Is your onboarding process efficient, effective, and excellent?

According to Gallup, only 12% of new hires would be able to strongly support the statement that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees. When you fail to connect with employees and form a strong bond of trust between them and your company, retention is unlikely.

In fact, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), you can expect to lose up to half of your workforce within the first 18 months of their hire date. Replacing them can be expensive, and the continual need to hire new staff to replace lost employees can prevent you from scaling.

Business growth depends on new hire retention

How can you prevent employee turnover and start growing your company instead of tenuously maintaining your status quo? One of the secrets to consistent business growth lies in how you manage the four quadrants of the onboarding process.

Onboarding quadrant 1: Assured compliance

An initial step in onboarding a new hire is making sure they will act in accordance with your company’s guidelines to help you avoid any legal or policy-related issues. This can be accomplished by documenting your entire policies and procedures packet and including it in your digitized onboarding system. Your employee can begin their onboarding even before their first official day, giving them time to absorb the information.

Onboarding quadrant 2: Job clarification

The next major step in onboarding is making sure your employee understands both the nature of their job and its scope. Nearly 50% of employees say they aren’t completely sure what their job description includes. Clarifying expectations can increase productivity up to 10%, and reduce on-the-job safety incidents by twice that much. Set short term goals that will be easy to achieve over the first few weeks or an employees work tenure. Add tasks with goals set at the 90 day, 6 month, and year marks as well, to provide a sense of continuity and ground your new hire.

Onboarding quadrant 3: Company culture

Your organizational values and norms should be on display from your employee’s first day. New hire orientation can help you introduce your newest employee to your company culture, but their best source of information will be your people and the “workplace vibe.” Create a diverse, inclusive workplace focused on collaborative effort and achievement. New hires will naturally benefit if your core philosophy is “culture add” over “culture fit.”

Onboarding quadrant 4: Forging connections

Help your new hire identify several people on day one that they can learn from or work with to achieve company objectives. They will go on to find another few on their own, but you can kickstart their “belonging” by helping them immediately create a team.  When you connect new employees to personal relationships and information networks, you give them the most valuable tools of all.

Technology can streamline the administrative process. Rather than giving new hires mountains of information to memorize, show them how to use the benefits portal to find the information they need, and then let them absorb that information on their own time.

Using technology for onboarding excellence

Using onboarding technology won’t replace one-on-one interactions that elevate the onboarding experience. It can, however, leave more time for those crucial connections by streamlining the onboarding process. Trainual is an ideal solution when it comes to rapidly getting a new employee through the HR related steps in the onboarding funnel.  Each quadrant of onboarding can benefit from automation:

Compliance: You can deliver all required information in regard to compliance using the same vehicle you employ for payroll and benefits enrollment. A digitized system allows you to set up several scenarios and quiz the employee on the appropriate course of action to ensure they understand the guidelines.

Clarification: You can personalize your employee’s onboarding experience by creating an onboarding system that automatically customizes their journey by including relevant modules and excluding those that don’t apply to their role. This cuts down on confusion over responsibilities and expectations.

Culture: Your company policies on diversity, inclusion, attire, and harassment can be included in this streamlined introduction, helping you make your stance clear from day one on what is and is not acceptable. This also gives you a chance to get employee input on their own beliefs and culture.

Connections: Provide touchpoints during onboarding, including contact information for the first few people your new hire will work closely with. Provide a short description of how their responsibilities and goals intersect. These key people will be a lifeline for your new employee during their first few weeks, so choose wisely.  

Remember that new employees are experiencing your company for the first time, so look for ways to:

• Make their first day on the job special
• Make their first meeting with managers and coworkers productive
• Make their first work projects and tasks easy to achieve
• Make their first immersion in your company culture positive

By keeping these things in mind when laying out your onboarding process, you will improve new hire experiences and increase retention rates, allowing you to achieve faster business growth and build a stronger company.