Onboarding doesn’t have to be a drag
How you can actually rock your employees' first days.
Congratulations on your most recent hire! You’ve probably spent weeks, maybe even months, trying to find them.
While it may be tempting to start celebrating your success, the hard work isn’t over yet. If you don’t onboard your new hire properly, they may not choose to stick around.
This is especially important in a virtual setup, where you have to ensure that the new employee receives all the necessary equipment on time, and has the resources to get onboarded properly.
The first day sets the tone for the first year of a new job, so onboarding is not a process to overlook.
Consider the facts:
- Employees are *69% more likely to stay with your company for at least three years if the onboarding is great.
- *91% of first-year workers are retained by companies with an efficient onboarding process.
- *49% of millennials want a better onboarding process.
A lot of companies suck at onboarding new hires. To help you get your employees started off on the right foot, we’ve compiled a list of best practices, including real-life examples, of how to onboard successfully.
Make the first-day count
As a manager, you should put yourself in the shoes of a new hire and appreciate what it’s like for them to start working somewhere new. Gather what new employees will need and have it ready before they start. Nothing’s worse than arriving for your first day and finding out that your computer is on backorder, you don’t have a phone number, or you can’t take notes. Setting up phones, computers, security badges, all software logins, and email accounts early is vital. Your job is to make new hires feel comfortable and integrate them into the company.
Content marketing platform, Percolate offers a comprehensive onboarding program that starts on the first day. After a new hire has been shown to their desk one of the first tasks includes signing into Asana, which will have a task inbox with several onboarding tasks to get them started.
Make introductions
Whether it’s through a mid-morning catch-up over a (virtual) coffee or meeting, help new employees make introductions and connections that will help them start to build relationships.
Buffer, a company similar to Twitter, assigns three buddies during onboarding, each with a different role to play. There is a Leader Buddy, a Role Buddy, and a Culture Buddy, all of whom help new hires through the onboarding process.
Start with a structured schedule
Without adequate guidance in their first weeks on the job, new hires can be left without a sense of purpose, wondering what to do next. Your employee onboarding program should include at least one to two weeks of structured days to ensure that the new employee is being adequately engaged — they should never feel like they have nothing to do.
Game developer Zynga understands the importance of making employees feel productive in their first few weeks. They pair up new hires with mentors as part of their internal onboarding program. Both parties are required to work together to innovate and learn from each other.
Set clear and realistic expectations…
Setting clear and realistic expectations for the success of employees is a process that should begin on their first day of employment. Goal-setting and reviews should continue as a monthly follow-up process between the new hire and their manager.
LinkedIn makes sure each new hire ends their first day with an in-depth roadmap in hand for the coming weeks. This allows all new hires to know exactly what is expected from them throughout the entire onboarding process, or first month at the job.
…But don’t expect immediate results
At the same time, it may not be realistic to expect new team members to come in and start performing at a high level immediately. Even a subject area expert takes time to acquaint themselves with the processes and people at a new company before they start delivering their best work.
Collect feedback
Managers should collect feedback from new hires about the onboarding process and help new hires feel comfortable addressing issues that could be affecting their satisfaction or productivity.
Financial services firm, The Motley Fool, recognized that employees are not always comfortable providing honest feedback to their bosses. They tackled this problem by creating feedback coaches, who have been trained to gather feedback from employees in a manner designed to remove fear from the conversation.
Conclusion
Great onboarding is a prime opportunity for you to win the hearts and minds of new employees. So make some changes — what do you have to lose?
- Statistics from employment engagement platform, tinypulse
To read more about how we operate at Recruitee, check out the following articles:
