Employee onboarding is a massively important stage in the recruitment process, but it’s often relegated to an afterthought. At its worst, employee onboarding isn’t done at all.
Even if you don’t completely neglect it there’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong.
Too many employee onboarding programs aren’t inclusive, transparent, or open, and they don’t encourage the two-way sharing of insight. Your employee onboarding program isn’t just an opportunity to hand over the computer. It’s an important opportunity to reinforce who you are, and how your new employees fit into that.
This is especially a huge problem now with remote working where no one has to go to the office and you all rely on Slack, Asana, Zoom, and other digital workspaces.
And this is exactly why we sat down and crafted this employee onboarding guide: to help companies do it the right way. In this guide, we will go over:
- Intro: 7 Reasons why employee onboarding can’t and must not be ignored
- Cost-efficiency
- Shorter time to productivity
- Elevating the employer brand
- Reducing costly mistakes down the line
- Encouraging transparent communication
- Get important feedback to improve brand perception
- Bolster performance across your organization
- Top 7 practical employee onboarding tips
- 0 – Finding the right fit
- Starting before the first day
- Make the right introductions
- Share the unwritten rules
- Make sure they know the rules of play
- Think about the little details
- Give them a warm welcome
- Introduce them to your social scene
- The best employee onboarding software
Without further ado, let’s start!
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What is employee onboarding?
Employee onboarding is the process of integrating a new employee into an organization and its culture. It’s also a key time for providing a new hire with the necessary tools, information, skills, and behaviors expected in their role.
A successful onboarding program goes beyond just an orientation day or week—it can extend over several months, and ideally, it will lay the groundwork for long-term engagement and productivity.
Components of an effective onboarding process can include:
- Preparation before the first day: This can involve setting up the new employee’s workspace, providing necessary equipment, and ensuring their access to relevant systems and software.
- Orientation: This usually involves introducing the new employee to their colleagues, explaining the company’s policies and culture, giving a tour of the workplace, and outlining the expectations and responsibilities of their role.
- Training and development: Depending on the role, the new hire may need specific training or coaching. This might be delivered through formal training sessions, e-learning, or on-the-job training.
- Mentorship: Assigning a mentor or a buddy to a new employee can help them settle in more quickly. This person can answer questions, offer advice, and provide social support.
- Follow-up and feedback: Regular check-ins during the initial months can help address any issues or concerns, and provide an opportunity for constructive feedback.
An effective onboarding process can significantly contribute to an employee’s satisfaction, productivity, and long-term retention. It can also help new hires to quickly become effective and integral members of the organization.
Intro: 7 Reasons Why Employee Onboarding Can’t and Must Not Be Ignored
Go back to your first day at work.
Now go back even further to your first day at school.
The emotions are pretty similar, right?
One part excited, one part nervous about doing a good job, one part terrified everyone will hate you. As HR professionals it’s our job to take that melting pot of emotions and make sure they leave after day 1 feeling elated, engaged, and inspired.
Done right, an effective employee onboarding program is a chance to build and reinforce your brand. It sets the tone for your future relationship with that employee. It has a huge role to play in how productive and engaged they go on to be.
Employee onboarding helps improve your retention rates and lower your recruitment costs, and it helps you embed the culture you aspire to.
In all, your employee onboarding process has a huge effect on your business bottom line. If you aspire to be a more successful, forward-thinking, growth-oriented company, you can’t afford to ignore employee onboarding.
Here’s why you should care about exceptional candidate onboarding.
Cost-efficiency
It’s fair to say that turnover is expensive. It costs tens of thousands of dollars to attract, find and hire talent. Those costs can run into the hundreds of thousands for mid and senior-level candidates too.
Plus, you’ve got the more intangible costs that turnover causes. Loss of morale, decreased productivity, cultural erosion. The list goes on.
In all, it’s more cost-effective to keep the talent you have, and much less of a headache too. That’s where employee onboarding comes in. There are several important ways to improve employee retention, and employee onboarding is a critical element.
Your employee onboarding experience helps ensure your people stay. It’s about setting culture. We all know how important it is to manage expectations within the recruitment process, which shouldn’t stop at onboarding.
If you don’t manage expectations early on, your employees will have their own expectations. If you don’t meet them, they’ll be dissatisfied. That whole cycle can be resolved by a good onboarding process designed to clarify your culture and processes.
Shorter time-to-productivity
Known as time-to-productivity, this is a critical metric for all HR professionals to pay attention to. Although different people define this differently (what is productivity, and when do we say we’ve arrived), the principle is important.
How quickly after hiring them are your new employees able to do the job you hired them for?
How quickly can you recuperate your recruitment cost outlay?
Your employee onboarding process ensures new hires can hit the ground running and quickly achieve the tasks you’ve hired them for. That’s a no-brainer because it ensures your recruitment spend delivers ROI more quickly.
Elevating the employer brand
As mentioned, an effective employee onboarding process has a massive part to play in forming and reinforcing your employer brand. It’s an opportunity to tell new hires who you are and why you do what you do, so they can start to leave and breathe your values.
That sounds simplistic, but in reality, this process starts much earlier – it’s vital to hire the right people to begin with.
Once you’ve hired the right people, though, your job is far from over. Culture only thrives when everyone within that culture is an advocate for it. Your employees have to understand your culture to strengthen it. That process starts with your employee onboarding process.
Get it right, and you’re well on your way to building a solid culture that your employees buy into and engage with. Happy and engaged employees make for a stronger employer brand, and a stronger employer brand is the best tool in your recruiting toolbox.
Employer brand gives you a strong ‘pull’ presence in the market, making it easier to attract top talent. When top talent is much in demand, that’s a significant benefit and can massively reduce your recruitment costs.
If your company needs more help with employee onboarding processes, then make sure to test out the beta version of our upcoming software: HReze!
Reducing costly mistakes down the line
Some mistakes fly under the radar, but others can have a huge, huge impact. For example, a simple food safety mistake within fast-food giant Chipotle led to an E-coli outbreak that cost the brand a 70% drop in earnings.
A moment of bad judgment in the middle echelons of VW, and you’ve got a diesel gate.
The point is this: employees make mistakes, and those mistakes cost money.
There’s nothing you can do to insure yourself against those mistakes completely, but you can go a long way in the right direction. Employee onboarding has a huge part to play