Great Employee Onboarding Means The Warm Fuzzies
It seems like a simple orientation, manual, or training videos are more than enough for employee onboarding, but research proves otherwise. Employers are doing a good job of communicating rules and regulations, but not so good on communicating workplace culture.
Failure to adapt to the workplace culture is one of the major reasons people quit. Helping new employees adapt to workplace culture, especially during the onboarding process, is the key to leveraging productivity and avoiding thousand-dollar loss in employee turnover.
In a world where employee turnover costs your business $15,000 or more, building an effective onboarding process, should be high on your to-do list. Not all companies have an onboarding process and just leave an employees line manager to take care of new employees. HR professionals should understand that this is one of the worst things that can be done. Whilst some companies make onboarding mistakes in their processes, the worst is not having a process at all. This reflects poorly on a company’s culture and fails to satisfy new employee orientation and ultimately negatively impacts on their first day of work.
Fixing the System: What’s Currently Wrong with Orientation Programs
As an employer, you might think your employee orientation program is just fine. After all, your business knows the hiring process and has several well-trained employees as proof. However, first impressions count, and this is especially so on a new hire’s first day. It can be stressful joining a new team and meeting your new coworkers for the first time, so the human resources department needs to ensure that a new team member understands the company culture and isn’t just handed the employee handbook and left to their own devices.
If you’re like most employers, your onboarding process and onboarding experience looks something like this:
Employer sends a welcome letter
Employees fill out the new hire paperwork
(Optional) Someone from HR goes through a PowerPoint presentation, notes, or handouts that explain the policies, procedures, and benefits of working at the organization
(Optional, but adds bonus points) You might get to eat some food, hear a presentation from a C-level executive, or play a corny ice-breaking game.
The typical new employee onboarding process is a top-down, straightforward (and often boring) process.
The BIG problem with this traditional onboarding is the lack of answers to burning questions that employee have when starting a new job:
Will I like working here?
What kind of people will I be working for?
What kind of person is my boss?
Employees quit when they have problems with the workplace culture, workplace relationships, or their boss. Most orientation programs don’t even touch this stuff. They may provide the supervisor’s name, but they don’t tell you that the supervisor will send three angry emails to all office staff if the coffee machine is broken. They also fail since they do not tend to feature a process to check in with the employee after the first week or first month to see if they need anything and if they are settling in well. Onboarding software is available that can help the hiring manager and HR department with all these aspects.
How to Fix Boring Onboarding: 5 Easy Keys Your Boss or HR Person Can Implement Today
Contrary to belief, building a successful onboarding program for a new employee’s first day at their new company doesn’t require a lot of time or money. It only requires creativity and planning from the office manager, which is luckily right up your alley.
Instead of simply asking, “what do I think my new hires need to know?”, also ask them what they want to know so they can equip themselves with the information they need to approach their new role. This is the key to a successful onboarding plan.
Answering those questions could take awhile, but you don’t have to wait to start or improve your onboarding process.
You can do it now with this checklist of 5 cost-effective tips for new employee onboarding:
Invite new hires to a meeting
One quick way to get new hires onboarding is by inviting them to a meeting. Doing so allows employees to get a glimpse of how things are in the workplace.
Assign a mentor for the first 45 days
Mentoring can be a key tool in helping retain your employees beyond the dreaded first 45 days in which an employer might experience 20% turnover. Developing a formal or informal program is a great way for businesses to shorten the time it takes new employees to adapt to workplace culture and become productive employees.
Include new hires in future onboarding sessions
Adapting to the workplace culture is key to employee productivity and retention. One interesting way that your business can support this is by involving new hires in training future new hires. Because of their status, new hires have a unique perspective on the workplace that can complement the orientation efforts of HR and management. New hires are the perfect guides to help welcome future new hires because they have empathy and perspective for the newest kid on the block.
Create a ritual for new employees
Every workplace has rituals, from what time Erica gets her coffee to the chairs sit in when taking lunch breaks. Most of these rituals are unconscious processes, but that doesn’t mean your business can’t use them. Examples of rituals that you might consider include:
- Inviting new employees to a restaurant after work that long-term employees visit
- Holding a party where you invite new hires to mingle and get to know the team in a casual environment
- Create a memorable welcome kit with some sweet swag they can show off to friends and family as well as useful information like a seating chart/campus map, team members’ favorite nearby lunch spots, and some of the books that have shaped your organization and its values.
Get constant feedback from everyone involved in the onboarding process
Take time to follow up with the new hires that come through onboarding programs. Go beyond the simple survey. Get feedback from new hires, HR, supervisors, and others to see where your onboarding programs are working and where they aren’t.
Welcome to the future of work, with culture at the forefront.
There has been a lot of thought and dialogue lately concerning the future of work. Unfortunately, that discussion hasn’t quite reached onboarding programs – the very beginning of anyone’s introduction to work. While the technology we used to orient and integrate workers has changed (for example, paper handouts to PDFs), we are still treating the onboarding process as a boring, top-down procedure.
It’s the office manager’s job to change that as one of the first faces that a new hire meets on day one.
If our future workplace demands innovation, we need to consider how to innovate our technical and talent resources. Doing that involves changing our perspective of the onboarding process from a simple HR resource into an adaptable tool that maximizes uses of a business’ greatest asset: people. And in order to welcome new people to the organization in a meaningful way, we need to create a culture that gives new hires the warm fuzzies.
