How to Successfully Onboard New Employees
When it comes to hiring new talent, you want the very best. Actually, you want the best of the best – the rock star employee that’s going to help you take your company to the next level.
That’s a great goal for you – but what about your employees? When it comes to onboarding new employees, a lot of companies get it wrong, so much so that they end up with a high employee turnover rate.
Turnovers hurt your bottom line, can ruin the reputation of your company, and put a lot of strain on the employees you are able to retain.
What can you do to ensure that onboarding new employees is not only an important part of your operations checklist but one that will help retain your new hires?
How to Onboard New Employees: Creative Ways to Onboard New Employees
The goal of hiring a new employee is to get someone on your team who will help increase your customer satisfaction rate, and thereby your bottom line. In order to do that successfully, you need to create a new employee onboarding experience that will make them feel happy to be on board with you. The happier your employees are, the more productive they will be.
Learn how to onboard new employees by following these steps for a more successful outcome.
Keep Your Onboarding People/Employee Focused
It’s incredibly easy to focus more on your company during the employee onboarding process. If you do this, you’re not alone. Many companies spend the first few minutes with their new hires talking about the history of the company, as well as standard operating procedures. New employees typically receive a packet relating to human resources procedures and workplace policies. Everything mentioned during this type of onboarding process is all about the company.
Unfortunately, such a strategy can severely hinder your employee onboarding process. Instead, you want your process to be people focused, not company focused. You want to avoid making the employees feel like it’s a privilege that you hired them and that the first step you require them to take is to fit into whatever mold you’ve designed for them.
What should you do instead?
Let your employees know that their identity doesn’t go away the minute your company hires them. Let them know that you value their input and want to foster their creativity. Show them that you recognize that they have unique personalities and strengths and that your team will encourage them to use their strengths to do their job well.
How to Effectively Onboard New Hires at Every Level
In addition to onboarding entry-level employees, you need to create a unique experience for those with more experience under their belt. You need to know how to onboard new hires at every level.
When creating your new employee onboarding checklist, make sure you create one for every position you’ll be hiring for, including entry-level and managerial positions. Of course, there will be some crossover but overall, the onboarding journey is going to be different for each position you hire.
Think about what each new employee will need when they start working for you. For example, an entry-level employee will need specialized training that someone in a managerial or executive position won’t necessarily need.
Take the time to imagine the journey each person you hire will need to take. Create a persona of your ideal entry-level, management, and senior-level candidates. Then, imagine what tools and resources they’ll need, as well as what gifts they’re going to bring to your company. All this information will help you create a custom onboarding checklist that will fit the needs of each employee you hire.
Your New Employee First Week Schedule
The first week of work for a new employee will give them a good idea of what it’s going to be like working for your company long term. Make their first week as fulfilling as possible so you can keep your employee retention rates high. How can you do this?
- Ask current employees for their opinion – what made their first week great and made them want to stay with the company?
- Create a schedule that both you (or the new employee’s manager) and the employee will stick to, one that will foster enthusiasm and ensure they don’t fall through the cracks.
- Pair new employees up with a mentor or office buddy to ensure a smooth transition and reduce anxiety.
How to Create a New Employee Orientation Checklist
A great resource for a sample new employee onboarding checklist is the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). The Onboarding Checklist by SHRM is comprehensive and will help you breakdown the onboarding process for whoever will be in charge of that task.
You can take the new employee orientation checklist from SHRM and tweak it to fit the needs of your company and the environment you want to foster.
The downside of this checklist is that it leans toward being company focused, as opposed to employee focused. It’s a great resource that you can use as an outline for your own checklist – one that’s going to create a positive impact on your new hires and make them excited to work for your company.
When creating your checklist, remember to keep things concise yet add some specifics to ensure you keep the onboarding process as people oriented as possible.
From Onboarding checklists to Onboarding Process with Metatask
While having a new hire checklist is a good place to start, at some point you will want to have a real actionable New Employee Onboarding business process. Unlike checklists, processes are instantly actionable and it’s easy to manage all required steps between many involved people – from recruiting team, to HR and legal departments, and to IT and support teams.
The great thing about workflow software is that you can create a template for your onboarding process that can easily be adjusted as needed as your onboarding process evolves. As your business grows, various policies will change – including your employee onboarding policy.
As you refine your onboarding process to make it more effective and more attractive to new hires, it is easy to update your processes in Metatask. Processes are instantly actionable, so as soon as you edit the process – all changes are seamlessly applied.
When considering how to onboard new employees, remember to stay people oriented so you can keep new hires happy. Then, add your new people-focused changes to your onboarding process template and start executing your new onboarding process today.
Metatask is a simple, business-oriented tool to create and manage various business workflows – from employees onboarding to purchase orders, proposals, budgets and just about any other custom processes your business may have.
