Onboarding is the highest-impact period of an employee’s time at your company. In fact, 93% of employers agree that onboarding can make or break it when it comes to employee retention.
Bad onboarding is bad for business: new hires are twice as likely to look for a new job if they have a poor onboarding experience, and each of those resignation letters cost between 50-200% of the employee’s salary. Likewise, good onboarding is great for business: employees who go through a strong onboarding process are twice as likely to feel prepared and over three times as likely to feel committed to their new job.
When putting together your onboarding process, the choices you make will impact employee retention, learning, performance, and — by extension — your company’s bottom line. In fewer words, onboarding matters. A lot.
That's why we put together the ultimate guide for onboarding to map out everything you need to make an excellent first impression and convert new hires into great, long-lasting team members. Strap in. We’ve got a lot to cover.
New hires are twice as likely to look for a new job if they have a poor onboarding experience.
The impact of onboarding — positive or negative — ripples throughout an employee’s entire time at your company. When you invest in creating a positive and valuable onboarding experience, new hires will appreciate it, and the company will be better off.
A lack of investment in employee development is the number-one reason employees leave a job. Without enough support, new hires start off their job with doubt and distrust, driving 20% of them to quit within their first 45 days.
Don’t miss your first (and biggest) opportunity to demonstrate you’re invested in their growth. Onboarding helps them acclimate to the day-to-day and demonstrates your employee value proposition by investing in their growth from the start.
Strong onboarding processes leverage organization and tech to get through new-hire admin tasks quickly (and without boring them to tears).
Starting a job is, by nature, an admin-heavy process. The average onboarding program has around 50 admin tasks alone, including setting up company accounts, filling out tax documents, signing employment contracts and forms, and getting on the payroll. Paperwork is a buzzkill, and without an efficient process in place, it can stifle the momentum a new hire has coming into the job.
If employees take half a year to become productive, nobody wins. Fortunately, a strong onboarding process can double new-hire productivity.
Employees need a high-learning, low-stakes period to acquire skills and become familiar with your tools and processes, and onboarding is the perfect time to do it.
Onboarding is a pivotal moment for community building and welcoming new people into your existing community. Ideally, new hires will plant the seeds for professionally and personally meaningful relationships during onboarding. Otherwise, they may feel isolated and build walls that keep them from being a happy or productive member of the team.
“Our understanding of what leads to professional satisfaction is often misplaced. People tend to overestimate the importance of the what when they should be focusing on the who.” — Rob Cross, coauthor of The Hidden Power of Social Networks
If we had to name the single most important goal of onboarding, an emphasis on company culture might just be it. Culture drives positive organizational results, but when it’s vague or disconnected, it can actually undermine them. Plus, these days, people care about culture more than pay or titles.
If your onboarding program helps new hires feel like a part of your company’s team, everything else will fall into place much, much easier. At 360Learning, for example, our culture is built around collaborative learning. If we get new hires on board with our culture of collaborative learning, future challenges are much easier to tackle because we’ve established a precedent of accountability and peer-based learning.
What do we want? Great onboarding! When do we want it? Now!
Below, we’ve laid out a step-by-step onboarding guide to help you create a top-notch onboarding program. Use these steps like a roadmap to make sure you’re heading in the right direction.
If you’re waiting for an employee’s first day to kick off onboarding, you’re already behind. Preboarding is a great time to get an incoming hire excited about your new relationship. They’re probably nervous about their first day and stressing about what to wear. Consider that an opportunity to get on their good side before they step foot in the office (or log on to the server) for the first time.
There are nine key steps to a winning preboarding experience:
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If preboarding is the first encounter, day one is the first date. It’s an opportunity for you and your new hire to really get to know one another and prove you don’t have smelly breath. More importantly, it sets the foundation for (hopefully) many dates to come.
Congrats! You made it past the first date. Next, you and the new hire will start getting used to seeing one another on the regular. It’s important to hold their interest, but you can’t be too clingy.
Over the first month, you and the new hire wrap up the get-to-know-you phase and start going steady. You may not have said the L-word yet, but that’s completely normal.
After 90 days of onboarding, you’ve successfully cleared the new-relationship hurdle. You’re not quite married, per se. In fact, your chances of tying the knot — long-term employee retention — increase if strong onboarding practices continue throughout the new hire’s first year. However, after three months of strong onboarding, you’ve built a foundation for a healthy, long-lasting relationship.
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The nitty-gritty details of onboarding will look different for each company, but these high-level strategies are sure to elevate any onboarding program.
Scalable onboarding is repeatable, resistant to human error, and resilient to unknown changes (such as COVID-19). Plus, done right, onboarding naturally grows alongside your company.
Here’s what we learned from Better.com's onboarding process for growing from 350 to 3,000 employees:
Creating a solid onboarding program from scratch requires a lot of planning. Don’t forget to plan some wiggle room, too.
Top-down management doesn’t work, and onboarding is no exception. A sense of discovery goes a long way, and your employees will appreciate having some control over their onboarding experience. In the spirit of collaboration, encourage your new hires to:
Picture this: you show up for the first day of work and a dense instruction manual is sitting on your desk. There’s a sticky note that says, “Here’s how to do the job. Finish this in 90 days.” That sinking feeling in your gut is exactly why personalizing onboarding is so important.
Onboarding isn’t one-size-fits-all. Great onboarding uses personalization to make the process more engaging, thereby improving learning outcomes. Personalization drives greater retention of learning material because learners are more authentically engaged when the content is specific to them. Don’t forget that actual people will be living through your onboarding program.
Like a new relationship, great onboarding depends on honest, consistent communication. Establishing a healthy cadence of communication during onboarding is key to build lasting trust, boosting employee engagement and performance, creating an effective feedback loop, and keeping new hires on track.
At 360Learning, we’re staunch advocates of the idea that not everything needs to be a meeting. Instead, we use asynchronous communication whenever possible to ensure communication is lean, direct, and doesn’t clog everyone’s calendars.
Variety is the spice of life, and great onboarding certainly isn’t bland. Make sure your onboarding program contains a healthy balance of modalities to keep new hires interested and engaged.
Here’s the secret recipe to 360Learning’s own spice blend:
There are two types of measurement when it comes to employee onboarding:
Assessments and quizzes reflect learning objectives by checking comprehension at the end of the lessons. Surveys and feedback, on the other hand, shed light on the employee experience and satisfaction.
We use both to gauge how well our onboarding prepares new hires for the job. New hires even take a short course on employee feedback to understand why and how it’s done at our organization.
The world was already becoming increasingly digital, and COVID-19 sealed the deal. Fortunately, innovations in digital tools make it possible to facilitate a great onboarding experience for your remote employees.
As a general rule, you can employ the same strategies and roadmaps to virtual onboarding. However, remote onboarding might require some additional tools and tactics. Use these tips to ensure remote onboarding achieves all the same benefits as the in-person alternative.
Even in a digital environment, collaboration is key. Especially without face-to-face contact, new hires need extra support to learn from, work alongside, and bond with co-workers.
Virtual meeting software like Zoom and Google Hangouts are great for distributed teams, but you can have too much of a good thing. We wholeheartedly recommend an asynchronous-first model to foster collaboration without all the Zoom fatigue and wasted time.
Asynchronous communication and productivity tools like Trello, Asana, and a collaborative learning platform can help you bring new hires into the huddle without demanding hours of unnecessary virtual meetings.
Starting a new job behind a computer screen can make you feel invisible. You never meet your colleagues face-to-face, have spontaneous check-ins in the hall, or get a reassuring wave from your manager when you arrive at the office. As a result, new remote employees can feel out of the loop, unsure of how to spend their time, and afraid to ask for clarification.
Go the extra mile to personalize your outreach and provide as much clarity as possible. At 360Learning, for example, we use Trello to give each new hire specific course recommendations, goals, and checkpoints. This helps new hires stay on track and provides that extra sense of security that they’re not missing something.
Here’s a quick, personalized nudge you might see during remote onboarding:
Another way to help new hires stay on track — a particular challenge if you’re not sitting in the same office — is to provide consistent progress and comprehension checks.
At 360Learning, apart from setting quarterly OKRs, our onboarding courses include knowledge and satisfaction checks. We want to make sure each training session has a clear payoff and that the new hire walks away with a solid understanding of why they just spent time taking the course.
Employees can earn badges and high scores and track their progress over the course of onboarding:
Also, we collect feedback from employees to ensure the training was clear, interesting, and up to date. The learner can also leave public questions and comments for the course author, providing clarification for everyone who takes the course down the line.
Parents are successful when they raise children who know how to help themselves, and onboarding is no different.
By the end of onboarding, don’t expect your new hires to be masters — that’s not the point. The point is to get new hires comfortable with teamwork and collaboration so that learning doesn’t stop after 90 days. For example, one of the best markers of a successful onboarding program is where a new hire looks for help. Ideally, before too long, new hires stop turning to their onboarder or manager for help. Instead, they start consulting the company’s learning resources and their peers to overcome challenges.
To achieve this at 360Learning, we built our company around the principles of peer learning. We do our best work with decentralized, peer-driven, and accountable processes. The way we see it, as long as our employees have the tools and motivation to continually grow, the only place we can go is up.
Check out The L&D Case for Peer Training: 3 Unignorable Reasons to Make the Switch to learn how to help your employees learn from each other, or subscribe to our newsletter for more onboarding and employee training resources! 👇