Struggling to hire the right people and keep them? It’s easy to focus on recruitment as the culprit, but what if you’re already doing everything right on that front? When hiring feels solid but retention is still an issue, your employee onboarding process could be the missing piece.
If onboarding has been more of a box-ticking exercise in your organisation, it’s time to rethink its role. Research shows that companies with a structured onboarding process see 50% higher retention rates than those without. Beyond retention, a well-designed onboarding programme boosts productivity, engagement, and overall job satisfaction.
In this article, we’ll walk you through five best practices to help you transform onboarding from an afterthought into a strategic advantage.
What is employee onboarding?
Employee onboarding is all about bringing new hires up to speed with how things are done in your business and setting clear expectations from the start. A well-designed onboarding programme gives a new employee all the knowledge, support and tools they need to succeed in their new role, from learning about your company culture and policies to connecting them with the people who’ll train and mentor them in the days and weeks ahead.
Onboarding is a little different from orientation, although orientation is very much part of the onboarding process. Orientation focuses on the initial admin involved in starting a new job, and on introducing new employees to their new working environment and the policies they’ll need to abide by. Onboarding takes a longer-term view, involving things like job-specific training, ongoing mentorship and integration into company culture.
The benefits of effective employee onboarding
A structured employee onboarding programme will do more than simply welcome new hires into your company and equip them to perform at their best from day one. It will boost their confidence and increase their productivity, job satisfaction and long-term engagement. In turn, this helps address the retention and turnover challenges we mentioned earlier, at the same time as making sure everyone understands and can work towards your business goals. Let’s look at the benefits in more detail.
Increased employee engagement and job satisfaction
Starting a new job can be daunting. Effective employee onboarding makes new recruits feel welcome and valued, helping to boost their confidence and motivate them to succeed. Not only that, but it ensures you’re both on the same page from the get-go, setting clear expectations and goals, and making sure they know what they need to do to progress in their role. It also gets them into a mindset of regular feedback and open dialogue, particularly in the context of ongoing mentorship and career development.
Improved performance and productivity
With lots to learn in any new role, an effective onboarding process is designed to get new hires up to speed, enabling them to hit the ground running as far as possible (something that can even improve your company agility). As well as providing new recruits with a clear outline of their new role and responsibilities, this means putting the right training programme and resources in place to help them learn their new job quickly and efficiently.
Stronger company culture and lower turnover rates
A great onboarding process instills your company culture from day one, helping new recruits understand your values, mission statement and aims. The idea is to reduce early-stage turnover by helping encourage a sense of belonging and loyalty from the start, as well as helping them to bond with (and cement their place in) their new team.
5 Best Practices for a Successful Employee Onboarding Process
Ready to start streamlining your onboarding process for long-term success? Here’s an actionable list of five best practices you can implement to get your new hires off to the best possible start.
1. Start early – begin with preboarding
A great onboarding process starts before your new employee even turns up on their first day. As soon as someone’s accepted a job offer from you, you can begin the preboarding process so that both they and you are already thinking about their transition into your company.
Drop them a welcome email with lots of useful information about your company and their future team, and about their new job with you. It might help to send them over a detailed job description at this stage, so that they can already start getting clear on what will be expected of them. Don’t forget to include the benefits they’ll be entitled to, so they can start looking forward to those. It’s not too early to assign them a mentor or work buddy, and even to put the two of them in touch with an introductory email.
On the admin side of things, now’s the time to start getting together all those important documents, such as employment contracts and P45s. It’s also a good opportunity to get them all set up on your IT system, with things like log-ins and their new email address.
2. Create a standardised onboarding plan
Consistency is key when it comes to onboarding, and a standardised onboarding plan levels the playing field by ensuring everyone has the same opportunities from day one, no matter what their role in your business.
You can ensure consistency by developing a standard onboarding pack that you can give out to new hires, containing company information (from your history to where you go for team lunches), practical details and all your standard policies. Creating structured checklists and timelines will keep your new onboarding process on track and make sure every new hire completes each stage. Scheduling a one-to-one with your new recruit will provide an opportunity to discuss expectations on both sides, as well as outlining their training schedule and milestones.
3. Use technology to streamline onboarding
If this all sounds like a lot of work, the good news is that there are tools available to help with your new onboarding process. HR software will take the strain when it comes to managing documents and training programmes, while repetitive tasks such as paperwork and compliance can be taken on by automation tools.
Don’t forget remote employees, too – virtual onboarding strategies will come in useful here. These might include online training and mentorship, virtual one-to-ones and getting them set up on a collaboration platform such as Slack or Asana.
4. Encourage a strong company culture
We’ve already seen the benefits of an effective employee onboarding programme on company culture, and communication is key here. Use the onboarding process to clearly outline your company values and mission statement, and maybe even arrange a meet and greet with senior management to reinforce leadership support.
To help foster a welcoming company culture, consider what you can do to help welcome employees to their new team. A thoughtful gift always goes down well, but it’s also important for team bonding to make sure new recruits feel included in activities from their very first day; perhaps a team lunch outing in the new hire’s honour?
Making an effort at this early stage will also help existing employees get to know the new hire and encourage continued social cohesion within the team. Employee friendships and social integration are crucial to morale and collaboration, helping them feel a sense of belonging, whether they’ve been with you for a day or a year. Socially integrated employees are more likely to experience better job satisfaction and company loyalty, and you can encourage these social connections with initiatives such as team building, mentorship and regular socials.
5. Provide continuous support and training
An effective onboarding process doesn’t stop after someone’s first few days of employment, it’s a longer-term process. On their first day, begin by outlining their training and development programme and the mentorship or coaching opportunities they’ll have going forward.
Providing some structure to your support and training helps formalise what you can offer so that it’s fair for everyone. And that begins with onboarding itself, a process that you could divide up into phases, such as:
- First 30 days: this phase is all about helping employees to settle into life in your company, as well as providing clarity over their role and the opportunity for early feedback.
- 30-60 days: during this phase, new recruits cement their knowledge of their new role, undertake initial performance reviews and begin building on the skills they’ve already acquired.
- 60-90 days and beyond: with the new employee starting to get established, this phase focuses on their long-term career growth and, if appropriate, leadership or other promotion pathways.
With these practical steps taken, there’s just one more best practice you can keep in mind to make your employee onboarding programme a success…
Measuring the success of your employee onboarding process
Any new strategy needs diligent measurement to ensure it’s having the desired effect, and your new onboarding process is no different. So how do you know if the changes you’ve made are working?
Quantitatively speaking, the key metrics to analyse for effective onboarding are:
- Time to productivity
- Retention rates
- Employee satisfaction
Qualitative measurement is useful here too, and gathering feedback and anecdotal evidence will help you make further improvements to your new onboarding process. There are various ways of doing this, such as anonymous online feedback forms and surveys conducted at regular intervals (these could align with the phases we suggested earlier). One-to-one interviews will help encourage open dialogue between you and your new hire and will provide you with more in-depth insights into how employees found the process. It also gives them the chance to make suggestions to help improve things even further for future new hires.
Perfect your onboarding process: next steps
Getting onboarding right helps get a new employee’s time with you off to the best possible start, helping them settle in quickly, minimise time to productivity and develop lasting loyalty to your company. Technology has a strong supporting role to play in enabling new hires to hit the ground running, and there’s more help at hand.
At Thomas, our powerful platform is designed to help you stop losing great new hires to a poor onboarding process. Powered by people science, it helps you develop an effective onboarding experience that’s tailored to each individual recruit based on what works for them, as well as what works for your team and company culture. If you’d like to learn more, read our complete guide to employee onboarding, get in touch with our experts or explore our assessments to improve and optimise your onboarding process.
