The Four Best Practices for Onboarding

When new employees don’t have a pleasant onboarding experience, it can create problems that impact the company. Gallup conducted research about the topic and found that only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization has a great onboarding process. In other words, 88% of staff don’t believe their organization has great onboarding.

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By creating a great onboarding process, organizations can avoid these problems. They’ll also see positive results like better retention and productivity. According to research by Brandon Hall Group, great employee onboarding can improve retention by 82% and boost productivity by over 70%.

So, what does your company need to do to improve this experience?

Many companies make the mistake of waiting to start onboarding until the individual’s first day. But from the moment someone accepts their job offer, the process should begin. After all, sometimes there’s a waiting period between the person accepting the offer and starting the job.
Communicate how excited you are for them to join your team. You can also take advantage of this in-between period by having them complete required paperwork or training courses before the first day. That way, they don’t need to do this tedious work when they arrive. They’ll instead be able to jump right into getting to know the team and learning your company processes.

There’s so much information involved with starting a new job. But all of this can be overwhelming. Handing over a laundry list of training to complete or PDFs to read, on top of their first-day nerves, is a sure-fire way to stress someone out.

Since you don’t want to overload them, breaking up the information into phases will help. Pace their learning throughout the first few weeks. You can give them training on a week-by-week basis depending on what they need to know.

Sending a new hire the list of company policies and paperwork is necessary, but it can also be overwhelming. To balance out this stress, your company can also implement exciting welcome activities.

For starters, sending a welcome email can go a long way. These can give the employee a glimpse of your company culture and also ease their nerves by going over everything they should know for their first day

Within these emails, you can even include a welcome video from your team. This makes them feel like they’re part of the company already and they’ll also recognize some faces on their first day. I’ll touch on the importance of this more in the next section.

Social interactions at work affect employee satisfaction. It’s positive to make these connections, but meeting too many people at once can be intimidating. How will someone new remember everyone?

Gradually meeting these people helps make it less stressful. The most important team member, such as managers and those in the same department, should introduce themselves first. You can include a chart with their pictures in the welcome email that you send. These people could even send their own welcome email to make it more personable.

This way, the new employee knows of some people they can approach if they need help.

If an employee’s first impression of your organization is positive, their productivity increases month to month. Data shows that new hires with onboarding experience have a 25% productivity rate in their first month.

This increases to 75% by their third month on the job.

Each of the best practices i listed in this video can improve their experience. Staff will have the information they need while reducing first-day nerves. They’ll feel prepared to start their new career, have the resources to be successful, and feel excited about being part of the team.

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