5 Practical Ways to Upgrade Employee Onboarding

How to Modernize the Employee Onboarding Process

How you welcome new hires can make a difference. It can mean either a successful organization with happy and productive employees or one that keeps struggling with high employee turnover rates.

To avoid the latter and retain your top talent, you need to provide exciting and effective employee onboarding that your new hires will love.

Read on to learn how to modernize it and why doing it properly is crucial for your overall success.

Why Is Proper Employee Onboarding Key to Success?

Without a structured employee onboarding process, your new hires may start looking for new job opportunities soon after starting their new job.

You need to help them acclimatize to the company culture, their new roles, and the entire team. You need to make them feel welcome, guide them through all their responsibilities, give them the necessary resources, and prepare them for everyday tasks.

If you cram everything into the first day, week, or even month, you might overwhelm and confuse the new hires, making them want to jump ship. On the other hand, if the process lasts up to a year and tackles every important aspect in a structured way, you’ll boost engagement, performance, and retention.

The latest employee onboarding statistics show why proper employee onboarding is important for any organization. Here are the most eye-opening stats to know:

  • 54% of companies achieve higher employee engagement due to a quality onboarding program.
  • Companies with structured onboarding programs experience 25% higher retention rates.
  • Onboarding programs provide companies with an 11% higher productivity.
  • 77% of employees who receive a formal onboarding process reach their performance goals.
  • 69% of employees who receive structured onboarding are more likely to stay with a company for three years.
  • New hires are 18 times more likely to stay committed to their company after a satisfactory onboarding experience.
  • 20% of new hires don’t recommend a company to friends or family after poor onboarding.
  • 76% of new hires value socialization during onboarding.
  • 56% of new hires prefer having a mentor or buddy during the onboarding process.
  • 87% of organizations that provide a buddy program during onboarding say it helps achieve new hire proficiency faster.

5 Steps to a Successful Employee Onboarding Process

The key steps below will help improve an outdated employee onboarding process and make every new hire want to stay and grow with a company.

Were all excited to have you onboard shot businesspeople shaking hands during meeting in office
Tips to Adapt Employee Onboarding to Modern Needs.

1. Create a memorable first day for your new hires

Making new hires feel welcome during orientation is a surefire way to engage them from day one. Small gestures, such as personalized welcome gifts, can make a big difference.

You can give them a welcome kit with a gift card, office supplies, and a book, and let them decorate their workspace. Taking them out to lunch with the entire team can go a long way, too.

If you hire remote employees, use video technology to show them around the facility, introduce them to the rest of the team, and bring them up to speed on all the goals and expectations.

2. Utilize employee onboarding software

Employee onboarding software will help you make the process interactive, save time and costs, and
Foster seamless collaboration and communication. It’s a no-brainer if you have remote employees. It will help you automate repetitive tasks and focus on integrating recruits into your company and culture.

You can use it to create a knowledge base with all the information on your company culture, policies, job responsibilities, products, services, and various types of training (e.g., workplace safety training, sexual harassment training, diversity training, etc.). It can be a directory that your recruits can access anytime to find relevant company information.

You can add onboarding videos, activities, and anything else to make the process more enjoyable.

3. Provide personalized employee training

Online employee training software is vital for preparing your new hires for the work ahead.

You can use it to create online training courses that facilitate self-paced learning, communicate with users in virtual classrooms, track real-time progress and performance, and assess knowledge retention with fun quizzes.

The key is to personalize new hire training, leading to higher engagement, productivity, efficiency, job satisfaction, and retention. Use surveys to gain an insight into every recruit’s preferences, strengths, and challenges to personalize training materials.

4. Turn onboarding into a social experience

By assigning a buddy or mentor to each new hire, you’ll make them feel like they belong and boost their engagement. You’ll help them build new relationships right away and learn your organization’s core values.

Set up a team meeting, take them out to lunch, go on a coffee break together, and plan other social activities to help the new hires form bonds and transition smoothly.

Thanks to modern technology, your remote employees can have the same social experience and seamlessly assimilate into the new culture. Employee onboarding software, video-conferencing tools, and instant messaging apps are some of the top solutions for facilitating communication, collaboration, and team building.

5. Ask for honest feedback

Gathering honest employee feedback during and after onboarding is the best way to improve your employee onboarding process.

Make it anonymous so that everyone feels comfortable sharing their opinion. Ask where the process may be falling short, what its strengths are, and anything else that will help you improve it and make everyone feel involved.

Make the Most of Employee Onboarding

Onboarding new hires require much more than just welcoming them into the team and showing them around the facility. It’s about supporting them, making them a part of the team, teaching them how to contribute to the company, helping them transition smoothly, and molding them into high-performers.

All of that takes time and requires various steps. The tips discussed above can be an excellent starting point. They’ll help you set new hires up for success. They’re the key to making onboarding interesting, beneficial, engaging, effective, and making recruits feel at home.

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