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Ready to Improve Your Onboarding Process – Where Do You Start?

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Congratulations! You’ve successfully made a business case to get the resources to improve your onboarding process. And, as a result of demonstrating its compelling potential ROI, you even received upper management’s blessing to implement onboarding software to infuse technology into your new hire experience. So, you’re ready to get started…but where should you start?

In this blog, I’ll outline four key strategies for ensuring that your onboarding process change effort will result in marked improvement for your organization’s business outcomes.

1 – Get stakeholder buy-in

If it has been some time since you’ve examined your onboarding process and enacted changes, then now is the time to invite others to participate…those who haven’t previously been involved in the design of this critical new hire process. Modern onboarding calls for the inclusion and engagement of a wide variety of stakeholders, and by involving them from the early stages of process re-engineering, the probability of them carrying out onboarding tasks willingly and successfully later greatly increases.

Demonstrate how an improved framework for welcoming and acclimating new employees will benefit stakeholders. While you’ve already shown senior management how your planned key performance indicators will be positively influenced by the change, and therefore have a positive impact on business outcomes, your peers (other hiring managers and administrative employees) may not have heard your case yet. Show them the numbers…especially how they impact their respective department areas, if possible.

Department heads, in particular, should appreciate the new plan’s aim to reduce turnover and shorten time to productivity, as it should prevent them from spending as much time interviewing replacements in the future. Additionally, the use of employee onboarding software will automate reminder notifications so important process milestones aren’t forgotten (i.e. periodic progress meeting reminders, benefit enrollment meetings, alerts to request future training sessions). Take it a step further and build in opportunities to have conversations with new employees that further set expectations with them about job responsibilities and performance expectations.

Having a system in place that alleviates any concern about forgetting tasks removes the urgency for managers to tell a new employee every little thing in the first week. Avoid forcing new hires to “drink from the water hose” the first few days. As a result, realize the benefit of improved knowledge retention due to more digestible information sessions being spread out over a longer period of time. Allocate the time saved by automatic software notifications toward strategic elements of the onboarding process that make a new hire comfortable and more likely to stay with your business for years to come.

2 – Make it easy for upper management to support the effort

The hard part (that is, getting the blessing of senior directors) is behind you. However, to maximize the potential success of your new plan you still need their ongoing support. Make it easy for them to give that support by telling them how they can be helpful, and giving them the information they need to convey success. In doing so, make sure their public involvement in supporting your objectives is done in such a way that aligns your improved onboarding process with the company’s image and culture. For example, if your organization is somewhat transparent and regularly shares certain aspects of financial information and goal progress with employees, then share a dashboard of your onboarding process metrics with staff members, as well. Or, if your smaller business prides itself on personalized service (including thank you notes to new customers), then ask your CEO to send hand-written notes to new employees before their first day on the job.

Other ideas for visible senior management support include:

  • public recognition of new employees via social media
  • an email to the entire company from the president welcoming a new hire
  • a 1-on-1 lunch with a new teammate during the first week on the job
  • public acknowledgment of newly-hired employees during the next company meeting

3 – Note the importance of sound documentation

The greatest plans will fail to deliver if they aren’t recorded properly…particularly employee onboarding process checklists which have multiple moving parts. Start by researching and confirming the required paperwork that should be presented to a new employee. This will most certainly vary by country, state and even municipality if you operate in a number of different geographic locations. If you’re unsure of requirements, it’s always a good idea to involve a trusted employment law attorney.

Along with the required tax and employment eligibility paperwork based on your location and industry, document which other forms and policy acknowledgments should be included in your new hire packet(s), and how it will vary based by role, division and/or location of employee. Effective onboarding software should allow you to create many different new hire packets, and then automatically present the appropriate packet to a new employee within the onboarding dashboard based on his/her employment characteristics (again…role, division and location).

Next, assign stakeholders to responsibilities for each step of the onboarding process. Have conversations with these individuals so they have an opportunity to volunteer, consent, ask questions and/or decline based on their understanding of the assignment. During this exercise, map out how stakeholders’ assignment to different tasks within the onboarding process could affect a new employee’s onboarding experience. For example, don’t accidentally assign an individual in your corporate office to be the Form I-9 approver for new hires in your production plant two states away. If possible, have more than one individual available to handle certain types of onboarding roles so that each geographic area has an appointed person in all of the critical roles. However, if for example, new employee equipment orders are centralized in your corporate office, it’s okay to have a single person in that equipment provisioning role regardless of new employee location.

Brainstorm other onboarding tasks that could add value with your stakeholders. If they’ve not previously been involved in this group effort, you may be surprised about the innovative ideas they bring to the table. As you vet other tasks for potential inclusion, determine where they should fall in the process, and whether any other tasks should happen as prerequisites beforehand. Assign owners to each of these tasks, as well.

4 – Create an onboarding roadmap to communicate expectations

Take your documentation efforts a step further by creating a visual resource for both your process stakeholders, as well as your other teammates. Share this roadmap with your new hires before their first day on the job, as well. It is okay to have a pared down version of your regular roadmap for your newest employees.

Make a detailed version of this resource available as a handout for stakeholders, and if possible, have an attractive summary version posted as a banner on a wall inside your offices and/or on your intranet, as well. Its prominent appearance will be a constant reminder for all employees to support the onboarding process in order to make it successful.

Your roadmap might be as simple as a flowchart showing the order of tasks and time during which they are executed; or, it may be a chance to get more creative and literally illustrate the “road” to new hire success…complete with pit stops and task milestone markers along the way. What works for you will depend on the culture and resources available within your organization.

This visual representation sets expectations for all stakeholders and clearly depicts assigned responsibilities by person. It is a mechanism to document minimum accepted timeframes for task completion and therefore helps to bring context to the dashboard on which you track onboarding-related KPIs. In fact, consider including a roadmap milestone that documents how frequently you conduct lessons learned sessions with stakeholders, and check on KPIs.

The roadmap helps to make clear which employee onboarding tasks need to be addressed at what time, and this frequent familiarity with the onboarding process and KPI dashboard is key in demonstrating how process improvement does in fact drive business outcomes.

If you’re ready to include employee onboarding software as a critical driver in your organization’s process change efforts, please contact ExactHire to schedule a live demo today.

 
Image credit: Harvard University by Tim Green aka atoach (contact)

How to Make a Business Case for Onboarding Process Improvement

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You know it’s time to do something better with your employee onboarding process. Your HR-intuition is on full alert after spotting the tell tale signs: high employee turnover; low workforce morale; lagging time to productivity statistics; and perhaps even lengthening time to fill trends for open positions.

But is your boss convinced that the new hire onboarding pain is palpable enough yet? As a person charged with human resources activities within your organization, it is your job to convince upper management that they need to care about this process and take action. To do so, you must make a business case for onboarding process improvement…and it starts with a discussion on how change can make the company more profitable.

Focus on KPIs that impact business outcomes

Key performance indicators for any organization are always tied to people. So, to help connect the dots between profitability and your plans for employee onboarding nirvana, you’ll need to identify and track the onboarding-related metrics that will most impact business outcomes. This means moving from a conversation that was once focused only on efficiencies gained or staff time saved…to one that illuminates the direct impact those efficiencies can have on your organization’s revenue growth and profitability.

In addition to your trusty turnover and time to productivity metrics, introduce ratios such as revenue per employee and profit per employee to the discussion with senior management. The latter metrics are more easily tracked and benchmarked, and more clearly affect the bottom line…a factor that will cause ownership to take notice when a process improvement effort can move that needle.

Next, paint the picture on how those business outcomes can be positively changed as the result of onboarding process re-engineering:

  • Automating the management of onboarding process tasks using employee onboarding software makes it easier for new employees and onboarding process stakeholders to address administrative items quickly and correctly
  • Allowing employees and managers to electronically sign and approve completed forms (vs. paper statutory forms and organizational documents) from any web-based device requires fewer HR business partners to be involved in document review in the instance of an organization with multiple branches/offices.
  • Leveraging automatic email notifications for onboarding process task reminders allows the human resources team to focus on the more strategic process elements such as culture assimilation, training excellence, fostering a sound mentoring program, and continuous analysis of new hire feedback…even with a potentially greater number of new employees and/or stakeholders involved in the process
  • Focusing more effort and enabling all stakeholders to spend more time with new employees leads to retaining teammates…teammates who are excited to be a part of the organization as a result of the attention, assistance and expectations offered in a revamped onboarding process
  • Engaged employees are likely to become productive more quickly, stay with your company longer and be better performers
  • This domino effect improves your customer satisfaction statistics, reduces operating costs, improves business output, and drives more revenue per employee in part due to the use of technology to automate the more tactical aspects of the process

Record benchmarks for current levels

During the process of identifying which quantitative KPIs are critical to your company’s success, be sure and note their current levels so that benchmarks may be established and compared against future metrics. Only by doing this will you be able to realize the extent to which your ongoing onboarding process improvements have an impact on business outcomes.

Meet with other process stakeholders to determine, in advance, where KPIs will be collected and reported; as well as, who is responsible for monitoring them, and how often.

To increase awareness of your re-engineering efforts, and to illustrate the importance of this endeavor with the rest of your organization, consider making highly visible dashboards available…either via a web-based portal/Intranet and/or in frequently-trafficked areas of your office(s). The added benefit of this approach is that it further commits all stakeholders to staying accountable to the goal for onboarding improvement. There’s no hiding from the onboarding scoreboard!

Organize your findings

Set yourself up for success when making your request for support and resources to senior management. By now you will have identified which KPIs will resonate with ownership, but also remember that your best approach is to come to management with a solution…not just a problem that needs fixing because a bunch of numbers are looking scary.

Think about the types of activities that will result in positive outcome change for your business. A helpful exercise is to organize potential items in a SWOT (Strengths – Weaknesses – Opportunities – Threats) four-square grid. This format helps to flesh out which items are the most critical objectives…as upon completing the grid, items that are truly top priorities are often redundantly referenced across more than one of the four squares. Additionally, a SWOT can help demonstrate that you are thinking outside the change’s impact on your department, and more broadly at an organizational level.

Grab your bullhorn and spread the word

In addition to presenting the raw numbers and proposed action steps to company ownership, it’s important to garner support from peers within the organization, as well. While you will need the head honchos to wave the green flag, it’s vitally important to make your peers aware of the forthcoming change effort, as well. The more you can engage them to offer feedback on how the process might work more effectively, the better your chances of future business outcomes being positively impacted. After all, you will continue to rely on these stakeholders to buy-in to the change so they are willing to help you execute the plan moving forward.

Do focus groups and/or surveys with existing employees for insight on what works or doesn’t work with your current employee onboarding process. Solicit feedback (and also communicate future progress) via many different avenues:

  • internal company newsletter
  • email
  • social media (particularly if you wish to also include feedback from your vendors and/or customers)
  • word of mouth
  • periodic company and/or department meetings
  • company dashboards/intranet

Stay the course

Approval for significant onboarding process improvement may not happen overnight in your organization, but continuing to speak the language of senior management will at least keep the lines of communication open (while you continue to amass data that supports your cause) and improve your perceived value to the organization (icing on the cake).

ExactHire’s employee onboarding software makes the otherwise tedious administrative activities involved with hiring new employees paperless and painless. For more information about our software application, please visit our resources section, try our pricing estimator tool and/or contact us today.

Image credit: Photographers expand horizons in 2010 Army Digital Photography Contest 110311 by familymwr (contact)

Time-Saving Strategies for Employee Onboarding

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“I need more hours in the day to get everything done,” is something I used to constantly think. For Human Resources professionals, this thought often comes to mind during the onboarding phase of a new hire. There is so much to do, and so little time to do it.

The only way to get more hours in a day is to shed current “time-consumer” activities or to sleep less–and let’s be clear, my sleep hours are protected like Fort Knox. That leaves shedding current time-consumers, and even that doesn’t seem like a logical solution because those things still need to get done. So what’s the solution?

You need to have a strategy for approaching your work and optimizing your time. My two favorite time-saving strategies are called “One Touch” and the “4 D’s”.

One Touch

The One Touch strategy is something that most frequently applies to paperwork. It’s a way to cut through clutter. When you encounter a piece of paper, your goal is to touch it once. I like to think about it like my mailbox: when I get an item, I either toss it into the trash before entering the house, put the mail in the “to be paid” tray, or take action on it immediately. Same thing can be said for the papers that land on my desk or in my inbox.

4D’s

Most people consider “4D’s” and “One Touch” the same strategy, but whichever strategy works for you, and whatever you would like to call it is a-okay by me. Here are the 4D’s:

  1. Do it. These are typically important and urgent items with short-term deadlines. Take care of it and mark it DONE. Think of someone who brings you a completed I-9. That’s a “Do It” task.
  2. Dump it. These items are unnecessary clutter and unimportant. Think of sales fliers for items your company will not partake or purchase. Take that to the trash.
  3. Delegate it. If someone else possesses the skill set to handle an item, pass that item on. Think of an IT competency questionnaire that will result in the IT department training a new employee. Delegate the submission and scheduling of the IT training directly to the IT department.
  4. Defer it. This is an item that you need to do, no one else can do it, and the deadline is not soon. Make sure that by deferring an item, you do not become a bottleneck in the process. Think of a new hire that submits an apparel form, but you only order new hire apparel once a month. You defer this item until the regularly scheduled moment.

To help manage your employee onboarding process a bit better, implement one of the above strategies. Whichever strategy you choose will be better than none at all. For extra assistance in implementing these strategies, consider investing in technology as part of your total time-saving solution. Onboarding Software can help with workflow and reminders, and it will require fewer touches of virtual pieces of paper.

 

ExactHire works with small- and medium-sized organizations to help them leverage technology in hiring. For more information about our employee onboarding software, try our pricing estimator and/or schedule a live demo with us today.

Image credit: Clock on East Montague by North Charleston (contact)

Checklist to Improve the Small Business Employee Onboarding Process

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Your business is agile, nimble…you’re capable of taking swift, decisive action in a short period of time. For example, it’s Thursday afternoon and your team has just finished interviewing the last of the final candidates for a newly-created job in your firm. You needed to fill the position yesterday. But, if all goes as planned, the offer will be extended yet today, the candidate (who seemed really excited) will accept on Friday, and…in the spirit of chaotic, yet productive startups, he will start work on Monday! He can just grab a notepad and some pens out of the supply closet, and do without a laptop for a few days (argh…we need to order that today) because he’ll just be shadowing other people during that time.

Sound familiar? Hopefully not, but don’t be ashamed if it is a sometimes accurate description of the employee onboarding process at your small business. It can be easy to ignore the importance of employee onboarding in the SMB space, especially if you happen to be growing like gangbusters, have a pretty good culture and perhaps many opportunities for upward movement across the organization. The thing is…those positive attributes are likely in play despite your lackluster onboarding process. Since your onboarding process is akin to your new hires’ first impression of your company, the business needs to put some effort and time into this new employee experience. The results of your efforts will exponentially improve your business.

Download ExactHire's Employee Onboarding Checklist

Here’s a checklist a small organization may use to start talking about employee onboarding process change.

1 – Envision future success

There’s no point in initiating a change effort if you won’t recognize success when it finally happens. If you’re not sure where to start, consider your organization’s current definition of employee onboarding, and then think outside the box to include other items that are now commonly attributed to this effort by the modern HR practitioner.

Think about broad stroke adjectives that could be used to describe your future successful onboarding process. Do you want to make it more: special; professional; efficient; niche-focused; standardized; personalized; etc.? Pulling out some key themes will then allow you to brainstorm more detailed ideas.

It’s key to visualize success simply so that you actually know when you accomplish it someday. And certainly the journey is never over. Upon reaching your first milestone accomplishment you’ll want to create new success goals; however, you must know where you’ve been and where you are going first. That’s why it’s important to identify potential performance indicators, establish starting benchmarks, and then evaluate movement and impact over time to determine which metrics are the most influential to positive change. Stay tuned for more details on this in a future blog.

2 – Discuss planning considerations

Before embarking on the change effort, along with brainstorming ideas, it’s important to note constraints that may impact your re-engineering endeavors, as well. For example, identify potential obstacles such as:

  • Availability of certain employees to participate in various steps of the onboarding process
  • Any existing policies prohibiting certain activities within the organization (i.e. new hires can’t watch videos about company culture and training on YouTube if your company blocks that site from employee computers)
  • Fulfillment time for provisioning employee equipment is set at a minimum number of days (no matter what)
  • Lack of the availability of hiring software to facilitate electronic signatures and approvals and task notifications

Additionally, bear in mind that your approach will vary depending on whether your human resources function is centralized or decentralized. For example, in a centralized system, an organization with different locations will likely rely even more heavily on supervisors to carry out the majority of the tasks associated with pre-boarding and onboarding since HR staff won’t always be directly available.

The complexity of your business will of course drive the development of your new onboarding plan, too. If you have multiple divisions and/or departments, then it would be to your advantage to take time to customize different versions of your plan so they each include items specific to their respective department to better engage employees. These customizations will range from different statutory forms being required depending on employee location to different long-term training curriculum options being offered depending on employee role level.

As you plan the many elements of your revised employee onboarding process, continuously evaluate how the number of stages you choose to include impacts the overall length of your process. And remember, it’s not a bad thing to have a comprehensive onboarding process that lasts for a year or more; however, it is underwhelming to cram a bunch of information into a new employee’s first couple of days — particularly, if that’s all she wrote for the onboarding experience.

3 – Identify potential onboarding process players

Planning a stage in which you get buy-in from the stakeholders involved in your employee onboarding process is a critical port-of-call on your voyage to improvement. People will more likely be active (rather than adverse) participants in change that they help shape. So, at the onset of your project, think about people who have relationships with new hires, and then also consider how the scope of their relationships will impact the extent to which they should be involved in the project. Some will be champions for your cause; while others are sufficient as supporting cast members…but you do want to engage all at the appropriate level. Potential onboarding process players may include:

  • newly hired employees
  • human resources department members
  • hiring managers / supervisors
  • people that provision equipment / resources
  • people that approve forms
  • existing department members
  • members of senior management
  • mentors and buddies assigned to new employees
  • external vendors who interface with a new hire’s role
  • customers of your organization

Depending on both the individual as well as his/her role in the onboarding effort, different communication styles may be appropriate. Take time to mutually create expectations with others about communication preferences that will efficiently support the execution of the process.

4 – Build a framework for accountability

Where many small organizations fall down is in their tendency to repeatedly bandage their process gaps instead of making time for re-engineering efforts and strategy sessions. Their immediate pain is often getting product out the door in time, delivering service that is personalized, and other issues that arise from narrow staff bandwidth. Or, if they do have a periodic project retreat to discuss action steps, they may later fail to execute those items and stay on track to realize change.

The same macro-level tendencies of the organization are often recreated at the employee onboarding micro-level, as well. To overcome this pattern, it’s important for companies to specifically document their plan for change, assign tasks to specific individuals and set milestone deadlines for project completion so that the revamped onboarding process can be put into action for future new hires. Your initial approach may involve the eventual creation of a Gantt chart; however, if you’re a small business ready to foster team collaboration, using colored sticky notes at a team meeting can go a long way, too. Brainstorm all facets and tasks involved in the process, narrow down a sequential order and then assign stakeholders action items and responsibilities by adding initials to the sticky notes. The note color coding strategy can be applied in whichever way is most appropriate for your organization. Here are some ideas:

  • task category (tactical vs. strategic vs. cultural?)
  • task location within onboarding process timeframe (first week vs. six month anniversary)
  • person responsible
  • new onboarding process items vs. old process steps
  • priority for completion (if process is being rolled out in multiple phases)

As you and your team hammer out the details, be sure and think about how employees’ task assignments and roles can affect their onboarding experience and adjust accordingly. For example, some tasks may be completed independently from one another; whereas, others require certain prerequisite items to be completed beforehand.

5 – Incorporate external feedback, tools and resources

It’s easy for small businesses to only consider how their existing resources might be altered to impact employee onboarding process change. However, SMBs do themselves a disservice if they assume that external resources may cost too much, take too much time to research/implement, or have too many bells and whistles for their needs. Here are a list of ideas that could further raise your employee onboarding process game:

  • Survey stakeholders – While the HR team is accustomed to looking out for employees and striving to make improvements, they have only one perspective of what needs to change–their own perspective. By taking time to survey other players in the process who are external to HR, valuable ideas can be gained.
  • Research other employers – If you admire any other organizations for their low turnover and ability to assimilate happy new employees, then make time to take some notes on how your organization can incorporate some of their best practices…or at least take their ideas and tweak them to fit your culture.
  • Don’t forget the legalese – The more tactical side of employee onboarding includes the requisite paperwork and documents…some of which are required in order for the individual to be in your employ legally. The employment law landscape changes over time, and especially if you hire in different states and certain industries, being aware of the latest updates is essential to avoid big costs later. A trusted employment law attorney is someone you should have on speed dial.
  • Make the most of employee assessments – A validated, job-relevant assessment tool, when embraced and used by the entire team, can dramatically improve a new hire’s productivity earlier in the employment relationship. Especially those assessments that have cognitive and behavioral elements…as they allow both new hire and manager to peer into one another’s hard-wiring right off the bat so that they can begin to work together effectively that much sooner. Scheduling onboarding sessions to discuss assessment tools and how they tell a story about one’s skills, motivations and/or preferences is time well spent.
  • Reserve a spot for technology in your onboarding process – Especially because some software companies now focus on working with small- and medium-sized companies, many web-based tools now exist that are budget-friendly. Whether it be using social media to publicly welcome new employees to the firm, building in gamification activities to improve training activity retention rates, and/or implementing employee onboarding software to make your process paperless and improve accountability further into your onboarding process with the use of task assignments and notifications…the cost of tech resources is often insignificant when compared to the savings realized by the resulting improved productivity, lower turnover and quick access to web-based information.

If you’re committed to avoiding future next day new hire scenarios, then follow this small business employee onboarding checklist to be on your way to planning innovative change that will positively impact your organization.

ExactHire’s hiring software solutions are specifically designed for small- and medium-sized organizations. For more information on our employee onboarding software, please visit our resources section, try our pricing estimator tool and/or contact us today.

Fly The Friendly Skies: Employee Onboarding Process

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Onboarding. Orientation. Welcoming. Regardless of the term your organization uses to describe the process of acclimating new hires, the goal of the process is to educate and affirm individuals in their new roles and set them on a path toward long-term success within your organization. “Onboarding” is the most popular term these days–derived from welcoming passengers “on board” the ships, trains, or planes that took them to where they wanted to go.

Recently, I took a trip with my girlfriend to France. In one day we travelled by car, shuttle, plane, train, tram, and taxi. With the exception of the car (we drove), all these forms of transportation “onboarded” us differently, and with varying degrees of effectiveness. And despite the horror stories of flying, we found that our plane trip was an example of exceptional onboarding. Here’s why:

1. They Got Us To Where We Wanted To Go

This is number one because it’s the reason we flew in the first place. We wanted to get somewhere. And ultimately, that’s really all an airline needs to do. It’s the minimum. The points that follow, though we’ve come to expect them from a flight, are instances of an airline welcoming, orientating…onboarding.

HR Takeaway: New hires have accepted a position with your organization because they want to go somewhere. And you likely promised them–explicitly or implicitly–that you could get them there. The warmest welcome and the friendliest co-workers will not make up for an organization that fails to provide professional growth opportunities and affirm an employee’s progress. It’s important to do both within a new hire’s first few months.

 

2. We Were Welcomed

A friendly greeting as we checked luggage, at the gate, at the cabin door, from the captain, from each flight attendant. We were helped with storing our carry-on luggage. We had clean seats, new magazines, pillows, and blankets.

HR Takeaway: New hires should feel that their first days are special; not just for themselves, but for the organization as a whole. The workspaces of new hires should be clean and outfitted with at least the basic essentials. As a group and as individuals, existing employees should welcome and chat with new hires in their first week on multiple occasions. Ideally, your work culture naturally promotes this, but it can also be scheduled.

 

3. Our Needs Were Anticipated

Ahhh. We had reached cruising altitude and the “fasten seatbelt” light was off. It was time to recline back, relax, and…a beverage perhaps? It’s tight quarters in a plane, and having drinks and food delivered to your seat is a nice alternative to squeezing snacks into your carry-on. We were on our way, and the crew ensured that our way was comfortable by anticipating our needs.

HR Takeaway: This–with a strong work culture–will likely go hand-in-hand with #2. Co-workers should anticipate the needs of new hires in the early days of employment and address those needs in their “chats”. Any new hire can likely find the way to the supply closet, but a friendly delivery of supplies by a co-worker does more than just meet a need–it communicates kindness, generosity, and a “je ne sais quoi”.

 

4. We Were Given Direction

In addition to being welcomed with smiles, we were given timely directions and informed of changes, connections, time zones, weather, and where to pick up luggage. These were all things we could have discovered ourselves, but the verbal reminders and support helped calm any anxieties.

HR Takeaway: An organization should obviously provide documents on formal policies and procedures. But woven in with the frequent acts of kindness in #2 and #3, verbal directions and reminders relating to policy and procedures will inspire confidence in new hires and reinforce learning. Also, it’s helpful to include specific step-by-step instructions for a new hire’s early assignments that reference formal documents (if these are assigned via email or onboarding software, this is best accomplished by using and linking to digital documents).

 

5. We Were Entertained

Multiple hours on a plane can get boring–even if you have the window seat. In-flight movies are the perfect way to pass the time and break up the monotony.

HR Takeaway: There is a lot to be accomplished in the early days of onboarding. The quicker that new hires get up to speed, the quicker that they can effectively contribute. But new hires can only “drink from the fire hose” for so long . An onboarding process that is broken up with downtime or team-building activities lessens the stress on everyone and helps to ensure that new employees emerge from the onboarding process both prepared and energized to perform in their roles.

 

Flying The Friendly Skies

Our flight and onboarding experience wasn’t flawless. There was the crying baby for 4 hours straight. My ears popped at times. There was turbulence. We had to outwit other passengers to gain access to the bathroom. And the beer prices were steep. But the airline–the crew–was at our service from the moment we checked-in, to the moment we claimed our luggage.

We safely travelled over 4,000 miles and across an ocean in under 12 hours. As amazing as that is, any airline could have done that. However, this one distinguished itself through friendly, effective service–exceptional onboarding. We got to where we wanted to go, but we also felt informed, welcomed, and appreciated along the way. New hires should feel the same as they begin their journey with a new organization.

 

ExactHire provides hiring technology for small-to medium-sized businesses seeking to attract, hire, and retain talented individuals. Learn how our onboarding solution can help your organization effectively welcome new hires and set them on a course for future success.

 

Common Problems With Employee Onboarding

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Let’s face it…employee onboarding can be problematic. Particularly because it plays second fiddle all too often to its predecessor – the recruiting process. Furthermore, onboarding is complicated by the fact that so many moving pieces must align to effectively realize an organization’s end goal for the effort…arming a new hire with the tools and knowledge to thrive in her new organization. Oh, and doing so while also instilling in her a real sense that she’s found her new work home.

Make no mistake though – the employee onboarding process must be a regular priority if you want your organization to be the coveted employer of choice in your industry and/or community. However, before you can determine what adjustments should happen with your own company’s process, it’s helpful to be familiar with potential red flags. In this blog, I’ll review a list of common problems with employee onboarding.

Failure to Launch – No Compelling Business Case

If you find yourself surrounded by members of senior management that think onboarding is still just about getting new hire paperwork completed the first day, then it will be an uphill battle to sell your boss on how the benefits of onboarding improvement will outweigh the costs. However, making a business case for employee onboarding process reengineering doesn’t have to be too difficult if you go about it the right way.

Consider the business outcomes that matter most to your company. Now ask yourself how many of those outcomes are driven by people? I’ll be surprised if you don’t say all of them…and so that’s where you start building your momentum with management. While there are certainly costs associated with addressing your onboarding issues, your objective is to demonstrate how the expected return on investment of the change will outweigh the current opportunity cost of doing nothing. After all, engaging your people to be more productive and content over a long tenure with your organization will ultimately drive your bottom line.

As you make your case for change, don’t just go for a blessing from upper management. In order for your program to succeed, you absolutely must get their involvement and public buy-in, as well. Otherwise, the program will lack the credibility it needs to succeed long-term.

Poor Participation from Stakeholders

Speaking of getting company brass to cheer on your revolutionary onboarding efforts, don’t forget the importance of rallying your peers. These are the other stakeholders included in employee onboarding such as hiring managers, new hire buddies, mentors, cube mates; and, those tasked with the administrative side of the process including equipment provisioning, payroll enrollment, form approval, etc. Even though the HR team is often the department that champions the importance of onboarding and is therefore tasked with keeping others accountable, the other stakeholders must embrace the process and make it their own, too. All too often there is a disconnect here–other departments must be encouraged to jointly own the onboarding process with HR. Otherwise, they are only hurting their own departments’ (and organization’s) productivity and morale in the end.

A root cause of this problem is the failure to train stakeholders on how to deliver an optimal experience to new hires during onboarding. Additionally, part of training should include dialogue about why the process is critical to success; and, it can easily borrow from the business case details already made to upper management.

Details Slipping Through the Cracks

Many circumstances can affect the extent to which details are missed during employee onboarding. If you don’t yet have a documented onboarding checklist then some of the following items may sound familiar. Some common examples of missed details include:

  • employee’s key card doesn’t function on the first day
  • a key piece of equipment did not arrive before the employee did (i.e. laptop, computer mouse, cell phone, etc.)
  • new hire arrives before supervisor does on the first day
  • email address isn’t set up by IT in time
  • employee uniform wasn’t ordered before the new hire arrived
  • a benefits enrollment meeting was forgotten and the new employee is rushed to make decisions as a result

Not only does the omission of these details leave your team scrambling at the last minute, but it also makes a shoddy first impression on your brand new employee. For additional motivation, think about what new hires facing these setbacks may be saying about their first few days to their family and friends. Now, think about how that might be amplified on social media. Great onboarding is great PR for your business.

Blind Onboarding Faith

Many of us in human resources appreciate the opportunity that our profession offers to really help and support people. That inclination toward a glass half-full mentality can quickly turn into the belief that doing something different is good enough…because at least it’s better than what we used to do, right? It’s not enough to just fix it and forget it…you’ve got to measure, too!

Here’s what happens when your process isn’t documented and you don’t have any ongoing metrics.

  • No one owns the effort, there is no project champion to keep others accountable (which leads to…see “Details Slipping Through the Cracks” above)
  • Because there is no benchmark (even if it starts at the bottom of the barrel), you don’t really know when real improvement has been made
  • Therefore, it becomes unclear whether the process is failing, flailing or actually fulfilling

A documented employee onboarding process enables you to state objectives and identify key performance indicators that support business outcomes. It includes periodic opportunities to evaluate progress, discuss lessons learned and enact action steps. Central to the lessons learned component, is the necessity to gather feedback from all participants…both new employees and stakeholders. Not doing so really does leave you flying blind for the future.

Not Taking Your Time

Timing is a strategic element of rock star employee onboarding. Without support from others involved, if you start off too strong, the effectiveness of efforts can fizzle out too early due to lack of direction. Or, in the absence of preparation and organization, activities can lag leaving the new employee bored and disengaged.

Many organizations don’t devote enough time to employee onboarding. If your current process isn’t comprehensive enough to go beyond paperwork and directions to your breakroom, you have room to grow from both ends of the process. Incorporate pre-boarding activities before the new hire’s first day to calm his nerves and get some of the administrative items out of the way. Then, expand your view of onboarding beyond a few days to include opportunities for training, mentoring, culture assimilation, performance management and employee feedback during the first year.

Conversely, some organizations have good intentions but try to pack too much into a short time period in the hopes of making the employee productive sooner than reasonably possible. Don’t force new hires to drink from the fire hose. Trying to digest too much information in only a few days will lead to poor retention anyway. To alleviate this potential issue, some smaller companies invite full-time new employees to work a few half days their first week. This allows the new hires to soak up the information with a better chance of retention, and it places less demand on the process stakeholders in a small business to be with the new hire constantly (thus, pulling them away from getting daily work done for a long period of time, too).

Not Customizing the Experience

Depending on the size of your organization, allowing for a good deal of flexibility may be necessary within your onboarding process. After all, some of the activities and requirements for onboarding a C-level executive at corporate headquarters will differ from the details associated with welcoming a new machine operator at a production plant in another region.

Failing to customize the employee onboarding experience can be just as detrimental as not having much of an onboarding process, too. No new hire wants to feel like the latest model coming off the just-in-time onboarding assembly line. Determine the core elements of your process…those activities that should be introduced to all new hires, and then flex the experience to cater to different new hire requirements that may be based on:

  • employee geographic location
  • department and/or division
  • employee role / level in organization
  • special accommodations for employee
  • assessment results

Overlooking Technology Solutions

Because the definition of employee onboarding encompasses so much more than in the past, it’s no surprise that so many potential problems now exist. There’s so much to track, so many others to involve. Growing organizations begin to utilize independent systems to alleviate some of the administrative burden. Emails are manually sent to different stakeholders to remind them to order business cards, create a timesheet and coordinate their department members’ schedules for a new hire lunch. Excel spreadsheets are used to keep track of which employees have signed off to acknowledge the latest policy update.

This piecemeal approach to systems is a step in the right direction; however, it pales in comparison to the efficiency and productivity that can be realized with web-based onboarding technology. Having a single system to integrate all onboarding-related forms, tasks and activities can fix many other problems…and at the very least free up time to address the other more strategic aspects of the onboarding process.

Robust employee onboarding software can handle your tasks, notifications, employee signatures and HR countersignatures, form updates, prompts for benefits enrollment, equipment provisioning, training curriculum and more. Plus, moving cumbersome paperwork into the cloud means no more illegible handwriting and incomplete fields on statutory forms.

The popularity of gamification has important ramifications for onboarding, as well. Use it to revitalize the way you train employees and hold them accountable for progress. By turning what might otherwise be tedious sessions in memorization into interactive, rewarding simulations, knowledge retention will increase and employment brand perception will improve, as well.

Shabby Face Time

Despite the increasingly prevalent role of technology in employee onboarding, it’s imperative that companies still build in frequent “face time” opportunities. Think of these sessions as chances to deepen the employee-employer bond, as well as a window to take the temperature of your onboarding process.

Companies that neglect these activities will fail to reiterate and elaborate on their expectations for the employee in her new position. Valuable discussion regarding timelines for achieving certain performance levels will be lost. Conversation about specific job success factors will be forgotten. If you don’t recognize the importance of the timing of these discussions, as well as your follow-through on any relevant action steps that result from them…your precious employment brand will undoubtedly suffer–specifically, in the form of early turnover that probably could have been thwarted.

Overcome Your Onboarding Problems

Now that you are better equipped to see your problems’ impact on your own onboarding process, it’s time to start laying the groundwork for innovative change. But with any process improvement, it’s important to visualize your destination before charting your course.

Examining the approach and creative ideas of peer organizations can be a helpful exercise at this stage of the game. Good ideas elsewhere may not always work well with your own industry/culture/location; however, a few golden nuggets will surely surface.

ExactHire works with small- and medium-sized organizations to help them leverage technology in hiring. For more information about our employee onboarding software, try our pricing estimator and/or schedule a live demo with us today.

Image credit: Seedling by Ray_from_LA (contact)

The Unsung Benefits of Effective Employee Onboarding

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Now that you have hired the employee who you envision to be part of your team for the long-term, how do you help ensure that this newest member of your team stays for that long-term? One way to help fulfill your prophecy is through effective onboarding.

Onboarding? Yes, onboarding! There are many facets of onboarding that encompass a smooth transition for newly hired employees, and which will benefit all parties involved. A new hire wants to feel informed, connected and valued. An organization wants team members who actively contribute and who fit well within the existing work culture. Both goals can be achieved and solidified through an effective onboarding process.

The first day for new hires should be geared towards bonding with their new team, learning first-hand what the new culture is like, and building rapport. Onboarding is not just a manager’s task; it is the responsibility of all team members within the organization itself to provide accurate information in an encouraging manner. Teammates need to welcome new hires and provide a climate of support for them during the acclimation time frame.

The Time in Between – Pre-Onboarding

In the immediate days after new hires accept an offer–and definitely before their first day–you should ensure that they complete many of the “to-do list” tasks that often bombard them on Day 1. Send new hires any packets, paper or paperless, that contain items like tax forms, personal data forms, and insurance registrations. They can review, complete and submit the information to HR before arriving to work. This will help them avoid a first day solely spent on documentation, while providing them with time to become acclimated to team policies and departmental/organizational expectations.

Keeping Connected – Onboarding Technology

Onboarding technology helps an organization keep in contact with new hires during the time between their offer acceptance and their official first days on the job. A lapse in communication between new hires and their managers at this critical time can potentially cause a big disconnect, which can be detrimental to relationships that must be developed between new employees and their teammates. Onboarding technology is also the most efficient means to continue promoting your organization’s employer brand that was introduced during the recruitment phase–especially for new hires that are working remotely on a full-time or part-time status.

Setting and Meeting Expectations

New hires have a lot on their minds. Whether they are recent graduates or seasoned workforce veterans, they will have acquired notions of what a workplace should be from their previous environments. They will bring these past mindsets along with them in the back, or possibly the forefront, of their minds when starting at a new place. The norms of the environment from which new hires come can affect the way they perceive and perform their tasks and acclimate within the new culture.

Since it is inevitable that some form of internal comparison will take place in the new employees’ minds,  it is important for current team members to be cognizant of this as they interact with new hires. Having a component within the onboarding process that shares norms and expectations of your organization will give your manager and team the opportunity to communicate expectations, as well as learn more about the new hires’ past experiences.

Improving Your Onboarding Experience

Simply put, there are always additional means to improve a process whether it is part of the onboarding process or an organizational based procedure. Within each new hire’s onboarding process, solicit feedback from each person. Ensure new hires that constructive criticism will help improve the organization’s onboarding process, and reiterate that their feedback will be taken positively.

The new hire’s feedback could lead to change that could positively impact the morale of the organization along with profitability.  With feedback from a new hire, additional training and employee development opportunities could develop.  The fresh, open mind of a new hire can help stimulate others to open their minds and discard the “But We Have Always Done It This Way” mentality.

As you develop and implement your organization’s onboarding process, realize that continuous improvement of the setup, content and delivery of the onboarding process itself is an objective for which to strive.  What works today for your new hires will not necessarily work for tomorrow’s new hires since we are in the midst of rapidly changing workforce dynamics.

Resources for Building an Onboarding Process

SHRM Foundation’s Effective Practice Guidelines Series outlines the Four Cs of Onboarding which gives an organization an excellent foundation on which to customize its onboarding process.

  • Compliance – Teaching employees basic legal and policy related rules and regulations
  • Clarification – Ensuring employees understand their new jobs and job related expectations
  • Culture – Providing employees with a sense of organizational formal and informal norms
  • Connection – Creating relationships and interpersonal networks that new employees need

Creating and delivering an onboarding process which encompasses the Four Cs provides initial direction that can be adapted to the intricacies of any organization delivering the onboarding piece.

A Final Note: Enthusiasm Is Contagious

Ultimately, the quicker new hires feel connected and knowledgeable about their job duties, the quicker they will be positively contributing to the overall goals of your organization. Onboarding should not be perceived by new hires and the organization’s team as something tedious and monotonous.  Onboarding is not that at all!  Onboarding helps generate excitement for something of high value–your organization, its team and your organization’s mission and vision. Enthusiasm is contagious!  Build excitement on what you do and who helps you do it!  Your organization’s mission is a calling, and positively communicate that calling to new hires in your onboarding process.  If new hires hear that calling, let them answer.

Image credit: Speak Your Mind by Ben Grey (contact)

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