first few weeks and months with your organization should help them to become quickly familiar with the culture. Effective onboarding reduces turnover and burnout, facilitates relationship-building, sets expectations between managers and employees and increases employee engagement.

 

More than forms and policies:

Onboarding goes beyond the first few days and is about getting a new employee engaged with the company, It’s culture, their role and team. To avoid “quick quitting” – where employees quit with their current employer within their first year of joining- offering early opportunities for development are important. Internal mobility, opportunity for growth can ensure that new hires stay committed to the organizations. With the rise of technology, hybrid and remote working, the job market has changed.

When your employees succeed, the organization succeeds, and onboarding is a great foundation for that. During onboarding, inform them of the opportunities for training and development, and then follow up with the commitment to upskilling and continuing education.

 

Internal mobility: Cross-boarding

As mentioned above, internal growth is important to new hires, so when that happens, employees need to get a similar onboarding process into their new roles. A poor cross-boarding process could set them up for failure even with their existing organizational knowledge. With an internal transfer or promotion, there is the opportunity to set new goals for the new role, define critical milestones and leaders can provide regular check-ins to monitor progress.

 

Remote Onboarding

Onboarding remotely always has its challenges. Organizations need to provide an onboarding experience that is informative, effective, engaging and informative. With the COIVD-19 pandemic, in the past few years companies have been forced to get creative and provide a remote onboarding experience. Setting aside time to develop genuine relationships with team members is so important, especially since the traditional “water cooler” chat is missing. Research has shown that cultural fit is the most critical factor in employee satisfaction and it’s important to prioritize this to reduce turnover.

Do:

• Set aside time to build strong team relationships between members
• Establish clear and realistic expectations and goals for new hires.

 

Don’t:

•  Leave them hanging after the first week of onboarding; be sure to set up follow-ups and provide resources.
• Avoid talking about opportunities for internal growth just because the person is “too new”, the person may misinterpret and think there is no future for them at the organization.

 

An effective onboarding program transitions a new hire from a nervous new employee to a productive and engaged team member. The best onboarding programs take care, thought and planning. It’s a window to your organization’s values and beliefs. By putting your best foot forward, employers can get early buy-in from new employees and improve retention rates. Turnover can be very costly considering companies can spend between 0.5 – 2 times the employee’s annual salary to replace them.

 

Onboarding helps new hires feel like they are a valued member of the team and encourages them to stay. An effective, quality onboarding program helps the employee, the leader and the organization as a whole.