How Onboarding Well Can Improve Retention
When I ask a client about their onboarding of new employees, they often tell me about their new hire payroll documents. And then I say to them, "What about the other onboarding activities?"
And I get a blank stare...
Just to refresh this statistic from my blog on Pre-boarding:
“Even after accepting a position, 91% are willing to quit within the first month and 93% during the probation period if the job doesn’t match their expectations.” - survey from Robert Half
With that said, let’s take a look at some of my favorite strategies around onboarding new employees:
Your New Goals for Onboarding:
1. Get your new employees super excited - one CEO of a large corporation we created onboarding for said, “I want to make the new hire run through the wall for our company”. They need to be fired up when finished with onboarding.
2. Help your new employees understand the general employment policies and expectations - This should also be company wide, but they need to know the information.
3. Make them feel like they made the correct decision in taking this job - Sounds like it is not your job, but it is.
4. Tell your company story - You want new employees to get behind the mission, values, and history of your small business.
5. Help them to create great relationships - Introduce them to people around the office. Set up lunches for them with different people that will be useful to know.
6. Help them to learn necessary skills - This is the basics, but set them up well to learn the role
7. Help them to know where to go for help and information - If they have questions about anything, they should know the best people to answer them.
Keep in mind the following statistic:
“A strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent.”
With these new "Onboarding Goals" in mind – think to yourself.
Is this a strength of our company?
When new employees are done onboarding, are they so aligned and ready to go that they hit the ground running with excited anticipation?
If not, let’s get to work. Two pieces of advice:
#1 – The importance of setting aside the time to do onboarding well.
The boss needs to participate and understand the importance of setting aside precious time in the first 2 weeks to do this well. We find that this is a real problem. If a boss doesn’t understand this critical need to onboard well, they just throw them in the job quickly to get work done. They are undermining future productivity without giving onboarding adequate time and attention.
#2 – The boss is the best person to onboard
The boss acts as a quarterback to determine what all is needed and to set up meetings and programs either with HR or alone if no HR exists to make sure all the objectives are met.
We will delve into more onboarding best practices next time!
Here are some links to our website and podcast. If you are a small business with recruiting or HR needs, please reach out to me at cfiler@innovative-outsourcing.com