Keeping employees on staff can prove difficult. Effective onboarding, however, may increase retention by more than 80 percent while boosting new hire productivity by 50 percent, according to the Brandon Hall group.
Unfortunately, Gallup found that just 12 percent of employees felt strongly that their company did a great job onboarding. For everyone else, work remains to be done. And given that half of all employees end up leaving within 18 months, according to SHRM, onboarding could make or break your organization.
Of course, recognizing a problem is different from solving one. So how can organizations build an onboarding process that educates new hires, boosts productivity and reduces employee turnover? New hire training requires more than a few general meetings and PowerPoint presentations. One-on-one time is vital, with nearly 90 percent of companies reporting that buddy programs speed up productivity, according to zavvy.io.
Teaching employees how is often the focus of many onboarding efforts. It's also important to impart why. Why are processes set up this way? How do customers make their journey and why do they buy your product or service? Pulling back the curtains provides clarity. And if at any point a new hire has questions, they should have a contact person on staff who they can turn to for mentorship.
You also want to promote your company's culture during the onboarding process. Organizations should have set standards made clear from the get-go for how to treat fellow employees, for example. You can also reinforce your organization's values and purpose during training, but make sure you walk the walk.
And don't fret oversharing, at least, not with business processes. You might share customer inquiries, showing a new hire how you handled an issue. Or you could explain something that seems tedious or even commonsense. But what's obvious to a practiced hand may not be for a new team member.
