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Every business needs efficient employees to overcome the challenges of an unpredictable market. It’s become very challenging to hire good employees whose work ethics can align with the company’s values. While the daily roles of HR are still very demanding, the recruitment of professionals during the talent crunch is asking for continuous candidate engagement more than ever. The job does not stop even after hiring the right person, it keeps on bringing new obstacles for HRs.
Signing an offer letter or joining a company is no longer a commitment to sticking with an organization. If spending their precious time and a long day of hard work does not make a person stay for long then, you as an employer may have to start reconfiguring your employee management strategies from the very beginning. However, a journey from 0 to 1 is not considered very easy.
In this case, only the onboarding experience can become the solution you are looking for.
What is Employee Onboarding?
It is a structured process that provides recent hires with the information they need to function comfortably and efficiently in the organization. The term “employee onboarding” refers to the process where you introduce the new hires to the company, its policies, and organizational culture. While the basic steps of employee onboarding are similar across organizations, the length of time for each phase and the tasks involved can differ. The onboarding process includes all the activities that take place prior to a new employee starting work on the first day to provide an excellent employee experience.
Steps of the Employee Onboarding Process
Many companies take onboarding as orientation, which includes the completion of paperwork, meeting the employees, training, and all. This sometimes leads new employees to leave within 90 days. Since it plays a crucial role in retaining new hires, you should implement a strategy for employee onboarding that starts from the first interaction. A successful onboarding process consists of the following 3 steps:
1.Pre-onboarding:
Once you have hired the candidate, you are responsible for making the new employee feel comfortable before he or she starts work. You should set up a workspace and exchange paperwork to establish trust between the company and its newest member.
Important Tasks During Pre-onboarding
- Offer release: After the selection of the candidate, HRs must send a heartwarming welcome email consisting of the important links to fill up documents for onboarding, the employee handbook, and policies for giving a good candidate experience. Transparent communication familiarizes new employees to quickly adjust to and understand the culture of the company and expectations.
- Acceptance of offer: To ensure that new hires stay with the organization, managers should design an employee orientation program that helps the new hires get acquainted with the organization and its policies.
- Waiting time: It’s common for new hires to consider other job opportunities during the waiting period between accepting one job and starting another. Therefore, it’s critical to keep them engaged during this time. Maintain a good rapport with them and let them know that their contributions are valued at your organization. It’s also a good idea to plan the waiting period for your employee onboarding process so that it doesn’t disrupt the overall process when someone new joins your team.
2.Onboarding:
As your new hire begins their first day of work, both you and the new employee should remember a few key things to make it a success for both parties. For example, to welcome them to your organization, you can show them their office space and introduce them to your team.
Important Tasks During Onboarding
- Joining day: A human resources manager’s primary duty is to give a good welcome experience on the first day of an employee. A sense of belonging will give the security that brings the focus to the employee to work better.
- Interaction with others: It is important to coordinate with key stakeholders and notify them of a new hire’s start date. Human resources staff members can ask for the help of other employees to decorate the new employee’s workspace, schedule an orientation session, and organize one-on-one welcome meetings.
- Orientation and training: Orientation provides new hires with an overview of the organizational culture and its goals. Orientation is also an opportunity to show new employees the teams within the company, policies, and processes of different teams. To ensure a smooth transition for new employees, most organizations schedule orientation programs to bring new staff up to speed in their jobs. To assess each individual’s knowledge and ability, employers should conduct a skills assessment and develop a customized training plan that is tailored to each employee’s competencies.
3.Post-onboarding:
A company should not consider its onboarding process completed with only the first few weeks of having a new employee. After hiring someone new, a company should work to quickly instill the business values and organizational culture into their new hires by giving them learning and development programs, performance reviews, and more.
Important Tasks During Post-onboarding
- Engagement for 1st quarter: The goal during this time is to make the employee more comfortable and stay open to communication. In this phase, the employer tries to make the employee quickly fit into the company. It is the most sensitive time for a new hire as well as for the company.
- Engagement for 1st year: The transition period allows the new employee to become familiar with the organization and for the organization to learn about the new employee. In this phase, the employer may be able to know the new hire’s performance. Since, one year is not a short time, anyone can analyze the improvement and get 360-degree feedback about the employee. During this time, organizations should schedule training sessions, analyze their ability, and more to make them beneficial resources for the company.
How Can You Ensure That Your Company’s Employee Onboarding is Effective?
Understanding the effectiveness of employee onboarding isn’t rocket science. To get a better understanding of how well your strategy is working, collect two types of data:
- Data based on quantity: It is numerical information that can be measured and tracked. These statistics will give you some insight into retention rates, productivity, and training completed.
- Data based on quality: This information is gathered by conducting interviews, surveys, and other research methods. Open-ended questions on employee onboarding surveys asking employees to share their thoughts and feelings will help you understand the qualitative aspects of onboarding.
These metrics can give you the results you are looking for or you can collect the views from the new hires which can be right or wrong.
Transforming Employee Onboarding Through Automation
HR leaders are often tasked with too many responsibilities. The HRs spent a lot of time finding resourceful employees. Even after hiring, they have to take care of every tedious work like scheduling training sessions, meets, and more during the onboarding process which is very tiring for them. Rather than forcing them to work through a cumbersome onboarding process, automation can reduce their workload.
By using Employee Onboarding Software for automation, businesses can ditch their onboarding checklists and forms in favor of automated employee workflows. Automated employee workflows by HRMS Software reduce the complexity of the approval process and make it easier to retrieve information about an employee’s status or troubleshoot problems. An automatic workflow is transparent, making it easy to pinpoint a problem or retrieve information about an employee’s status.
With a system that automates onboarding tasks, you and your staff are freed from running after employees and assigning the tasks of paperwork to managers. The system notifies key personnel when any delays occur in the onboarding process, and only your intervention is needed when the software finds bottlenecks.
Let’s wrap it
Constraints within the onboarding process can be fairly a common challenge the companies are facing these days. Since it is one of the most important factors to engage the right talent, modern organizations are continuously working on a foolproof strategy but sometimes it may fall short because every human is different. For example, candidate A may like the engagement with the company, but candidate B may not like to communicate a lot.
In this way, an HR manager should be flexible to change the direction to engage him/her. Even after implementing a lot of plans to engage the right talent, if it’s not fulfilling your hiring goal then you can get in touch with Akrivia’s experts to know how our onboarding software can take your burden by automating tasks in seconds.
