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Employee onboarding is a critical part of the employee lifecycle as it’s the employee’s first on-the-job experience with a new company. It’s the process a new hire goes through when joining and adjusting to their new role, specifically by learning their essential duties as it relates to organizational goals. The key is to focus on these two pieces:
There are two main components in all successful onboarding programs. On one hand, you have the acculturation of the new employee – the human side of onboarding. The other component is the paperwork and compliance side of onboarding. Both are vital, and both require the right tools to maximize efficiency.
When we talk about efficiency in the onboarding process, we mean getting the employee working at their fullest potential in the least amount of time. In order to do this, both components of the onboarding program have to be strong. Known in economics as the break-even point, the faster you get a new employee to this point, the higher the return on your investment in them will be. If this point is never reached before the employee leaves the organization, you are upside down on your investment.
“Each year, nearly 25% of the working population undergoes some type of career transition. Turnover is expensive, so it’s important to support new employees with comprehensive onboarding to ensure their success. Onboarding is the process by which new hires get adjusted to the social and performance aspects of their jobs quickly and smoothly, and learn the attitudes, knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to function effectively within an organization.” - SHRM Onboarding Report
The Human Side of Onboarding
According to Aberdeen’s 2012 Onboarding Report, onboarding is the leading area of talent management that impacts retention. Let’s think about this for a moment; do you believe that onboarding so severely impacts retention because all of the right paperwork got filled out, or because successful onboarding includes a focus on acculturation, socializing and mentorship? Yeah, although we’re tech people, we get it; the human side of onboarding is vital in productivity, engagement and retention.
That being said, many employers are left wondering: So, where are all these resources to properly onboard each employee going to come from? The answer that surprises most business owners is—technology. By eliminating redundancies, inefficiencies and archaic processes on the compliance side of onboarding, organizations can free up resources to concentrate on the human side of human resources.
Tools of a Successful Onboarding Program
Automating the administrative side of onboarding creates exponential returns from new hires, managers, and HR staff alike. With paperwork and data entry out of the way, new hires can spend less time filling out forms, and more time doing what you actually hired them to do, getting them to full productivity sooner and more efficiently.
Perhaps the most significant element of our particular brand of onboarding is that the ClearCompany platform creates a flow from recruiting to onboarding. The common disconnect between these stages results in a sad sight we’ve all witnessed – the new employee standing around the water cooler for a week with no direction, no mentor and really no idea what’s going on. A seamless progression for employees entering the onboarding stage means expedited productivity and more importantly it means, energized, positive and goal-driven fist moments in the organization. The flow of the lifecycle then continues on to performance management, with the same transparency.
