How to Create a Positive Employee Onboarding Experience
First impressions can have a big impact. A good employee onboarding process can help you retain new hires by making them feel like part of the team, fostering engagement, reducing their stress, and helping them understand your culture. A chaotic, outdated, or otherwise bad onboarding process can lead to negative assumptions about how your company runs. It’s expensive to replace people, so this also affects your company’s bottom line.
Keys to Onboarding Success
- Begin onboarding early. Potential employees are forming impressions of your company way before they get their offer letter. Make sure your website showcases your values, culture, diversity, and what it’s like to work there. You should also have and showcase a clear employee value proposition (EVP) – what you offer employees in return for the value they bring to your organization. That can include things like compensation and benefits, company stability (or excitement at a new startup), location, development opportunities, and more.
- Ask behavior-based interview questions. Candidate experience leads into employee experience. Behavior-based questions give candidates the impression that you’re creating a level playing field, while informal conversational interviews are more prone to bias and give candidates a feeling that you’re just “winging it.”
- Provide realistic job previews. Be honest about what the role entails and what their day-to-day might look like. You don’t want people getting there day one and finding out their new role is nothing like they expected!
- Provide support tools and processes. Have a written onboarding plan and make sure you’re educating people on processes.
- Create stickiness with coaching and support. Help your new hires form relationships with their new coworkers, and consider setting them up with a coach, mentor, culture ambassador, or work buddy (whatever your preferred term is!).
- Train, train, train! Try not to put all the training on their first day (it makes things harder to retain). Learning Management Systems (LMSs) can be a great place to store trainings, but don’t go overboard; no one wants to be sitting in a cubicle on the LMS all day! And consider having some written standard operating procedures in place that they can go back and reference later if needed.
The Four Cs of Onboarding
Compliance
There’s always paperwork to do when a new employee starts! There may also be training that needs to take place (like safety training) before they get started.
Clarification
Make sure the new hire understands all the important things as they start in their new role. This may include details about their role and responsibilities, the offer letter, the start date, who they report to, when they get paid, when benefits start, etc.
Culture
Look for ways to connect your new employee to your organization’s culture. Mention fun benefits and traditions like summer Fridays, free massages, recognition systems, etc. And don’t forget to tell them about your culture beyond the pizza parties – for example, “we have a culture where mistakes are accepted.”
Connection
Think about who your new employee should know. They should be connected to coworkers, trust them, and have people they enjoy working with. In addition, make sure they understand how their role connects to your organization’s overall mission.
A Few Onboarding Best Practices
A lot goes into creating a great onboarding experience. We could go on and on about best practices! For now, though, here are a few key tips.
- Make the first day feel special
- Develop a written plan
- Be consistent
- Use milestones (30, 60, and 90 days)
- Send out a welcome packet ASAP
- Establish personal connections
- Make training easy
- Organize group gatherings
- Assign easy tasks to build confidence and ease
- Schedule some onboarding check-ins
- Regularly communicate your mission, vision, and values
Looking for more advice on creating an effective onboarding program? Purple Ink can help! Reach out to us to learn more about how we can help you build a program that fits your organization.