Creating an Effective Employee Onboarding Programme: Best Practices

« Back to Articles

Do you know that one-third of the employees leave their jobs within the first three months of getting hired?

There are various reasons for this, such as a mismatch between job expectations and reality, cultural shift, and change in priorities. But poor onboarding experience is one of the biggest reasons for it.

Only 12% of employees agree that their organisation has a good onboarding process.

On the other hand, the opposite is also true. Research shows that a great onboarding experience can improve employee retention by 82%.

Thus, onboarding employees is a great opportunity to set the tone right. However, a fair share of companies (35%) still have no formal onboarding programme.

So, in this post, we will go through the best employee onboarding tips and practices that will help you create an effective onboarding programme.

7 Best Practices to Create an Effective Onboarding Programme  

If you feel that your employee onboarding programme is not as effective as you want it to be. Or you are creating an employee onboarding programme from scratch. These seven employee onboarding tips can help you improve your process.

1. Define the objectives of the onboarding process

The first step to creating an effective onboarding programme is to define what you want to achieve from it. For that, you need to understand that employee boarding is much more than orientation.

Many organisations mistake orientation for onboarding. Orientation takes hardly a few hours or a day to introduce new hires to the basic hierarchies, office infrastructure, and point of contact. But onboarding can go on for weeks. It focuses on acclimating new hires completely into company culture. Write down the goals of the employee onboarding programme. It can include the following:

• Providing a new hire with all the information required to work successfully
• Making a new hire fully understand the company culture, policies, and work processes in three months
• Making sure employee is ready to add value to the organisation on the completion of onboarding

Or you can include any objective you want to achieve from the programme.

2. Document the onboarding process

An effective onboarding process runs up to 90 days on average after a candidate joins the company. Some experts even recommend beginning the onboarding a week or two weeks before a new hire joins the company to help out with the paperwork.

Ben Peterson, CEO of BambooHR, said, "If we don't worry about onboarding before the employee starts, then we're way behind."

Without documenting your entire employee onboarding process, it is hard to implement it effectively. You need an onboarding manual that tells you when to follow each step.

Document your onboarding process. It can include things like creating a checklist for the HR department, defining the roles and responsibilities of all the stakeholders involved in the onboarding process, and writing down instructions for each step.

Just to give you an example, the basic checklist for an HR can include the following things:

• Preparing paperwork
• Signing the documents
• Sending requests to procure devices and equipment
• Sending notifications to the IT department for setting up online accounts
• Preparing a welcome kit
• Introducing new hires to the team and manager
• Making company-wide announcements

3. Decide on the onboarding team

Employee onboarding is not only the responsibility of the HR department.

Even in the study by Bamboo HR, when it is asked, “what new hires really want in the first week,” it was found that new hires want their managers, not HR, to take charge of the onboarding process.

Thus, it is a good idea to involve managers, seniors, and other employees in the onboarding process. This will make new hires feel they are a part of the company from day one.

For example, many companies assign a ‘job buddy or peer mentor’ to a new hire. The role of a buddy is to help a new hire get comfortable with the role. The mentor passes their valuable knowledge to a new hire to better understand the roles and responsibilities in the first few weeks on the job.

This is a great way to make new hires comfortable as usually, they are hesitant to walk to seniors and managers for uncertainties. A job buddy is at the same professional level, which makes it easy for a new hire to ask day-to-day queries.

Pro tip: To formalise and streamline your onboarding process, clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each individual involved in employee onboarding.

4. Invest in the onboarding tools

Onboarding involves many moving elements such as collaboration with different departments, paperwork, content development, training, and documentation. Without the right platform, it is hard to execute the onboarding process effectively.

An onboarding tool helps you better execute an onboarding programme, streamline the process, bring everything to a centralised place, and track the entire process.

Not only that, it helps you improve efficiency and productivity and make life easy with its range of features and automation.

5. Create onboarding learning courses

Learning and development is a key part of employee onboarding. Whether it is company policies, job training, or product training, you need to create learning resources to make it easy for new hires to learn about the processes.

To do so, you can utilise your internal subject matter experts to create learning courses. These courses not only help the new hires quickly learn the processes but also help the trainers with employee’s on-the-job training.

Make sure you spend a good time creating resources as it serves as the foundation for new hire learning.

6. Measure the effectiveness of your onboarding process

93% of businesses agree that onboarding experience helps new hires decide whether they want to stay or leave.

Creating an effective employee onboarding programme is not a one-time event. To make improvements, you have to track the performance of your onboarding programme.

To do so, you can track the important numbers such as cost per new hire onboarding and employee retention rate.

You can set the KPIs as per the acceptable industry standards to find the effectiveness of your employee onboarding programme.

This data will help you analyse the performance of your employee onboarding programme.

Keep in mind from time to time, you have to upgrade your programme and make changes.

7. Get feedback on the onboarding experience

Last but not least, actively seek feedback from your new hires. This will help you understand what works and what does not.

You can take feedback multiple times such as the initial phase of the onboarding, a few weeks later, and after the completion of the onboarding.

This will provide you with a complete picture of the areas where you need to improve to make the onboarding process effective and efficient.

Final Words: Invest in Creating a Positive Employee Onboarding Experience

So, it is very important you invest in creating an effective employee onboarding programme. Because you have made all the efforts, invested resources, and spent plenty of time to find the right candidate. Now, losing your new hire just because of a poor onboarding experience is not justified.

Using the above-mentioned best employee onboarding tips and practices you can create a positive employee onboarding experience.

Author Bio

Olivia Poarch is a versatile freelance writer passionate about SaaS and B2B. Her expertise extends to team productivity, project management, marketing, and human resources. With a knack for crafting insightful content, she helps her clients thrive in the competitive business landscape.