Employee Onboarding: How to Get it Right

When it comes to your company assets, staff are among your most valuable, as having the right employees, knowledge and abilities in place, can be the difference between success and failure.

It’s therefore essential that besides attracting the best recruits, you do everything you can to retain and increase your volume of happy, fully engaged and productive long-term members of staff. And one of the best ways to achieve this is through a comprehensive employee onboarding programme.

For those of you that are new to this concept, we will look at this in a bit more detail next.

Employee onboarding best practices

When it comes to onboarding, organisations that provide quality employee onboarding programmes understand that the process of integrating fresh recruits into a company and its culture, requires more than just a welcome letter and a great first day at work.

Nurturing relationships with new employees are crucial, as great first impressions don’t necessarily lead to great lasting impressions. In fact, in some organisations it can take months to educate a new staff member on the knowledge, skills and behaviours required of them to begin contributing effectively to an organisation’s success.

It’s why the best employee onboarding programs typically extend throughout an employee’s first 90 days with an organisation and in some cases up to a full year. It’s also important when you consider that nearly 70% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they’ve experienced a great onboarding programme.

Considering the length of some onboarding programmes, it’s almost impossible to create a specific onboarding agenda, schedule, or template. So, instead it helps to have some best practices to work to, as you look to build some longer-term goals and metrics that you can use to determine whether your onboarding is successful or needs to be tweaked.

Here are some best practices to consider:

Begin onboarding new hires before they arrive

Many organisations prefer to wait until the new employee’s first day of work before starting any orientation and onboarding. However, there will often be a delay of many days, weeks, or even months from a new hire receiving their job offer and starting their new job.

This period of delay can offer a great opportunity for you to build excitement with new recruits, create a great employee experience from the off, and help them feel welcome and initiate the steady stream of information they will need to get up to speed quickly.

Develop some great hiring and welcome practices

Help new employees hit the ground running, by getting them ready not just for their first day, but their first month in their new role.

Consider putting a new hire checklist together that captures some of the following hiring practices for new staff.

• Welcome new recruits with a call and a welcome email
• Send new hires a welcome package
• Prepare work tools and resources for the new hire
• Put together an orientation program and agenda
• Offer ample opportunities to meet and greet colleagues

Enrol the support of leaders to talk about company culture

Onboarding should not be the sole responsibility of your human resources team, but also involve other team members, managers and senior leader to executive different onboarding activities.

You could involve a senior leader, such as a company founder to educate new employees about the company’s history, it’s culture and expected values and behaviour. This could be delivered in any of the following ways:

• Delivering a company presentation
• Giving new recruits a tour of your company building or facility
• Presenting it as a specific topic area, as part of an overall training programme
• Taking new recruits out for coffee or lunch

Offer opportunities to connect with co-workers

Devising ways for new employees to connect with their new teammates early on can help foster greater feelings of belonging and inclusion. Ideas could include:

• Scheduling some short introductory meetings with co-workers.
• Getting an existing team member to act as a mentor or buddy for your latest recruit.
• Hosting a team lunch or team building event to foster a more relaxed, informal environment for getting to know each other.

Use onboarding software tools

An effective onboarding process can involve a range of different tasks and activities, from completing new employee paperwork to conducting orientation and training programs for new recruits.

Given the time that some of these activities can take, you might want to consider investing in some onboarding software tools to help with this. By automating and streamlining many of these processes, they can help save you time, and ensure you don’t miss any important steps in each staff member’s onboarding process.

Conduct regular one-to-one meetings

Conducting frequent one-to-one meetings between a line manager and their team members helps foster more positive and productive relations between the two groups. So, for any new faces, it’s prudent to build these one-to-one meetings into their normal work routine, as soon as you can.

Employ surveys to identify what’s working and what’s not

Probably one of the most important tools to consider during the onboarding process is the use of staff surveys, as it’s difficult for you to know what’s really working and what isn’t without feedback from your new recruits.

However, when it comes to surveys, what’s interesting is that many employers are often happy to gather feedback from employees via exit surveys conducted as they prepare to leave their role, but crucially don’t think to survey them before this stage.

While it’s useful to get feedback from departing staff, to find out more about their reasons for leaving, it’s more valuable to get their feedback earlier on, in order to make the changes that will help more of them stay. This is where the benefit of using an onboarding survey, really comes into its own.

From their views about your recruitment process and how it influenced their decision to work for you, to their opinions about their first day, induction, training and first few weeks and months with your organisation. With the right onboarding survey questions, you can get a good feel for what new recruits think and what more you can do to improve onboarding and the number of recruits going on to become productive long-term members of staff.

8 employee onboarding ideas

While we’ve provided some good pointers about some valuable best practices to include, it’s also worth thinking about including some more unusual, creative or inspiring ideas, that can provide the ‘X’ factor in terms of exciting and engaging new recruits. To help you, we’ve put together a short list below: