A Great Onboarding Experience Retains Employees

The process of integrating a new employee into an organization is known as onboarding. Onboarding is supposed to be an experience to the new hires, not a process. If the employee feels great throughout the great onboarding experience then they are most likely to stay. This post will be a part of a series of posts where we take one onboarding statistic and break it down to understand the meaning behind it. Here is our onboarding stat of the day.

69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding

– SHRM

The Current Scenario

Companies often spend a small fragment of time onboarding new hires. With up to 20% of staff turnover occurring within the first 45 days of employment, a standardized onboarding process is essential. After the initial onboarding is complete some companies continue to offer new hires relevant training and development opportunities.

What Leads To a Great Onboarding Experience?

1. Culture Adaptation

Sometimes even the most talented new hires struggle to adjust and find a place in the new culture and so they never feel like a part of the team. A few other employees (mostly management and leadership role) bring in their old cultures with them which can sometimes prove out to be dangerous. When a new hire joins the company should take time to make the employees understand the company’s desired culture and purpose.

Meet as many different people as possible, so you can get a clear idea of the whole company and the roles played by everyone in the organization

– Joel Zeff

2. Employee-Centric Onboarding

The onboarding process and the experience should always be employee-centric and never company-centric. Companies often while onboarding focus on the knowledge instead of the effective knowledge transfer. A great onboarding program should resonate with the interests, tech habits and workplace behaviors of the employees.

3. Slow Down the Onboarding Process

Most of the companies have this habit of making the new hires to swallow a lot of knowledge instead, the companies should slow down and let the new hires consume the knowledge in their own speed. Don’t we all know that getting the people to speed quicker doesn’t necessarily mean giving them more information to consume in a shorter period of time. There is no need to rush the employees, onboarding is not a race.

4. The Bigger Picture

Many new hires, after joining some department in a company are given knowledge only in their field of work for the company. It is becoming necessarily important for the employees to know what is going on with the rest of the business. Giving the employees a bigger picture of the company enables and encourages them to collaborate and communicate across departments to help the organization innovate and adapt quicker.

5. Showing Them Their Worth

Hiring someone means that they would play some role in the strategic plan of the company.Communication often is fuzzy in most cases. It would really be unfair if the company would expect the new hires to understand and work towards the strategy of the company, without even knowing the strategies set by the company. New hires at every level of the company are completely capable of understanding the company strategy.

Be very explicit about your company’s vision, values and culture. By doing this you’ll know that new team members align with your vision, and they’ll be able to contribute more quickly. You need to give new employees a good foundation based on your vision and then empower them to make decisions about how to achieve that vision

– Chris Cancialosi, Gotham Culture

6. Upgrading the Managers

The front-line managers are the most undervalued and underinvested group within the workforce today. Most of the managers don’t have time to train and nurture the new employees as they are already involved with a lot of tasks. The number one priority of any employee should be building a high performing team. The managers struggling with their tasks should be given training so that they have the right skill and tools to be the best team leader possible.

The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager

– Peter Drucker

Summary

An employee would still stay in the company when they are well connected with the company’s vision, strategies, and their co-workers. A well-structured onboarding platform would solve the company’s onboarding problem by giving the new hires a great onboarding experience.