First day of work: is it really a hello or a goodbye?
First impressions matter, and this is a saying many human resources departments hold when they conduct onboarding for new hires. Onboarding is the final step of the hiring process, and the beginning of the official collaboration of the employee and the organization.
The good news is: your organization can prepare for a successful onboarding – one that will lead to many years of a great working relationship.
Placing time, energy, and careful thought in your onboarding plan is an investment, and the returns are amazing, going way beyond monetary gains.
Onboarding is about establishing a relationship with the new employee, and it also sets a tone for how a company or an organization will treat the new hire.
If onboarding is done and is clear, transparent, and engaging, this will set motivation for the new hire. It will improve their engagement with the business tenfold, especially those in a remote work arrangement.
What is Onboarding?
After weeks of finding and interviewing many job applicants in the recruitment process, it is now time to prepare these successful candidates to get fully acclimated to their roles in the company or organization. It is now time for their onboarding.
Onboarding is when a company or an organization provides upcoming employees with the training and information they need to help them assume their new job roles. This process will involve helping them understand the gist of the position, what their employers expect of them, and a look into the company’s culture.
As most companies don’t have an HR department, the immediate manager usually does the onboarding. But still, most of the time, a group composed of the supervisors and managers will introduce the new hire to different aspects of the company or organization.
What Does An Effective Onboarding Process Look Like?
Engaging from the Start
The first characteristic of a streamlined onboarding process is that it has to be engaging. In a study about workforce strategy conducted in 2017, several HR professionals — 53% of them, reported that employee engagement of people who had improvements done to their onboarding experience has improved.
If new hires feel like time and resources are invested in them through comprehensive onboarding, they are more conceivable to be productive and excel in their respective functions. With them being productive and excelling in their work, the company is more likely to increase its revenue by up to 26% just from effective onboarding.
With a company having a less than adequate onboarding process, negative things will arise. For every three new hires in a company or organization, one employee will leave the company before the end of their first year, and the worst is that 5% of new hires will leave the business after a bad first day.
Improvements to onboarding are beneficial for the new employees for faster integration, but they will also decrease the cost for the business in the long run.
Mentorship Program
A good onboarding process assigns the new hire to a mentor or an onboarding buddy on the get-go.
Current employees of the company or the organization already have an idea of the inner workings of the business, and they have already done countless outsourced tasks. They have an idea about what it is like to be a newcomer, so making them the mentor initially will make the new employee comfortable asking them questions they might have.
No matter what age your new employee would be, it is essential to give them a mentor, especially in the first year they are getting the hang of working for the business.
This will ensure that they are growing not just as an added asset to the company or organization but also in themselves and how their skills are honed and improved
With a senior employee as their mentor, new employees will feel more comfortable with the new company environment. It will also give them a contact person when they need something.
Strong Display of Company Culture
A critical factor in onboarding is putting the company or organization’s culture and values at the center, especially for younger employees, the Millenials, and Gen Zers. Factors such as employee attitudes, the business’s mission, the social impact of their value system, and many others constitute their company’s culture.
Once they know the culture and its relation to their value system, an employee will be more than likely to be passionate about everything they are working on and will stay for the company for a long time.
If a company or an organization’s onboarding is rushed, they risk vaguely presenting their business’ culture, which will give a disjointed impression to the new employees.
This is why consistency is essential. The longer the onboarding process will be, the more effective it will be at making sure that the new employee will know the ins and outs of their work at every stage of the company and organization.
If the onboarding is rushed and short-lived, new employees will feel overwhelmed and will be burned out more quickly and easily.
Ready to Follow Up
Onboarding is a process that can go on for a couple of months to even a year. The more comprehensive it will be, the more the benefits of the more extended onboarding will be felt by the company or organization—benefits like lower employee retention rates and overall excellent employee experience, and many others.
That being said, through the continuous mentorship program and regular check-ins and progress reports with the new employees, onboarding will be more effective. The more valuable and essential you make a new employee feel, the more empowered they will be to produce the best work they can.
Remember to ask for feedback and what your office can do more because no program has its door shut for improvements.
Final Thoughts
Seeing all the ways a company or organization can benefit from a great onboarding process, from reduced labor costs to higher employee retention, is enough reason for many of them to adopt these methods. Onboarding gives them the knowledge, support, and training they need to make them confident and productive members of the business or office.
Once they are acclimated, they become engaged and result in more substantial talent and a much-defined business outcome for the company and organization. This is what MORE knows an empowered candidate can do.
With MORE, we can help you work on your onboarding plan while we are sourcing the candidate for you, and by the time we have hired the new vibrant talent, the onboarding plan will be ready to be presented to you.
We’ll help you find exceptional Filipino talent. Contact us today. If you want to read more of our blogs you can read them here. And don’t forget to follow our socials on Twitter and Linkedin. Schedule a call today.
