What’s the point of going through the strenuous undertaking of hiring a new employee if your new hire isn’t going to stick around through the onboarding process? There is none. It’s a waste of time and money.
The likelihood of them sticking around depends on how engaged they feel, and employee engagement depends heavily on the following five achievements:
- Bringing on new employees without struggle or awkwardness
- Getting them to work harmoniously with their designated teams
- Creating adherence to the broader corporate culture
- Equipping every new hire with the tools and data essential for team contribution
- Establishing a staffing value system that encourages long term employee tenure
Together, these goals give management a running start in the onboarding process, helping to ensure that employees stick around.
Routine work
Whenever you see the term “employee onboarding,” it’s nothing more or less than an abbreviation for an end-to-end employee onboarding process, including all the vital touchpoints involved in making the new hire a fully functioning staff member.
From the first email after hiring through training and integration, every touchpoint matters.
A smooth and seamless employee onboarding process should be a fundamental mission for every business – one that negates the ROI-erosion of employee churn. You have to make sure that every aspect of your process is doing its job so that you can keep onboarding employees like a well-oiled machine.
Clearing obstructions from the tracks
Arguably one of the most intense challenges in the HR arena today is the new employee onboarding process. Failure to complete this employee onboarding process to the point of mutual recruit and team acceptance is an incredible waste of time and money.
It throws all the search ins and outs, interviews, and the notice period to the curb. Even worse, it perhaps aborts a mature employee onboarding process midstream, thus showing the ugliest face of employee churn. Anyone who understands the intricacies of employee experience can appreciate that one defective touchpoint is enough to implode a huge staffing investment.
Here are the pivotal employee onboarding process steps that cement an enduring employee lifecycle:
Give a warm (and informative) welcome
Onboarding new employees begins after what often turns out to be an arduous recruitment journey. The hiring manager’s procedure is to:
- Send a warm welcome email to the incumbent welcoming him or her to the employee onboarding process
- Attach with the message, the official offer, essential fill-out forms, and company policy addendums.
- Begin communicating critical aspects of the corporate culture that underlies employee onboarding protocols at every level.
- Open things up in the spirit of uncompromised transparency to usher the new team member into the fold.
Clarify and help acclimate
When a hire accepts your offer, it triggers a whole string of events related to employee onboarding, beginning with:
- Arranging to meet virtually or in-person to go over numerous housekeeping issues.
- Sign off on fundamental policy understanding.
- Reiterating employee benefits
- Clarifying that the recruit’s expectations are realistic.
In short, HR uses this stage to outline the roadmap for employee orientation. It’s not so much what occurs in these interactions, as to how the process moves forward. It’s crucial to consolidate emotional ties between new employees and the companies welcoming them to join the team.
Keep in touch
Arguably the most nail-biting time for any hiring manager is the waiting period. It’s the epitome of staffing vulnerability because the employee may be getting cold feet or seeing what else is out there. Everything depends on the employee onboarding rapport built in the touchpoints prior. It’s vital to lead recruits into this hiatus fully satisfied that their decision is the right one. The interviewer should have the innate ability to skillfully give interviewees a sense of value even before entering the job.
Anticipate their arrival
Empathy is the overwhelming emotion at this moment. The new employee, understandably, enters the office with mixed emotions. There are feelings of wariness – trepidation even – excitement and eager anticipation. It’s indeed a groundbreaking day that’s sensitively balanced. Disappointment can seep into the formula and upset the applecart in a split second.
Preparation and understanding are key here. From having a schedule to assigning supplies and mentors, your actions will affect a new hire’s perception of the company.
Facilitate relationships
No client exists in a vacuum or can stay contained in one channel of work. Business today is all about cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. Likewise, any employee onboarding process that ignores inter-departmental orientation is significantly deficient. Bring all relevant managers, stakeholders, peers, and outside vendors into the new employee’s arena (the earlier, the better). It will speed up employee onboarding by removing potential obstructions down the line that frequently lead to frustration.
Educate
Here’s where we get into the nuts and bolts of the job description. It’s the juncture where you connect the recruit to the company’s cultural, tactical, and, in cases, strategic expectations. It’s a perfect time to communicate the enterprise’s vision, mission statement, and operational procedures in a way that’s closer to the incumbent’s work specifications. In doing so, positive collaboration, team dynamics, and inter-departmental channels come into play.
The training can range from informal to structured, using digital technologies, case studies, podcasts, and social media to optimize time constraints. Essentially, the employee journey for the next thirty or more days is mapped out in quite some detail, encouraging the recruit to participate as much as possible. Moreover, if there are skill gaps, this is the stage to fill them in.
Communicate
The initial ninety days are undoubtedly the most stressful for any recruit. Feedback is a critical aspect of assisting and encouraging the employee to complete the employee onboarding – becoming a fully-fledged corporate member. It’s a time of fine-tuning, where one forgets the broad strokes and specifics are far more pertinent. The managers overseeing the employee onboarding should assess how well the actual match shapes up versus expectations. All parties should show readiness to discuss openly and without inhibition to get remaining annoyances into an open arena.
Reaching your destination
There has to be a schedule of things from end-to-end so that employee onboarding flows smoothly. Such a program should cover all the critical touchpoints to ensure a seamless process that engages the employee in the long term. The phases outlined above steer the company toward employing people who will passionately stick with the business agenda and see it as a core career opportunity. In this way, we contain employee churn at a minimum and uplift motivation to greater heights. Any organization retaining at least 70% of new employees for three years and longer should experience a significant ROI boost.
You’ll have noticed that the order of things is not dissimilar to CX mapping. Notably, the employee journey and employee experience (EX) in terms of touchpoints can be convoluted and difficult to trace on a predictable pattern. It’s mostly the case when multiple departments intertwine in making the employee’s role fully functional. So, while the mapping varies from company to company, and from employee to employee in the same company, your company’s onboarding should follow the approximate steps above.
Conclusion
Onboarding is a function in its own right. It requires unique skills and training to enable hiring managers to climb aboard the onboarding employee bandwagon. HR has a huge role in this, but for many SMB companies, it’s not a facility or department they can afford.
Sogolytics, as a specialist employee experience group, is poised to help. When it comes to digitally structured procedures, schedules, onboarding techniques, and more, Sogolytics makes the onboarding process look easy. Gear yourself up with all the professionally available help. There’s no such thing as second best when it comes to customer retention and customer churn considerations.
In the digital era, Sogolytics is at the cutting edge of employee onboarding automation in every corner of its application. It not only saves you time, but it also creates better results, and that’s what counts.
