Effective onboarding to eliminate throwing a new employee overboard

We see it all the time, the new employee starts and they’re caught between the agency that has held their hand throughout the final stages of the process and the new employer who barely knows their contact co-ordinates.

And of course COVID and remote work exacerbated all of the issues that we’re about to share.

Day one. Crickets. Or maybe noisy crickets at best. 

A Gallup poll said that 88% of organizations don’t onboard well and below we’ll get in to basic information of what good onboarding looks like. 

Why is onboarding so important?

  • We can almost ignore this one. Did you ever move as a kid and have to start at a new and wholly unknown school? That’s exactly how the new employee feels if they’re left to sink or swim. It’s just the polite and civil thing to do.
  • There is a distinct and sizeable correlation between effective onboarding and employee engagement according to this BambooHR survey https://www.bamboohr.com/blog/onboarding-infographic/ so it’s just a matter of harnessing that new employee’s vim and vigour. Good onboarding means that they’ll be 18X more committed to the organization, 30X more likely to have higher job satisfaction.
  • Employee retention, can, according to the same BambooHR survey, increase by 82%, all as a direct result of employee engagement. Rest assured, I want to talk to you about the next hire for that same role as much as you want to talk to me!
  • We all love more productivity don’t we? It’s quite strange to me that while organizations pat themselves on the back for a 2% increase in productivity through implementation of a new invoicing application, they ignore the massive benefits of improved employee engagement. One study says a 20% hike in productivity and another a 26% gain in productivity through engaging your workforce.  GET LINKS

None of this needs to be difficult but so many companies create their own challenges. While 88% of new employees say that companies don’t onboard well, companies can even identify what they don’t do well. 

Onboarding programs that last a week are commonplace, the best ones go 90 days minimum, some as long as a year. 

Onboarding programs that are inconsistently applied. It’s ironic that companies implement processes across the organization but can’t seem to get this one right. 

Pre-boarding programs to allow the about-to-start new employee to begin feeling like a part of the gang before they start. 

If you’d like to find out how we help our clients onboarding the candidates that we place just go to https://l6j.72f.myftpupload.com/onboarding/ on our website to see some of the documents that they get from us. And if you drop us a note from the same page then we’ll send you two templates for you to put an onboarding program in place.