Did you know turnover can be as much as 50% in the first 18 months of employment and that hiring a new employee can cost more than $4,000 before salary and benefits?
With stats like that, doing everything you can to keep your employees is just good business and that means creating an excellent employee onboarding process. Great onboarding can help give your employees a better sense of their work, the company, and their place within it.
But how do you make sure your onboarding process is as good as possible? That’s where this article can help.
What we’ll cover
- The benefits of employee onboarding
- How to build an employee onboarding process that works
- Outline the employee onboarding journey
- Create an employee onboarding checklist for each stage in the onboarding journey
- House your onboarding materials in a centralized location
- Leverage technology to enhance your onboarding processes
- Track essential onboarding metrics
- Encourage feedback every step of the way
The benefits of employee onboarding
The importance of the new employee onboarding process cannot be understated because of how much it can do for the relationship between the employee and the company as a whole. If done right, you’ll make more than a good impression on your employee and hopefully see everything from increased productivity to higher levels of engagement.
Here are a few other benefits a great employee onboarding process can bring:
- Compliance with company policies and procedures: New hires will get to know the ins and outs of your company much quicker with better onboarding, reducing speed bumps down the road.
- Better communication: Part of a good onboarding is plenty of facetime between the new hire and their managers, coworkers, and teammates.
- Higher job satisfaction: Making new hires happier starts with outlining clear goals and steps for how to achieve them, which is a key component of onboarding.
- Less stress across the board: Managers will be less stressed because there’s more of a support structure in place and new hires will be less stressed because they’ll have a clearer outline of what to do and how to do it.
How to build an employee onboarding process that works
Crafting great employee onboarding process steps is more than just cobbling together some decent ideas—it’s about having a solid framework that guides the entire process. This means customizing your strategy to your industry or even the specific roles you’re hiring for.
Step 1: Outline the employee onboarding journey
To start outlining the onboarding process, consider that the average timeline should be 6–12 months. That’s because onboarding is so much more than orientation or your new hire’s first week!
There are six main steps to consider:
- Preboarding: New hires sign their contracts, review paperwork, and start casually familiarizing themselves with the company’s mission
- First day and orientation: Attend meet-and-greets, learn more about the company’s values and culture, and get acquainted with the office and/or team, including getting their basic equipment set up
- First week: More thorough training, one-on-ones with teammates and management, and getting deeper learning of tools and systems
- 30-60-90 day check-ins: At each of these milestones, the new hire will have a goal to meet that helps them ramp up their performance and productivity by giving them clear benchmarks
- Annual review: After their first year, a progress review and goal-setting for their career trajectory
An important caveat: depending on your industry and the role at hand, some of these steps may involve more or less intensity. For instance, sales new hires might benefit from additional one-on-one coaching while creative teams might need to spend more time with your suite of creative tools.
Step 2: Create an employee onboarding process checklist for each stage in the onboarding journey
To create thorough onboarding checklists, consider sorting employee onboarding process steps by the department or person handling them. We recommend creating at least four different onboarding checklists: one for managers, one for HR, one for IT, and one for the new hires themselves.
Nonetheless, while we’ve provided some guidelines, it’s important to customize your checklists to your company and the position at hand. Recognizing each role’s individuality is part of what can make your onboarding process stand out—boilerplates will only get you so far. Making an effort to speak to the nuances of your new hire’s position can help them feel more understood and invested in the company as a whole.
Step 3: House your onboarding materials in a centralized location
Having a thorough collection of onboarding materials is great, but it’s not going to be of much use if your employees don’t know where to find them. That’s why hosting these digital content experiences in one spot with a service like Zoomforth can help keep things organized.
Because Zoomforth lets you create as many pages as you need and every page can host a wide range of interactive media, it can be a great solution for remote and contract employees as well. Not relying solely on in-person sessions or physical manuals is smart and savvy.
Step 4: Leverage technology to enhance your onboarding processes
Learning how to automate the employee onboarding process will not only help make it more successful, but more efficient as well. This is where building a custom onboarding tech stack comes into play.
Here are a few great options to consider:
- Payroll tools such as Gusto and QuickBooks to help get your new hire set up
- Digital document-signing tools such as DocuSign to collect paperwork quickly
- Content hosting solutions such as Zoomforth so you can properly house your essential onboarding info and track your employee’s progress
- Interactive, online training software like Trakstar to train onsite and remote employees
Step 5: Track essential onboarding metrics
Just like any other important part of your business, it’s important to track performance in your onboarding process so you can adjust accordingly. But what exactly do you need to track and why? Here are a few of our top suggestions:
- Time & cost to productivity: Specifically, how long it takes the new hire to ramp up to standard, expected productivity levels, and how much that costs the company to do. Often, the quicker they hit this mark, the better their onboarding has been.
- New hire turnover: How long are your new hires sticking around? Are most in for the long haul or are you seeing a precipitous drop-off after a few months to a year?
- Training completion rate: Tons of training materials won’t do new hires any good if they aren’t given the time or motivation to complete it!
Step 6: Encourage feedback every step of the way
Finally, tons of feedback is essential to a successful onboarding program. That’s why it’s so important to build that communication into the structure itself. It should be a main feature of onboarding, not an optional add-on! This can include your traditional 30-60-90 reviews, but also plenty of informal communication as well, such as team bonding and collaboration time.
Don’t rely on managers or the new hire to proactively make time for this ongoing feedback. It should be built-in as an expectation so every new hire can get the same amount of crucial facetime.
Zoomforth: Your employee onboarding process simplified
An efficient onboarding process isn’t something you can build in a day, but it’s well worth the effort. Streamlined onboarding gets your employees engaged from the start while gearing them for the position ahead.
Ready to get all of your onboarding materials together? Then you’re ready to get Zoomforth! It’s the perfect addition to help make creating and organizing your onboarding essentials a breeze. There’s no design or coding skill necessary to get started. Just use the simple drag-and-drop tools to start making your microsites. Plus, custom templates make it easy to ensure everything stays on brand.
