According to Forbes, approximately 59% of employees changed jobs in 2015 to pursue better career opportunities. Also, statistics from a consulting firm BCG indicate that your company’s onboarding process has a more significant business impact than you know — it comes second, only after recruitment.
Streamlining your company’s onboarding process assists new workers in becoming accustomed to their new responsibilities swiftly. This allows them to get the necessary skills and knowledge to become productive sooner than later. In addition, a simple, consistent, and efficient onboarding process helps create a better first impression for your new staff and retain top talent, thus lowering employee turnover.
Here are five ways to streamline the onboarding process for your company.
1. Maintain an Open Communication Channel
Often, streamlining communication while undertaking the onboarding process not only implies informing new workers what they have to know. Instead, communication is a two-way traffic endeavor, and your HR personnel must leverage employee feedback during and after the process to improve some aspects.
Your company can maintain an open communication channel by leveraging an applicant tracking system and scheduling a 15-minute weekly face-to-face meeting with new workers. During their first few weeks, you can do this to engage them, learn how they’re coping, and collect their feedback so far. Ultimately, offering an effective open line of communication and taking new employees’ feedback can go a long way in making the onboarding process seamless and practical.
What is the Onboarding Process for New Employees?
2. Provide a Clear Career Path
The first six months are crucial for recruits. Often, this is when they decide if or not they’re going to stay in your organization in the long run. As demonstrated by Forbes, if your company fails to provide a clear, realistic, and attractive career path, they’re likely to search for better opportunities.
Therefore, one of your primary objectives during the onboarding process should be ensuring each worker gets to understand all the career opportunities available to them. Also, it would be best if you highlighted what they have to do to achieve their long-term career objectives.
By offering a clear career path, you’ll increase the probability of top talent staying with your organization. Therefore, your company will lower employee turnover, which is often costly to any business.
3. Set Expectations Immediately
Usually, the job descriptions you provide in a job posting aren’t sufficient to inform prospective workers of your expectations. Therefore, during the first day of the onboarding process, ensure you make what you expect from your new staff crystal clear to them. This may include the conduct you expect from them and the responsibilities they will assume in your company. Additionally, ensure you provide them with information to help them succeed in your organization.
Furthermore, during the onboarding process, ensure you encourage your recruits to ask questions and be willing to give helpful responses. If you’re too busy to get time to train and engage your new staff, you can delegate the task to one of your experienced staff. By understanding what is expected of them, new workers can adjust quickly to become productive in their new work environment.
4. Make Your New Recruits Feel Welcome
Taking up a new responsibility in a new work environment can make anybody nervous. Therefore, even small actions of friendliness can help new workers to fit in swiftly. For instance, you can introduce a new culture of welcoming each new team member with gifts and other tokens of goodwill.
Also, ensure you introduce the new member to other members and let everyone know the role they will assume in the company. This way, the rest of the team will easily embrace the new employee as their own.
5. Draft an Onboarding Plan
Often, onboarding is a continuous process that changes over time depending on the prevailing conditions and market trends. Therefore, after every onboarding endeavor, you’ll have to take note of each experience and adjust some aspects to make the succeeding one better.
Once you take note of all aspects to adjust, you can leverage them to develop a newly digitized version of the onboarding plan. You can easily alter the digitized version over time as you take note of other aspects to adjust. This way, you can improve your onboarding process each time you experience new challenges.
Conclusion
Employee onboarding is crucial for any business that aims to realize its goals. A streamlined onboarding process can help new workers adjust quickly and become productive sooner after hiring them. These five strategies can assist your company in improving its onboarding process.
