What’s the biggest, most effective thing you can do to help prevent employee turnover?

One word: Communicate!

Fact:

A staggering 28-33% of new hires quit their new job within the first 90 days. Pay attention to and address the things that make employees leave. Otherwise, you’ll have to go through the recruitment, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding process all over again. This can be costly if you lose one out of every three or four employees you hire.

What makes new employees leave?

According to research, 43% of employees who left a new job in the first 90 days claimed it was because of poor communication over what would be expected of them – they said that the day-to-day job was not what they had been led to believe it would be during the recruitment and interviewing process.

34% said a bad experience or an incident drove them away from the workplace (chances are, a miscommunication was involved).  32% said that the company culture was not what they had expected, often due to misleading or “seeded” workplace reviews. Such reviews can communicate a false sense of what the work environment is like.

Poor onboarding plays a part

Additionally, new hires said that their onboarding communications were significantly lacking in clarity and thoroughness:

• 23% said they wanted to “receive clear guidelines to what responsibilities were”
• 21% wanted “more effective training”
• 17% said “a friendly smile or helpful coworker would have made all the difference”

Obviously, honest, clear, and consistent communication during the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding processes has the potential to positively change new hire outcomes.

How can you communicate better with new hires?

Onboarding shouldn’t be a one-day process, but a supportive plan for the first 90 days of your new employee’s experience – a road map to what’s expected. The best way to ensure this happens is to plan ahead and make clarity and comprehensiveness a cornerstone of your recruitment and interview process.

Pre-hire:

Be honest about the job, the work environment, the company culture, and all facets and responsibilities the employee will be expected to handle. A job interview should be a two-way process. You want your next hire to be the right hire!

Upon hiring:

Once you make an offer and it’s accepted, immediately begin the welcoming and onboarding process. Make sure new hires have contact information for a colleague with the knowledge, skills, and authority to help them; you might even want to assign someone within your company to be their personal mentor for their first week or two. Your employee’s first experiences should leave them feeling delighted, not daunted.  

Onboarding

Make your onboarding processes as smooth and intuitive as possible. You can achieve this by creating a comprehensive, automated onboarding plan that takes them through:

Orientation

Make sure employees start at the beginning with a thorough introduction to:

• Your company policies and procedures
• The employee’s responsibilities

Human Resources

Get every HR task possible out-of-the-way by streamlining tasks like:

• Implementing their time tracking
• Arranging their schedule
• Setting up payroll
• Choosing a health plan

Training

Training new hires has never been easier, with software that can allow them to:

• Complete required training modules on their own time
• Verify their knowledge and highlight areas in need of improvement
• Take tests that allow them to prove their skills
• Alert their training manager when training is complete

The way you onboard is critical to keeping employees past that critical 90 day point. Strategic onboarding of your employees can improve employee retention by up to 82%!

Check-ins

You should already be doing 90-day employee check-ins with your existing staff, but with a new employee this form of communication is even more important. Check in at the end of the first week, the first month, and every 30 days after that to ensure they are settling in, feeling comfortable and enjoying their new job. Employee check-ins can be one of the most important communication tools at your disposal.

How Trainual can help you communicate

When every expectation for your new employee is clearly laid out in their orientation and onboarding process, you create an open line of communication. Trainual can make the flow of your new hire’s first days in your company intuitive and stress-free. An interactive wiki that is built around your company can set them on the path to success. 

Don’t hire employees only to lose them 90 days later. Choose an onboarding and training system that actually makes sense and prepares them for their new career. Find out how Trainual enhances communication between you and your new hires, to keep them around for good.