When done right, a positive onboarding experience can increase employee retention by 80%. Moreover, a study from the Aberdeen Group states that streamlined onboarding can generate 60% year-over-year growth. While these statistics can be rewarding, it can be challenging to achieve them, as making an impactful onboarding process is not an easy feat.
It’s no secret that the onboarding process for new employees can be a bit of a headache for HR professionals. Not only do you have to make sure that all of the necessary paperwork is in order, but you also need to ensure that the new employee is correctly oriented to their new role within the company.
However, there are many ways in which HRs can streamline the onboarding process for new recruits to get them acquainted with the company culture, thus strengthening their relationships with their colleagues and seeing more financial benefits.
Go Paperless
The traditional way of creating and managing employee documents as a part of the onboarding process can be pretty cumbersome. It can be challenging to track and manage all the documents, sign them off, and keep them updated. This can make the entire process daunting not only for you but also for the employees. This is where going paperless can help streamline the process by creating a digital onboarding workflow.
A paperless system allows all employee documents to be signed and stored electronically. This makes it easy to track and manage the documents and keep them updated. This can be done with the help of electronic signature software. An electronic signature software allows HRs to send the documents through email, and the employees can sign them using the same software. Moreover, the software also stores metadata like IP address, time and date stamp, and geographic location. This helps bind the employee legally to the signed document.
In addition, paperless systems can also provide employees with a self-service portal where they can access all the information they need during the onboarding process. This can help to reduce the time and effort needed to onboard new employees.
Going paperless will make the onboarding seamless and save you money on the overall recruitment costs. The cost of hiring a new employee can be huge as it involves everything from recruiting to training to salary. The cost of training alone can cost over $90 billion annually, according to the training industry report.
Automate the Onboarding Process
With my experience in the HR industry, I have seen first-hand how manual processes can hinder employee onboarding. When there isn’t a standard process in place, it is easy for vital information to fall through the cracks and for crucial tasks to go unattended. Ultimately, this practice only creates more work for HR and does nothing to help new hires immerse into their roles. To counter this trend and make employee onboarding efficient and effective, you must implement a new system that utilizes technology as a solution to automate most parts of the process, if not the entire process.
Automating onboarding tasks can have an excellent impact on overall employee satisfaction and performance. Recent data suggests that automating onboarding can improve employee retention rate by 16% and performance by 18%.
Several ways to automate the onboarding process include using an applicant tracking system (ATS) or a customer relationship management (CRM) system. ATS systems can automate many of the tasks associated with onboarding, such as creating and managing employee files, tracking employee training, and sending onboarding materials to new hires. CRM systems can also automate onboarding tasks, such as creating and managing customer records, tracking customer interactions, and sending customer communications.
Predertimine Training Needs
To ensure your company gets the most out of its new hires, you must identify and address their training needs before starting work. You should ask them what they need to know to be successful in the role and then turn their answers into a list of predetermined training needs.
Once you’ve done this, you can begin the onboarding process by first providing them with all the information on their predetermined training needs in one place so they can easily access it when needed.
Additionally, by giving employees access to whatever else they need before they start working for you, such as HR forms or benefits information, you’ll be able to make sure that there’s no gap between when an employee starts working and when they start receiving those things from you—which means less waiting around for them!
Ask for Feedback
If you have an employee onboarding process, ask each new hire how well they think it worked out for them and what could be improved. Then use that information to tweak your process so that future hires can easily learn about their new role and get started with their work.
Another great way to get feedback from your employees is through anonymous surveys. You can send out an email asking everyone on your team to take a few minutes out of their day and fill out a short survey about their experience working with you or on your team, then use that information as part of your ongoing employee development efforts.
Besides asking for feedback, sharing your feedback based on the training performance is vital. You would have acquainted the employees with the systems and software you use. Based on how the new employees use the tools, you can share feedback on how they can improve the usage, some tips that you can learn from other employees who have been working on the systems for years, or different shortcuts that can make the lives of new employees easier. Employees always value such feedback. In fact, according to data from Weekdone, 65% of employees want more feedbackd.
Final Thoughts
I sincerely hope the above article will help the HRs straighten out the entire hiring process and give the new employees an idea of what they are expected to do once they join their organization. I am sure this will help them contribute better to their organizations. Through this, both organizations and employees will have an enjoyable experience.
