Many people working in HR would admit to investing a great deal of time, effort, and resources in seeking the right job candidate. You’ve found the right person after countless interviews, and the first day has finally arrived. All seems to be going well but things change after a few months, and maybe they’re going to leave you hanging with another open vacancy! It’s a waste of both sides’ efforts. It is difficult enough to select the right candidate, but even integrating and keeping new hires shows also more difficult.
Onboarding new employees are the process of integrating a new employee with an organization and its community, as well as getting a new recruit to become a productive member of the team with the resources and knowledge required.
A strong onboarding checklist should include tasks that demonstrate your commitment to the success of your employees. Consider the environment in which your new employees must be successful and effective in their respective jobs. Does the talent in your organization fit with the culture and values of your company?
Creating An Onboarding Program
The onboarding process should be an experience that your staff can enjoy and remember, it will help you stay on track by taking the time to come up with a comprehensive plan for each move. If you just put some paperwork together, move the new employee over to someone else or wing it, you skip important chances to involve your new member of the team.
Instead of making a stack of papers waiting for their signature, give them to the employee for electronic signature beforehand. Offer them their choice of benefits. To help you simplify the paper-pushing process, find the technology.
Get The Essentials Out of The Way First
It’s exciting and a little uncomfortable to add someone to your team especially when thinking about how to incorporate company culture into their experience. Before their starting date, try asking a few friendly questions about who they are outside the workplace to alleviate tensions and break the ice.
On their first day, share the results with the business, department, or team, with your new teammate’s permission. To relieve the discomfort of a new employee is to appoint someone to show them around the workplace and meet individuals. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but a guided tour and some introductions to people in other departments will help make it much less awkward for random break room experiences.
Onboarding And Retention Go Hand in Hand
Your onboarding sequence can become a broader recruitment opportunity for employees from remote regions, but you have the ability to equip your new employees with skills, tell them what they need to know, and teach them how to behave. They should understand what to do and be sure of their ability to accomplish what is required of them? Can they learn from other employees in the same role as colleagues or superiors? Employees know what their strengths are when they share with others, how they do, what they do, and how they do it well.
Each year, advancements in technology and a new wave of applicants enter the workforce. The strategies of recruiting, directing, and maintaining staff are evolving with onboarding.
Make It Structural
A little reliability can be a good thing — especially when it comes to onboarding employees. Although no two workers would be exactly the same, it can go a long way to ensure that everyone on the team is on the same page by offering a structured onboarding method. This organized approach offers the same comprehensive overview of the business with any new recruit, as well as extra time to learn with their individual team.
For the onboarding team, it often makes life simpler because they know exactly what the process looks like before it starts. Before new hiring takes up work, you should review your company’s smart goals with them and guide them to create a 3-month or 6-month plan based on business priorities and a long-term plan.
Involve Senior Leaders
Employees don’t only want to get a feel for the colleagues they’re going to work with, but they’re still curious about their representatives. The presence of senior leaders has a beneficial influence on the understanding of the onboarding process by employees. For any new recruit, make the senior leaders sit down and guide them through the company’s mission and vision. No one is better prepared to have this discussion, and new hires will certainly have a lasting effect.
Encourage Team Building
Invite new employees to corporate retreats, events of the networking, and optional social get-togethers. Spending time with colleagues helps to incorporate new employees into the atmosphere of the organization. Organizing team-building activities and gatherings for new and current workers helps to improve and expand the organizational culture and highlights that a positive corporate culture is a priority.
Use Technology to Make It Fun
It might not be a practical opportunity for your business to create a dedicated app, but there are several other ways to use technology for a little fun. It’s easy to use the technologies at your disposal, from social media updates and dedicated Slack networks to a little low-fi fun with Photoshop to make new hires feel like part of the team.
Seek And Incorporate Feedback
Don’t miss the opportunity to ask staff what they think of the onboarding process in a sense of continuous improvement and whether they have ideas for improvement, not only right after the training but also once they’ve been on a job and have time to really appreciate the importance of the training they got. After the new recruit has spent about three months on the job, managers can try to gain input on the onboarding process, so they can determine what worked and what didn’t.
Ask your manager to share key priorities so that the new employee understands what they expect from you and what you expect from them. Managers should also make an effort to gather feedback about the onboarding process during the three months that your new employees spend on the job, to evaluate the work that has not worked. One of the best ways to continuously improve your onboard program with data is to record the number of new hires who have boarded within 1, 6, or 12 months.
If your company does not go through these steps, it will miss a critical onboarding process that helps new hires make the transition to the workplace. One of the most obvious and beneficial ways to improve your onboard program with data is to collect the number of new hires who have completed their training without taking 1, 6, or 12 months to complete.
Final Thoughts…
Onboarding is crucial to ensuring employees’ success and helping them quickly learn the company’s ropes and the people with whom they will be working. Take steps to ensure that you think creatively about ways that you can move beyond tradition to have a meaningful effect on employee retention, engagement, and tenure in your company.
Originally published at upstack.co May 12, 2021, by Sheetal Munjal.
