After effective recruitment and selection, the first day of an employee’s job typically involves running around various departments to complete the onboarding process. When new employees join in, aligning them to the business goals, introducing them to their roles, and engaging them well becomes daunting. A smooth employee experience with the onboarding process allows a new employee to start contributing from the word “go”. It’s one of the first experiences an employee has within a company, and it’s the only real opportunity a company has to make a great first impression.
Why is employee experience critical in onboarding?
Before accepting a job offer, job seekers identify workspace culture through the experiences of their references. Employee experience exemplifies what people encounter and observe throughout their organisational tenure. The employee experience comes down to the induction and onboarding process once an individual starts a new job.
How important is this process exactly? Well, almost 33% of new staff start looking for a new job in the first six months, and 23% of new employees leave their position within the first year. With unprecedented changes to our society, economy, and businesses, the way employees experience work has become more significant.
We believe the employee experience and its relationship with engagement and performance is critical to understand and focus on – now more than ever. Because when organisations get employee experience right, they can accomplish double the consumer loyalty and advancement, and create 25% higher benefits, than those that don’t.
Why is it essential to have a good onboarding process?
Organisations with a standard onboarding process experience 50% greater new-hire productivity. You need to stimulate and keep your employees sane throughout their employment. With this, the mental stability of new employees is crucial. You need to engage and motivate them using learning tools and face-to-face interaction. As new employee starts their role, they need to know the ins and outs of the company. You can implement such tools as online training, invitations to lunch/coffee with staff and managers to feel included, and setting goals to push them throughout the first 30 to 90 days.
The onboarding procedure is the first chance to positively impact the employee’s journey. By designing it around diversity and inclusivity, carefully optimising the experience, giving effective mentorship, and motivating to have a successful collaboration between HR and IT, your company will help make a positive employee experience that proceeds through the whole employee’s venture.
How to Improve Your Onboarding Program
Employees who strongly agree their onboarding process was exceptional are nearly three times as likely to say they have the best possible job. Employees often establish their opinion of your culture in the first few months, and misperceptions can take a long time to fix. After experiencing onboarding at their organisation, 29% of new hires say they feel fully prepared and supported to excel in their new roles.
With so much on a new hire’s plate when they join your company, asking the right onboarding survey questions provides a systematised way to check in with people. It also gives you valuable information about the new hire experience that you can use to improve this stage of the employee experience moving forward. On a strategic level, leaders can utilise onboarding information to distinguish why employees are not associating well with the company. Leaders can provide additional assets and proposals for correcting issues and engaging their team members in light of what they learn.
To do this, adjust the onboarding experience to focus on familiarity, simplicity, and culture while making it personal for each new hire.