5 Best Practices in Employee Onboarding
To ensure that new joiners become efficient at their work, organizations implement onboarding or induction programs. Every employee, experienced or otherwise, undergoes this process to learn about their new role as well as the company culture.
Traditionally, onboarding has been a one-time process and a cumbersome one at that. In modern times, technology has enabled optimal use of resources, and its impact has been observed on the employee onboarding experience as well.
In this blog post, we’re going to look at some of the best practices in employee onboarding to help you maximize efficiency. Before we do that, let’s shed some more light on the importance of onboarding.
Importance of Employee Onboarding
Employee onboarding has different meanings for different people. Most organizations tend to use orientation and onboarding interchangeably. However, they aren’t the same. The former is just an event that occurs during the entire onboarding process.
Onboarding takes at least 90 days to ensure that your new employees have perfectly assimilated to their new work environment. In the absence of a formal onboarding process, organizations experience turnover as high as 50% in the first year.
An impactful employee onboarding experience helps new employees optimize their performance and feel more valued. Instead of a one-time event, onboarding is typically a year-long process that requires a strategic plan.
Best Practices in Employee Onboarding
Now that you’re aware of the significance of onboarding, it’s time to introduce you to some of the best practices in employee onboarding.
Let’s begin with the first one:
1. Leverage Cloud-based Onboarding
Cloud-based onboarding solutions enable lesser work and greater productivity. Using the right onboarding platform, you can streamline the entire process and gather all content into an integrated system.
Moreover, you can integrate background checks, healthcare, payroll into one platform while ensuring compliance. Beginning a pre-onboarding process before the date of joining becomes easier with a cloud-based onboarding system.
By offering onboarding content over mobile devices (stored over the cloud), your employees can access it anytime and anywhere. In the remote work scenario, incorporating a cloud-based onboarding system is one of the best practices in employee onboarding.
Listed below are the other benefits:
- Ensure compliance with federal and state laws
- Eliminate human errors by leveraging automation
- Quickly upgrade the onboarding solution if and when needed
- Bring tremendous value to the team
- Boost the company’s profitability
- Gaming solutions can foster cultural development and increase engagement
2. Connect New Hires with Coworkers
Second, on our list of best practices in employee onboarding is the connection with coworkers. While team building is an inherent part of onboarding, the current remote work scenario has made us realize the importance of team-building even more.
Given the social restrictions still imposed in many parts of the world, employees often feel isolated. In fact, even today, many new hires have to go through the entire onboarding experience digitally. Not having the opportunity to connect with coworkers does little for team-building exercises.
Since many companies have moved a certain percentage of their workforce to a remote work environment or plan to give a permanent work-from-home alternative to their employee, connecting new hires with their coworkers becomes even more important.
Many employee onboarding software tools offer a ‘mentor feature’ wherein you can assign seasoned managers to each new hire. Apart from that, you can also facilitate team introductions using the power of videos.
3. Create Cloud-based Documentation
Signed documents and paper reports are a feature of conventional employee onboarding programs. Not only is the traditional process inefficient, but it also overwhelms the new hires. When it comes to file sharing, we recommend opting for the digital route.
Through content-sharing platforms like Kytes, you can share onboarding content in the form of eBooks, videos, games, infographics, and more. Many onboarding software tools have e-signing features that help you keep the process safe and online.
Not to mention, it would help you save resources generally spent on printing documents and all the paperwork. Moreover, your employees would be able to access it when needed.
4. Improve Training Efficiency
If you want to offer self-paced learning and improve retention of information, eLearning is one of the best practices in employee onboarding. Research suggests that it’s an incredible approach to enhance training efficiency.
When it comes to business operations, the onboarding process is less disruptive compared to others. It means that you can spend more time on the overall process.
Studies have shown that longer onboarding programs (90 days to one year) allow new hires to achieve the required competency nearly 34% faster than others.
Apart from that, you can benefit greatly by hiring eLearning practitioners to develop the onboarding course for your organization. Important practices such as weeding, chunking and scaffolding can increase the value of onboarding materials.
In addition, the visual appeal, interactive elements and multimedia would boost the overall engagement of your new hires.
5. Incorporate a Blended Approach
Moving to a digital, cloud-based onboarding program doesn’t mean you have to abandon all forms of group training sessions or face-to-face contact. The process then runs the risk of feeling more impersonal. Instead, you can opt for a blended approach.
In this approach, you can:
- Include eLearning elements
- Incorporate face-to-face meetings with coworkers, mentors, supervisors, managers, and HR staff
- Include webinars and seminars
- Convert employee handbooks into interactive eBooks
With the help of the blended approach, you can save money and reduce the resource it takes to improve the onboarding process.
While creating employee onboarding content, you need to keep your employees in mind. Think from their perspective and see how you can improve the eLearning content further.
In a Nutshell
By incorporating these best practices in employee onboarding, you can greatly improve employee retention and productivity. Your employees will feel less stressed and more connected to the rest of the team.
An efficient onboarding process is beneficial for company leaders, old and new hires alike. By minimizing administrative tasks and offering engaging onboarding content, you can transform new joiners into seasoned employees.
