Are you a business owner or HR manager who wants to optimize employee onboarding in your workplace? Perhaps you’ve heard of the term onboarding and want to know more about how this process can improve your employee retention rates. In this blog post, we’re going to discuss some of the best practices for mastering the art of effective employee onboarding.
First things first, what is employee onboarding anyway? Onboarding definition would refer to the process of introducing new hires into your company’s culture, values, and goals. It aims to help employees understand their roles and responsibilities as well as their work environment- quite similar to when you start at a new school or university, where they guide you through all aspects so that it becomes easier to settle down.
Nowadays, companies realize that good onboarding sets the foundation for long-term employee satisfaction and is important in increasing productivity. With effective early training continuing further would be much easier for both employer & employees. Here are some important steps towards mastering the art of effective employee On-Boarding:
1. Start Even Before Day One
Yes! You read it right! An impressive onboarding experience should begin even before a new hire’s start date with anticipatory communication and teamwork-building activities like assigning mentor buddies even before joining, which will slowly introduce them to their team’s environment building better bonds.
2. Create A Comprehensive On-Boarding Plan
Beforehand preparation helps smoothen everything, so creating an agenda including the introduction by CEO/Managerial-level Management and sharing logistical details ahead increases ease & comfort level amongst fresh joiners being able to have someone facing them.
3. Make Use Of Technology
Incorporating technology-assisted processes like online learning portals or webinars providing access to introductory information even before stepping into office, allowing free time utilization while understanding terms & policies which, if not followed, might lead to consequences but at the same time having interactive mediums using multimedia techniques can help faster & better digestions of policies.
4. Encourage Face-To-Face Interaction
Human bonds are the strongest; thus, having an introductory meeting briefly identifying each other would boost everyone’s morale and confidence levels. Make this experience even more memorable with items like giving them printed merchandise or a welcoming kit.
5. Designate A Mentor
Designing a personalized approach and providing a mentor to assist with any difficulties faced while on the job helps to bond with past experiences, accumulating knowledge bases effectively due to active supervision, and gaining insight into the company culture at the grassroots level.
6. Set Clear Expectations
Helps in getting into alignment between manager & employees’ expectation sets by explaining all goals, performance metrics, etc., explicitly building transparency leading to higher accountability and making grip over the tasks more manageable.
7. Provide Ongoing Feedback And Support
One mistake during the probation period shouldn’t lead to entire validity, so providing constructive feedback and allowing them to improve is very important. This, being supplemented through continuous check-ins from senior managers, can decrease anxiety levels and promote a better understanding of proper feedback mechanisms. Prioritise the importance of employee safety through training courses, like active shooter and workplace violence training.
8. Celebrate Their Achievements
Celebrate their smallest achievements, creating personal level relationships that enhance team-building efforts as they aren’t machines with achieving binary results but actual humans building strong bonds along the way using casual celebrations helps them feel valued, an aspect which generally goes unnoticed but holds critical importance.
9. Keep The Process Dynamic
Avoid going monotonous, let it grow, keep adding newer aspects/updates based on interactions acquired after every batch, trying to make it an ever-evolving experience so as to meet changing business needs that arise due to market trends of competition, new technologies upgrades, or, most importantly constructive criticisms sometimes received from fresher’s perspective also.
While these best practices certainly won’t guarantee that you will create perfect employee experiences, we find incorporating these steps in your Onboarding process just about guarantees improvements allowing visualization across the lifetime value of employees, and reducing overhead costs. Though it seems effortless, changes such as repeatedly conducting small experiments creating an ongoing cycle of improvements get magnified to establish long-term benefits that significantly impact the development of a tightly-knit, engaged, and productive workforce. So put on your thinking cap and go ahead with providing the best experience for your employees; the time is ripe!
