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onboarding processes

Definition: Onboarding is the process of integrating a new employee into an organisation. It brings new employees up to speed on company policies and benefits, gives role clarity and relevant training and helps them form social connections with their new colleagues. In short, onboarding ensures people are equipped with all the tools and resources they need to thrive in their new role.

• For Employees: It’s all about the employee experience. Times are changing, and money is no longer the sole employee motivator. People want a great experience, and they’re not scared to leave and find it elsewhere. So, what better way to start them off than with an excellent onboarding programme that makes them feel welcomed, prepared and excited to get stuck in.

• For HR: Make remote onboarding a dream. Gone are the days of in-person inductions. With many businesses now choosing to offer flexible or fully-remote roles, your onboarding process needs to be extra engaging where employees don’t have the chance to organically integrate into the company (how do you replace those water cooler moments?).

Great onboarding can increase productivity by over 70%. Choosing the right technology, where you have full visibility over the entire process, is key to making sure new hires have a seamless experience, much like they would in an office environment.

Employee retention is top of mind for many organisations this year, and for good reason. Employee turnover is expensive once you factor in things like the cost to backfill the position and the cost of vacancy. While some turnover is always expected, you still want to maximise your employee lifetime value. Replacing a new hire within 90 days is more wasteful than replacing a more tenured employee who has provided your organisation with years of productivity.

Organisations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 per cent. This should begin with employee preboarding the moment an offer letter is signed, as 11 per cent of candidates have changed their minds on an offer after signing. Extend a warm welcome to build off the excitement of your recruitment process and offer and provide a smooth transition from candidate to a new hire. Get the paperwork out of the way so your employee’s first day can be filled with celebration, introductions, and early learning. Then continue your onboarding process for at least 90 days to ensure new hires properly acclimate and assimilate to their new roles—and stay long-term.

New hires typically need more than a year to ramp to full productivity. It takes time to settle into a new role between things like getting to know your organisation and building relationships to forge cross-functional teams.

Onboarding employees the right way can speed up this process, decreasing time to proficiency and improving productivity by over 70 per cent. A great onboarding process helps the new hire become acclimated to the organisation and facilitates relationship-building between employees. It also includes goal setting, frequent manager check-ins, and employee development so employees know what’s expected of them, where they stand and have a plan to improve. Only 21 per cent of employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work, making this an impactful focus area for many organisations.

It’ll save time and lots of it. One of the biggest benefits of onboarding software is the amount of time it saves when it comes to repetitive tasks. It removes the bulk of the heavy lifting, saving everyone time that can then be utilised elsewhere.

Preparing to scale or already quickly growing? As exciting as rapid business growth is, it’s also a critical time to ensure your onboarding experience will retain top talent rather than send them running for the hills. Great onboarding software will make it easy to onboard multiple hires at once by automatically assigning workflows, documents and emails. The best bit – workflows can be customised if they’re in different teams, geographies, or reporting lines.

Need more room to store paperwork? Concerned about how GDPR-friendly your filing system is? Onboarding software will digitalise everything. Not only is it a more efficient way to store (and access) essential documents, it helps the environment too – win-win.