The Covid-19 pandemic has taught businesses many things, among them creating sustainable contingency measures. Suppose you’re a business owner; how you onboard new employees can have a considerable impact.
This can mean the difference between an engaged workforce and the expensive and disturbing process of high employee turnover. If you have an onboarding process in place, it’s best to ask yourself if it’s setting up new employees for success in their duties.
Or, is your workflow getting dragged down by manual processes? An efficient onboarding process is a vital part of the new hire experience. This is because it effectively sets the stage for what’s to come and the relationship you’ll have with the new employee. With that said, let’s look at some tips to improve your employee onboarding experience.
1.Make It Interactive
Since new-hire paperwork is now simplified, modern technology allows for a more interactive process for new hires. Using training content such as quizzes, images, webinars, and videos is often easy for employees to absorb and comprehend.
Additionally, onboarding can also be achieved by cross-platform integration applications that provide better features and benefits for operations and back-office functions. As a business, you can utilize onboarding software that provides a dynamic company directory. This goes beyond the conventional organizational charts of the past.
2.Encourage seniors to Engage with New-Hires
A new employee’s senior or manager is a vital person in the onboarding process. Gaining their trust may improve or undermine new-hires chances of success.
This relationship may also affect a new hire’s role-clarity, job satisfaction, and even their salary over time. Efficient onboarding programs must consider not just the experience of the newly hired but also that of hiring managers. You can ask the managers to share departmental and team goals.
Additionally, they can also share the standard key metrics and management style to help the new employees understand key priorities and what to expect.
3.Make Your New-Hire Feel Special
Because of the pandemic, many people have gone through tough times. As an employer, you want your new hire to know they are wanted and feel they are lucky to be there.
Also, you want them to feel like you’re fortunate to have them too. This also brings in the question of: what do you want your new hire to think when going home after the first day?
About the many reports, they had to complete? It will help if you aim to have your new employee going home and thinking about how great it is to work there. You can ensure this by avoiding the less official tasks in the onboarding process. For instance, you can ensure their work ID badge or workstation is ready on time to make it transparent that he or she is valued.
4.How About a More Proactive Approach?
This is the best way to refine the employee onboarding process combined with both communicating and planning. It will help if you didn’t wait until the new hire’s first day to begin engaging with them. Instead, we recommend starting the process in advance of the start date by communicating via email or call. This will help remove any fear the employee may have on day one as they will have a great sense of what they can expect.
5.Create a Partnered Collaboration
You can help ease a new employee into a new position by pairing them with an experienced employee who will act as a single point of contact. Creating this partnership gives a new hire a reliable acquaintance who can introduce them to the team. Additionally, this person will provide hands-on training to help the new hire learn their job more quickly and integrate them into the company’s working culture.
This is also an excellent way for the new hire to learn about social spots like lunch spots, cultural quirks, and any other tricks a seasoned employee has learned along the way. Studies have shown that new employees work with more determination when they have a friend.
6.Learn from Feedback
This is another excellent way to refine the employee onboarding experience. You can ask for feedback and then improve the company’s process based on your findings. If you’re open to new employees’ input, you can gain valuable information that will help make improvements to your onboarding process over time.
You can start by sending out anonymous surveys to new employees, asking them for feedback about their experience during the onboarding process.
By following the guidelines above, you can transform an old employee onboarding process into a more revamped one. This will help create a more superior experience for new employees.
It will also increase an employee’s motivation, which increases productivity and output. Finally, this allows them to focus on the position you hired them for.
