In our previous onboarding post, we discussed the importance of creating an onboarding process that’s comprehensive, properly handled, and sets new employees up to be successful, confident team members in their new workplace. However, there is always room for improvement, especially since onboarding has a direct influence on employee retention and how an organization is perceived by potential talent. Understanding how to improve your company’s onboarding process can be just as important as already having one that works.
In fact, no matter how well your onboarding process already sets up new hires to be their best, there are always factors that could improve it, taking your onboarding to new heights of professionalism, engagement, and success. Successful onboarding can be directly linked to employee retention, productivity, and engagement–all things employers need to prioritize.
Before understanding how to improve your onboarding process, it’s important to ensure employers know why successful onboarding is crucial to employee retention and success. Conversely, it’s also important to understand what happens when onboarding isn’t handled properly.
What Makes Successful Onboarding Important?
As the familiar saying goes, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”. First impressions are everything, and to new employees, the first impressions of your company are often reflected by how they acclimate. The onboarding process isn’t just a representation of your company’s culture and priorities; it’s also representative of its organizational skills, meaning improper onboarding can often make your workplace seem disorganized or unprofessional. Onboarding is supposed to help new employees feel invigorated and well-equipped to do their best work in a workplace they see themselves caring about.
When mishandled, retention has been proven to fall dramatically, as employees can often feel confused, unmotivated, or even dejected by their place of employment when their introduction, training, and preparation isn’t viewed as a priority, or is conducted without regard for their questions and concerns.
The power of a quality onboarding experience lies in its ability to provide employees with the tools they need to do their best while integrating them into the fabric of a company’s culture, values, and environment. This builds emotional investment, comfortability, and a sense of belonging, while ensuring new employees are well acclimated to their new position. Properly onboarded employees generally show higher levels of retention, and these factors contribute to why.
How Long Does Effective Onboarding Usually Take?
While the length of the onboarding process tends to differ based on the complexity of a position and other factors, it’s important to ensure that employees are provided enough time to properly settle into their work, and the work environment, addressing questions and concerns as they arise. It’s also important to remember that the onboarding process begins before an employee’s first day!
This means effort should be maintained to facilitate the best onboarding experience possible right from the beginning. It all starts with the job description, making sure your document communicates the requirements, responsibilities, benefits, and other aspects of the job accurately and comprehensively. Understanding this is a simple way to passively improve your onboarding process from the start.
This way, applicants will already feel prepared and informed about the position before they are even a part of the company; aiding in decision-making, and ensuring candidates understand the position. Transparency is important in every step of the onboarding process, and that all starts here. Interviewing is also very important; remember that a candidate’s initial interview is their first exposure to your business, so represent yourselves well.
Once an employee is hired, onboarding usually continues until their first month to 90-days, as needed, assessing their progress along the way. Typically, it’s here where the onboarding process formally ends, but for many employees, the process continues in a less formal way as they continue to learn the ins and outs of their position.
Tips for Optimizing the Onboarding Process
While the importance of good onboarding practices is something employers can easily understand, how to improve an onboarding process, even one that already works, is a bit more subjective. However, even iterating on a process that’s already delivering solid results and setting employees up for success can be extremely rewarding, often increasing retention, efficiency, and competency.
Onboarding can be a tricky process to get right considering the many variables contingent on its success, and the simple fact that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every employee. However, keeping some lesser-considered tips in mind can help offer a positive, fruitful onboarding experience that any employee can benefit from. Here are some useful tips to help optimize, refine, and improve your onboarding procedures:
1. Plan a Regimented Training Schedule
To help ensure new employees are learning everything they need to know at a pace that’s manageable for them, it’s always a good idea to plan an employee training schedule. This could include everything from workshops, to time with a mentor, to straightforward on-the-job training, but essentially, new employees should be introduced to concepts in a logical order where each task or lesson builds on the experience and insight gained from the last.
This helps new employees understand how the many facets of their responsibilities fit together in a way that avoids being overwhelming. It also helps employees become more confident; as their skills gradually build onto each other, they learn naturally in a way that allows them to use each lesson to inform the next. A well-thought-out, well-paced training plan encourages employees to use their knowledge to solve their own problems and come up with methods of doing their job that work best for them.
2. Check-in With New Hires at Regular Intervals
In order to assess a new employee’s progress and understand what they’re doing well or struggling with in their new position, it’s a good idea to schedule check-ins at regular intervals. Not only will this facilitate an atmosphere where employees feel listened to and cared about at their new job, but it will also help address potential challenges or issues before they become larger problems! Regular check-ins also strengthen the employer-employee relationship by allowing both parties to get to know each other better.
Check-ins should be a regular part of the onboarding process at regular intervals throughout an employee’s first 90 days, but even afterwards, following up with employees to discuss progress, performance, and other factors is always beneficial for both parties, from entry-level to experienced employees.
3. Make Sure You’re Asking the Right Questions
Providing new employees with direction and guidance is a huge part of the onboarding process, but it isn’t always as simple as an employer may think; it’s not all about just providing information, or waiting for questions to come – as an employer, sometimes asking the right questions can yield some productive results. Here are some questions you can use to help employees acclimate themselves:
What do you find the most challenging about the work?
Do you feel like you’re understanding your responsibilities well?
Is there anything you’re struggling with that you’d like to go over some more?
Are you feeling comfortable with the culture here? Have you been getting along with the team?
Do you think you have everything you need to do your work and handle your responsibilities?
Is there anything you think would make your introduction to the company, or your work better? What can we do to better prepare you for your position?
It’s important to consider that sometimes employees may be uncomfortable asking certain questions, or may not know what to ask in order to improve their onboarding experience. By ensuring that you, as the employer, come up with questions like these and ask them when applicable, new employees may feel more comfortable voicing their opinions and addressing their concerns.
4. Don’t Neglect Opportunities for Team Building
Integration into the workplace culture and its team is vital to the success of any employee, largely because forming these kinds of connections builds the emotional bonds and loyalties that help inspire employees to take pride in their responsibilities, and enjoy coming to work.
Any workplace is better when employees get along well and feel like a team, so ensuring new hires get to know their coworkers by becoming part of that team is very important. For any team-building exercise, or company get-together, it’s important to remain HR-compliant and ensure the choice of activity is acceptable for all the employees involved. When all of this is properly taken into account, team-building can be an integral part of building strong professional relationships that make the workplace a more positive place for everyone.
5. Facilitate a Mentorship for New Employees
When starting out at a company, employees will benefit from all the transparency and information you can give them; one natural, effective way to do this is by appointing a more experienced employee to help them.
Through this employee, a new hire can receive valuable, actionable insight that’ll help them understand their job and their new workplace better, while endearing them to someone who knows the company well. This not only provides new employees with help and guidance, it also gives them an entrance to integrate into the company culture by forming a relationship with one of their coworkers.
Employee mentorships can help new employees establish where they fit into the dynamics of a workplace, all while providing them a resource to learn the ins and outs of their new responsibilities.
6. New Hires Should Know Their Input is Welcome and Important
Starting out in a new position at a new company can be intimidating; new employees often feel like they need to earn the right to give their opinions about work-related topics through experience, but this isn’t truly the case. Something that helps employees feel more confident is to establish the understanding that their skills and specialties are what awarded them the position they have. Despite any lack of experience, their opinions and insight into workplace decision-making is just as important as that of any other employee.
Every employee of a company is hired for a reason; their specific skills and experience, and therefore the contributions and insight new employees can bring to a company, is incredibly valuable. Many new hires may not have the experience of their fellow coworkers, but often just a fresh set of eyes, or an opinion from an outside perspective, is exactly the kind of insight that’s needed to solve a problem.
Letting new employees in on the decision-making process is also a very useful way to make them feel like a trusted, contributing member of a company. You never know what kind of valuable insight or out-of-the-box thinking an employee can provide unless they feel comfortable to speak up and do so.
7. Onboarding Doesn’t Need to Just Be for New Hires
The word onboarding may suggest that these practices are only important for employees just entering a company, but their importance transcends that; onboarding practices can benefit even the most experienced employees at any time, especially if you predict they are losing motivation, struggling, or falling behind.
Sometimes even the most seasoned employee just needs some refocusing, or an experience that reminds them of the passion they once held for their work, and this is something some onboarding practices could inspire.
Re-onboarding can also be an important means of course-correction. Say you think your initial onboarding of an employee didn’t work well for them; re-introducing some of these concepts in ways that could be better suited to an employee’s needs may improve their experience with the company, address anywhere the employee is struggling, and restart them on a path to success.
Are You Ready to Improve Your Business?
Setting employees up for success should be the goal for any employer. When it comes to ensuring new hires have the tools they need to thrive in the workplace, onboarding goes a long way. Even if your onboarding practices consistently yield success, different strategies can always work better for different employees, so there’s always room to optimize your process for the needs of new hires.
As an employer, you can never be too prepared to introduce your new employees to their position and working environment to ensure they have what they need to succeed. If you’re reconsidering your business’s approach to onboarding, contact us, the TripleTrack HR Partners team today.