Employee onboarding is the process of assisting new employees in bridging the gap between them and their new employer. It’s the procedure of formally welcoming new staff into your company. It’s similar to going through a freshman orientation program in college if you had one during your first week.
Employee onboarding is a sequence of events aimed to help new workers become familiar with your firm, your team, and other aspects of their new employment. Most employee onboarding processes, for example, include a welcome event (often in batches), completing required paperwork, setting up technical equipment, enrolling in training programs, enrolling in healthcare and other benefits, and learning about the company’s values and mission.
Why is employee onboarding important?
Offering a positive employee onboarding process experience from the start sets the tone for new workers. New hires frequently return the effort they put into the onboarding process. If you provide a mediocre onboarding experience, they’ll probably give you a mediocre work performance until they find the next adventure that piques their interest. And if you give them a fantastic first impression, they’ll put their all into their work to match the enthusiasm.
Statistics back this up as well. Companies that use a standardized remote onboarding process see a 50% increase in new hire productivity compared to those that don’t. This goes back to our earlier remark about leveraging onboarding to reduce their learning curve.
3 important factors to create a seamless employee onboarding experience
Employee onboarding is a difficult task. If you offer too little, you risk losing your employees’ interest in the near future. If you cram too much into it, the stress of performing in their new job can overwhelm them.
The Goldilocks concept is a terrific method to build a world-class employee onboarding experience. The rule, which is based on the fairy story Goldilocks and the Three Bears, claims that “When working on projects that are right on the border of their existing abilities, humans experience peak motivation. It’s not that difficult. It won’t be easy. It’s just right.”
That means you must design an onboarding process that is simple, well-paced, and productive all at the same time. Ignore the notion that all of your onboarding activities must be completed in a single day or week.
Frequently, the process of onboarding a new employee begins even before they enter your office.
For example, onboarding a new product marketing manager who is slated to join your team next month might entail keeping in touch with them via email or responding to their questions, if any.
However, onboarding is rarely completed after the first day. After the niceties, the true work of acquainting new staff with their jobs begins. Here are three methods to give your new hires a positive onboarding experience and help them succeed:
1. Create a thought-through onboarding program
Gallup conducted a study of millions of employees a few years ago to determine the quality of their onboarding experience. As a result, Only 12% of respondents believed their company did a good job onboarding new employees.
One of the most crucial interactions that new workers have with your company is onboarding. Every interaction a prospective employee has with your company during their journey either pulls them closer to or further away from your brand. As a result, you should consider the experience you provide them from the moment you shortlist and interview a candidate.
It is critical for stakeholders such as HR managers and recruiting managers to create interview playlists that other members of the organization can subscribe to and listen to. This allows them to find the finest hiring processes while providing a consistent experience to potential workers beginning with the interview.
Here’s how to divide your onboarding program into three areas to make it easier for new hires to learn the ropes at their new job:
Bridge the knowledge gap with training and feedback
Onboarding is an excellent moment to provide thorough product training and strengthen your new hires’ subject knowledge. Use the onboarding time to fill in any knowledge gaps new hires may have regarding your product or company’s internal operations. For example, if your sales recruits are taking customer calls during onboarding, record the calls so you can provide them with customized, asynchronous coaching and feedback based on actual discussions.
Set realistic SLAs
Onboarding is also a great time to teach new employees about their team’s standard operating procedures (SOPs) and establish service level agreements (SLAs) with their cross-functional partners. When onboarding a customer care representative, make sure they are aware of the essential KPIs for their team as well as the SLAs they have with the technical team or end customers.
Give them the big picture
Finally, offer them a high-level review of your company’s goals and vision so they may understand how they can assist in achieving them. Set reasonable, time-bound goals for them to reach, based on the Goldilocks principle, so they are motivated to help the firm grow while shining in their new position.
2. Offer frequent touches for the first three months
This might be three weeks or two months, depending on your organization. However, three is usually the ideal number because it takes an average of three months for a new sales professional to start making sales calls on their own in a typical B2B environment. For new employees on all customer-facing teams, the transition period is roughly the same—assuming you’ve set the correct learning milestones.
You can give your new employees all the tools they need to succeed if you spread your onboarding process out over three months. As a result, develop coaching programs to assist you in accelerating the new employee’s learning curve.
The only limitation is that in the post-pandemic era, you can’t rely on in-person training programs. In 2021, the pandemic does not appear to be going away. Even if the force that keeps us glued to our desks had an end in sight, virtual coaching programs appear to provide a superior overall return. Instead of overwhelming new recruits with the full curriculum at once, a remote training program stretched across multiple days, weeks, or months makes employee training easy to follow and self-paced.
Furthermore, providing your new hires with access to conversation intelligence tools such as Auzmor can help you win big in the long run. Regardless of the tools, team leaders across all functions are responsible for providing a few touches here and there to help new employees understand the correct balance between expectations and the Northstar KPIs.
3. Facilitate cross-functional collaboration
HR isn’t the only staff responsible for onboarding new workers; it’s a company-wide function. One of our main takeaways from onboarding new employees is that cross-team communication helps speed up the integration process for new hires.
One team’s capacity to collaborate effectively with the product, marketing, sales, customer success, and customer support teams is known as cross-functional collaboration. A smooth onboarding process allows new workers to gain a 360-degree perspective of the organization and establish critical cross-functional ties.
We recommend that you expose your new hires to people from all other departments so that they can seek advice from a team expert if they have a question. New hires can create important alliances and overcome organizational silos with the help of a formal introduction with key people across the organization.
This is especially important in today’s work culture, which is remote-friendly, asynchronous, and geographically spread. Use tools like Slack, and ClickUp, and facilitate free-flowing communication between teams so that new workers can fit in right away.
