Building a successful team involves more than just hiring the best people for your small business. Provide an outstanding onboarding experience for your newly hired employee by acquainting them with their role and workplace. Ultimately, the only person who can teach your new hire how to be your ideal employee is you.
Onboarding is an essential part of any recruiting process for either of the following reasons:
- According to the study by The Society for Human Resource Management, onboarding a new candidate costs somewhere around $4,683, and this price gradually increases as per the new hire’s salary.
- As per Brand Hall Group, organizations having a robust onboarding process can retain new employees by 82% and can improve organizational productivity by 70%.
- According to the survey of Jobvite, it has been observed that 28% of people quit the job within 3 months of joining because of the poor onboarding experience.
With the best employee onboarding practices in place, you can acquaint new hires to your culture and give them the tools and information they require for success. It is necessary if you want to increase production, reduce turnover, and retain your staff.
Even if you are already occupied with the other important tasks of your organization, you must find time for interesting employee onboarding techniques. This blog will walk you through the best employee onboarding practices, so that you can ensure your new employees get the best start they deserve.
What is Employee Onboarding?
During the onboarding process, new employees acquire up the abilities, know-how, and attitudes needed to contribute positively to your small business team. Completing necessary documentation, taking part in practical training, interacting with co-workers, and being familiar with the business culture are all part of the process. Unlike orientation, onboarding is a longer process that should continue after the employee’s first week on the job. It can continue for a month or for a year.
Onboarding is sometimes mistaken for orientation, which consists of having the employee watch some videos, do some paperwork, and then be told to start working. But throughout the onboarding process, your new hire gets an emotional introduction to the mission and values of your business. It should provide them with all the resources and tools they require to join your team productively as soon as feasible. In addition, it ought to leave a positive impression on them about your business, encouraging them to stay for a long period.
What is Employee Onboarding Process?
We would be understand the process of employee onboarding and the activities involved in it with the help of this table.
| Onboarding | Timeframe | Activities |
|---|---|---|
| Preboarding | This is the time period between a new hire’s official start date and the sign-off on their offer letter. | Ask workers to provide necessary documents and complete the paperwork. Eliminate the roadblocks so new hires can easily and quickly get set up with all of the equipment, credentials, etc. |
| Orientation | The orientation is normally a day-long or two-day program that is held on the first day of employment for the new workers or in a close time interval from their start. | Revise and ensure that the employee handbook and the necessary policies are accurate in terms of content. Engage with culture values, harmonize purpose and high standards. |
| Training and Development | You need to set more time after orientation for employees and provide assistance to feel their responsibility so that they get comfortable in their tasks. | Assign a compliance and role-related training. Collect and process data, evaluate it, and track progress. |
Let’s have a look at the best ideas for onboarding new employees that you can personalize to your team and candidates, leading to better outcome for the company.
12 Employee Onboarding Best Practices That You Cannot Afford to Miss
Choose the Right Onboarding Software
Using employee onboarding software within the company is the first step that should be taken towards implementing one of the best onboarding techniques. Organisations and HR specialists might benefit from H2R.AI digital onboarding solution. This software can help you-
- Save numerous hours on tedious work.
- Supply business details around-the-clock
- Integrate new hires considerably more quickly.
- Make the onboarding process interesting.
- Assign new hires educational and training resources.
Use workflows to automate the entire onboarding process.
This is our top recommendation for better employee onboarding since it addresses the bulk of potential issues. Your company may manage sales, onboarding, training, HR, and learning internally by utilising a contemporary learning platform.
Preboard New Hires
The process of initiating an employee’s onboarding experience prior to their first day of work is known as preboarding. It can pique their interest in their new work and hold it until their start date. Now is a great time to give them some corporate gear, such a notebook or water bottle imprinted with your logo, and invite them to ask any questions they may have. Additionally, email them the onboarding calendar so they will know what to anticipate on day one.
Be Adaptable
An organised, methodical onboarding approach is a wonderful thing, but it should also leave room for some flexibility. Let’s imagine a new hire is unexpectedly unable to make it to your office for in-person onboarding. You should have a remote option ready in this situation.
Additionally, you might wish to reschedule the next training session for the following day or week if you find that new hires require some time to unwind following a rigorous training session.
Send a Welcome Kit
An orientation packet for new hires conveys a lot about the company:
First, by including certain paid, branded, or personalised products, it shows the new worker that the company is “investing” in their future.
Second, the company is giving new workers all the tools they need to be successful.
Finally, this welcome kit for new hires accomplishes its purpose perfectly: it welcomes the new hire.
Finish The Paperwork Quickly
To ensure that your new hires’ first day isn’t spent filling out paperwork, it’s a good idea to assign administrative duties in advance, such as setting up a business email account or finishing HR paperwork. Before they begin, you might want to urge them to work on the following kinds of paperwork:
- Tax documents
- Forms for direct deposits
- Nondisclosure or noncompete agreements
- Acknowledgment forms from the employee handbook
- Allow your new hires to electronically fill out these documents to save them
- The trouble of printing and filling them out by hand, if at all possible.
Engage Group Members in the Procedure
Effective onboarding necessitates collaboration across multiple team members, beyond the HR department and hiring managers. Make sure senior leaders, managers, supervisors, and other staff members are aware of the onboarding procedure and how they fit into it. It will make new hires feel more at ease and a part of your business.
Perfect Employee Onboarding at
Your Fingertips
Assign a friend or mentor
Through a mentorship programme, staff members can “buddy up” or mentor new hires while they learn the ropes. These mentors are available to give them a tour of the workplace, respond to frequently asked questions, help them adjust to their new schedules, and familiarise them with their new positions.
For employee onboarding, mentors are excellent since they –
- Establish the initial rapport with newly recruited team members.
- Respond to frequent inquiries regarding the department, function, and business.
- Put work-related policies and procedures in context.
- Engage newly hired personnel in interdepartmental correspondence.
A new hire can look to their mentor as a familiar face to help them integrate into the organisation. Additionally, they serve as a go-between so that you don’t have to approach HR or higher-level management for any queries.
Ensure an Exciting First Day
The first day of work for a new hire should be both enjoyable and educational. You do not want them to go through lectures and complete paperwork for eight hours. However, you also want to make sure they gain knowledge and are better equipped to begin working. Here are some pointers to make sure they have a great first day.
Arrange their workspace with ID badges, passwords, manuals, a building map, and any other items that will facilitate their first day of work.
- Plan a lovely lunch out with colleagues.
- Introduce the new hire in an email sent to the entire workplace.
- Send a present on the first day.
- Remain attentive and patient.
Never be afraid to find out what first-day experiences pleased or dissatisfied current employees. You can use this information to gain some important insight into future first day planning.
Don’t Give New Hires too Much Information
Onboarding overload can result from providing new hires with an excessive amount or insufficient amount of information. Giving just enough information to make your point is a smart practice for employee onboarding.
It’s scary enough to start a new job at a firm; adding fuel to the flames only makes it worse. It feels just like that when you give a new hire an enormous array of training materials, videos, questionnaires, paperwork, and signatures.
When providing new hires with content during onboarding, consider the following strategies:
- Only send what is required to complete the assignment.
- Don’t try to fit employee onboarding into a single day; instead, give it a week.
- Divide up the training into manageable chunks.
- Make good use of your learning management system to store documents.
- Establish a learning, training, and informational progression.
For this reason, the best practices for onboarding new hires include scheduling and organisation. It establishes a simple timetable that makes it easy to introduce new material gradually and guarantee that newly hired staff members remember what they have learnt during onboarding.
Frequently check in
Regular check-ins are crucial to ensuring new hires have successfully integrated into the company and have all they need to flourish. Nowadays, “frequently” doesn’t have to mean every day or even every week; a 30-, 60-, or 90-day timescale is normal for check-ins.
This check-in schedule gives you just enough space from the worker to avoid bothering them or scheduling pointless meetings. They would also have ample time to consider the company and their position before forming an opinion.
The employee has worked for the company for thirty days, which is enough time for them to form an opinion of it.
After sixty days, the worker is fully aware of their job obligations, duties, and management.
Establish attainable and Reasonable goals
The main idea behind this employee onboarding best practice is to establish SMART goals that the new worker comprehends, accepts, and wants to work towards. These objectives serve as a baseline against which the worker can gauge their success at first. The new recruit won’t have a number, metric, or KPI to strive for and evaluate themselves against if they don’t first set goals.
The following guidelines can help you develop goals for new hires during or after onboarding:
- Adapt them to their position and skill set.
- Make a stretch objective and a backup plan.
- Create individualised, distinctive goals for each employee.
- They must to be in line with the objectives of the division and company.
- Establishing unrealistic expectations may demotivate your recent hiring if they are unable to meet them.
Take Feedback
In particular, the onboarding of new employees is a process that never ends. Pre-, during-, and post-hire feedback gathering is a critical component of employee onboarding best practices. Send questionnaires, forms, videos, and evaluations via your learning management system (LMS) to new hires, asking them to describe their onboarding process.
The information you obtain from new hire onboarding comments is quite beneficial. Utilise this input to:
- Enhance the process of onboarding.
- Look for ways to turn tedious jobs into automation.
- Quickly get new hires up and running
- Improve the onboarding process.
- Reduce the length of the onboarding process
- Feedback from onboarding is a treasure trove of techniques to improve.
Master the Art of Employee Onboarding
Wrapping Up
A successful onboarding procedure is essential to getting your new hire started in the correct direction at your company. Workflows in HR software, like the H2R.AI onboarding platform, enable more consistency, better onboarding process quality, and a reduction in the amount of time employees must spend performing manual labour.
Also, if your team is tired of spending much time on onboarding activities, investing in one such platform will be worth.
HR teams can concentrate on assisting new hires in adapting to their roles and your company culture by using onboarding software like ours, which helps them recover a considerable amount of administrative time. Automation makes sure that all of the onboarding procedures are finished when they’re supposed to.
An investment you are going to be proud of!
