Onboarding. We all know how crucial it is to get our new hire experience right. Retention, productivity, engagement… these all depend on making sure that your new employees are onboarded correctly. But not only does this take budget and resources, it takes planning and time.
If you create standardized onboarding processes within your organization, you will experience 50% greater new hire retention. But standardized is no longer enough, here’s how to build an incredible onboarding program starting today:
How To Create an Onboarding Program
- Make it formal and clear. Stakeholders need to know what to expect and exactly how they’re responsible for implementing it.
- Build your onboarding program so it begins before the first day.
- A great onboarding program ensures measurements are in place ahead of time.
- Create alignment between your internal development plans and what you build into your onboarding process.
- Onboarding programs use the strengths of their experienced employees to improve the program.
- Incredible onboarding programs are built on feedback from new hires and employees.
- Map onboarding initiatives to productivity bottom lines throughout the company.
- Ensure your onboarding program isn’t all paperwork and training by including mentorship and buddy systems.
- Onboarding systems that work are in lockstep with the company culture, vision and values.
- Building an onboarding program that truly works hones in on both soft skills and hard skills.
Now that we know what an incredible onboarding program contains and how best to map it out, let’s see what that looks like in action.
Your onboarding starts with a plan and the right tools. ClearCompany Onboarding is tailor-made to provide everything you need to start building a strong new hire program. While onboarding can be fun and edifying for you and the new employee, it also has its burdensome, administrative side. One way to make the experience even better for your new hires is by creating a seamless pathway into the organization. How? Intelligent forms, seamless E-Verification and automated workflows that help your employee through the process are much simpler than balancing stacks of paper and trying to remember your social security number for the hundredth time.
Reinforce your employer brand throughout the process. Your brand is based on your vision, mission and values, which you are going to impress upon your new hire. But there are even more opportunities to make your employees feel like part of the process. Using your experienced employees to help set benchmarks in order to plan out performance reviews (which you can schedule within ClearCompany’s onboarding module), as well as a branded new hire portal that’s mobile friendly. Many new employees spend their first days and weeks on their feet, touring their new space. Make their time easier, by including tools for benefits administration, payroll information and scheduling from anywhere.
Make sure you can measure how well your onboarding process is doing. While I-9 management and E-Verification are important parts of the onboarding process, measurement of purely administrative functions, while useful, doesn’t speak to the rest of your onboarding process. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, so ensure you are putting the right tools in place for next month and next year to prove your onboarding process is making an impact!
Get your team involved with the onboarding process. Onboarding a new employee shouldn’t fall solely to their manager, HR or the employee who happens to be in the next cubicle. Once you’ve got your technology and measurement tools in place, you need to add the most important ingredient to onboarding, your people! Take stock of the employees you have. Chances are, it’s obvious who would make a great mentor (probably in the same department) and who should provide performance goal posts and ongoing training (generally their manager) and of course, if you’re reading this, you get to share benefits information, assist with paperwork and deliver the employee manual to the newest member of your team. But there are other important positions that can make onboarding the exciting process it should be!
Show ‘em around Sharon: Bring in an extrovert from another department to help your new hire find the coffee maker, give a tour of the gym in the next building over and tell the new hire about the parking meter across the street that eats everyone’s quarters.
Unwritten Rules Roger: Every company has its own unwritten rules. Find someone who’s been around long enough to know that no one parks in Carl’s space, shorts are only allowed on Fridays and Maria is a stickler about leaving dirty dishes in the sink.
Swagalicious Steve: Usually found in marketing, this person can ensure your new hire gets his or her branded tee, their very own branded tumbler and business cards printed within a week.
Energetic Evelyn: New hires are bombarded with brand new information, new faces and new processes. Tap someone positive and energetic to help them keep track of it all. This person will help keep their energy up if they see the new employee lagging.
Incredible onboarding processes provide check-ins. Sure, maybe your Word Doc from 2009 suggests a 30, 60, 90 check-in but we’re talking about something much more detailed than that. Your new employee needs to know that his or her performance matters to the bottom line and they are important enough to check up on. But don’t leave the checkups to your new employee, check-in with your onboarding team, the manager and your administration staff to ensure everything is running on schedule. If it seems overwhelming, it might be because your process is outdated.
With easy reporting and automated workflows, benefits administration overview and HRIS integrations, you can pull your numbers, set reminders for the new hire and their onboarding team, check to ensure your employee has all the benefits info they need and easily extend their profile right into your HRIS, information intact. It’s as simple as that! You can even send automated surveys and emails to gauge your onboarding progress.
ClearCompany provides paperless onboarding that makes your process simple and even fun. Take the time you’ve saved slogging through duplicative paperwork, scheduling performance reviews with supervisors and managers, and conducting background checks and use it to create an amazing onboarding team, bake your brand into the process and create an engaged workforce. Get a demo today.
