How to Engage New Employees with a Successful Onboarding Program

New employee training should be more than checking a box. It should lay the foundation for your employee experience.

It’s rare that anyone would deny that a successful onboarding program in important.

The first 90 days on the job are the most critical for the long-term success of your employees. And 20 percent of turnover happens in the first 45 days of employment. That means that the business leaders responsible for an employees’ first touch points, HR and managers, have just a short few weeks to earn their new hires’ loyalty.

Yet 1 in 6 employees considered quitting a new job due to ineffective onboarding and nearly two-thirds of organizations indicate they do not set any milestones or concrete goals for new hires to attain. So where is the disconnect?

Want a workforce that is excited, energized and motivated? You must invest in your employee experience, even before Day 1.

So much more than perks and free snacks (turns out that Less than 1 percent of people care about that stuff!), a strong experience is founded on organizational values, a culture of learning and strategic onboarding.

Onboarding programs often are conceived from the employer’s perspective – as a box they need to check to transfer basic information to new employees about benefits, payroll, and potentially some compliance-related training. But what about the employee’s needs?

The best new employee training starts when hires are still in the recruiting phase. There are really two major to onboarding – the induction of a new employee into the company and a mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and behaviors to become a productive team member.

From recruit to new hire, your talent will likely be asking themselves a few questions that a successful onboarding program will address:

• Who am I working for?
• Who do I work with?
• What do I do to meet expectations?
• How do I know how I have performed?

Does your company’s new hire training cover these questions? Are stakeholders across the organizations involved beyond the new employee’s initial HR contact?

Learn how to assess your organization’s onboarding program maturity and where you can improve your program in this webinar replay.

When new employee training is thoughtful and consistent, then business results follow:When new employee training is thoughtful and consistent, then business results follow:

• 69% of employees are more likely to stay with the company for at least 3 years after a great onboarding experience.
• Organizations with a standard onboarding process experience 54% greater new hire productivity and 50% greater new hire retention
• Organizations with structure onboarding programs enjoy a 60% year-over-year improvement in revenue per full-time employee and a 63% year-over-year improvement in customer satisfaction.

*sources:

Bamboo HR 2014 Onboarding study (n= 1,005 people, currently employed over the age of 24)

O.C. Tanner Onboading Checklist, https://www.octanner.com/insights/infographics/an-onboarding-checklist-for-success.html