It’s painful to lose talented employees. But it’s even more disruptive and pointless to lose great employees within the first two years of their employment. Organizations spend so much time on the candidate sourcing and selection processes that it is understandably frustrating when newer employees don’t stay. The costs rack up (turnover, recruiting, lost productivity), while many other KPI percentages slide down (employee retention, manager satisfaction, length of customer relationships). Surprisingly, though, many companies continue to underestimate the resources that should be spent on crafting an effective employee onboarding process.
Maybe they understand the opportunity effective onboarding presents, but have not made a compelling business case for change to upper management yet. Or maybe they still need help to better understand how sound onboarding practices can allow organizations to:
- Enable new employees to become productive earlier in the employment relationship
- Scale to meet growth objectives
- Address a skills gap present in their workforce
Define Onboarding
What should be included in employee onboarding activities? Or more importantly…what does onboarding mean at your organization? How does it feel to new hires and existing employees? Consider whether your answers make your onboarding process sound like a two- or three-day to-do list (maybe even a Post-It Note waiting to be crumpled and tossed upon completion) or a challenging quest comprising tasks that deeply impact your business outcomes.
Onboarding is a core component of your employment brand. It is the foundation on which employee engagement rests. Therefore, consider whether your current onboarding process reinforces the promise your employment brand makes.
Rethink Your Onboarding Process
It’s easy to unintentionally confine your thinking to the traditional ideas about bringing new hires into your company. Or, more likely due to a lack of time, resources or know-how, just put the idea of reengineering your process on the back burner where it may not be addressed for months or years. But this idle approach can lead to mediocrity—or potentially worse, failure in the long term. The good news is that little wins are okay and they are a great place to start.
One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to improving your onboarding process. To realize improvements over time, adjust your change objectives to reflect the capabilities of your organization size. Additionally, contemplate how the milestones in your process may differ by job category. Then, set expectations with the stakeholders involved in the change effort. When stakeholders understand what is expected of them, they will naturally promote a culture of setting expectations with your new employees, too. When new hires know what to expect, they will more quickly align their efforts with your overall organizational objectives.
The key to embarking on an onboarding process improvement project is to align your onboarding objectives to your overall business goals. Plan for ways in which the process can reinforce your company’s reason for existence, and then identify the metrics that will indicate when an improvement has been made.
Key Elements
While it should come as no surprise that a retooled onboarding process should still include tactical items such as the completion of new hire paperwork and the provisioning of employee tools, the process must address the cultural activities that help a new employee feel like a part of the team, too. As your organization plans for change, examine opportunities to enable, enlighten and impassion employees.
Enable
Enable your employees to be productive as soon as possible by preparing them for employment. Provide them with easy, early access to the necessary administrative documents and provision the equipment, tools, and resources necessary for them to carry out the responsibilities of their role in the most efficient way possible.
Consider whether automating new hire paperwork would help you better deliver on your employment brand, as well as whether its potential impact on key performance indicators justifies its implementation cost. Don’t forget to better enable your process stakeholders to fulfill their assignments, as well. Get their feedback on the tasks they perform that instead could be accomplished by a software tool, so the stakeholders have more time to refocus on strategic activities that will better support your employment brand. The decision to use a tool to automate many onboarding-related tasks such as equipment provisioning, benefits enrollment, payroll coordination, training curriculum milestones, and mentoring relationship activities certainly will impact your organization’s ability to introduce other concurrent changes to your onboarding process.
Enlighten
Enlighten new hires about the opportunities that exist within your organization by reinforcing their reasons for choosing you, and educating them about the potential career paths available. A simple way to start includes scheduling time for new hires and supervisors to restate the responsibilities of the position, discuss performance expectations, detail timelines for accomplishing the mastery of skills, and discuss the next big goals for the organization.
Employees who are aware of long-term learning opportunities, such as advanced training and mentorship, are more likely to stay with your organization.
Impassion
Take the time to see how the passion employees have for your organization drives your business outcomes. Think in terms of customer satisfaction and retention, employee referrals, and greater attention to operational efficiency as a start. Job passion will grow when employees are challenged in productive ways, recognized for their efforts, and championed for their results.
Communication is fundamental to the aforementioned activities, and it can be fostered effectively early on through frequent, intentional opportunities for new hires to interact with others in your company. Many businesses get this “social” part of the equation right, but sometimes at the expense of managing onboarding-related tasks successfully. Some organizations stop socializing after the obligatory new hire lunch on day one of employment. Don’t stop doing lunch…but start thinking beyond the first week for chances for new employees to collaborate with others.
Excerpt from “All Hands on Deck: A Guide to Employee Onboarding Process Improvement” by Jessica Stephenson and Tom Branson (ExactHire.com, August 2015). For information about making a business case for onboarding process change and implementing innovative employee onboarding activities, download this free e-book at http://bit.ly/1OtAdLB.
Jessica Stephenson, PHR, SHRM-CP, passionately works at the intersection of content marketing and HR technology. She is vice president of Marketing and Service Operations for ExactHire, a software firm that helps small and medium-sized companies automate and improve the hiring process. Follow her on Twitter @JessLStephenson and ExactHire via @goExactHire.
For more information, visit:
ExactHire Website: http://www.exacthire.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exacthire/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessstephenson
