How To Make Your Onboarding Process Seamless
How you handle your onboarding process is one of the most important aspects for ensuring your new team members adjust well into your company. A carefully implemented onboarding process can help ensure your new hires integrate well, feel confident in their new roles, and thrive within your company. Onboarding isn’t simply what happens on their first day, it’s a process that begins well before any job offers are made and should ideally carry the new hires into their first few months in the company.
Get Technical
There is actually a ton of software designed to help make the onboarding process smoother and to ensure you don’t miss out any important steps. HR onboarding software can help you from every aspect of hiring new staff, starting with applicant tracking, making checklists to help with hiring and onboarding, as well as having a platform from which to verify the applicant and conduct an extensive background check. You can also use the platform to store important files, such as employment agreements and tax forms. Not only does the software act as a safe keeping place, it also helps you quickly see what’s been completed and what’s left to be finished.
Keep Communication Going
It’s important to have regular times to check in on your new hires. Ensuring easy and clear communication from the beginning will help with their job satisfaction over the long term, but also keep things open so that they can come to you with any problems or questions, should they arise. You want to plan out regular times through their first year to check in and see how everything’s going. Another thing you need to communicate clearly is what it looks like to be doing a ‘good job’ in their new position. It can be hard when starting a new company to know exactly what’s expected of you, so being very clear about this from the beginning can help your new hire become more successful.
Get Them Excited
It’s important to spend a bit of time explaining what the company stands for, and how they will contribute to that in their role. This should also include where the business is going, long term goals and the overall vision for the company. Having your new employees understand where they fit into the company and where there’s room for growth within their role, can make a world of difference.
Online Training
With everything that’s happened over the past 18 months, online training has become an even more crucial tool as we navigate working through lockdowns, and various restrictions. Online training can be a great asset during the onboarding process as it allows us to automate everything, and ensure that our new hires can work through content at their own pace. However, a consequence of online training is that it can be quite challenging to maintain engagement. One of the easiest ways to help combat that is with regular breaks, so allow your new hires to grab a drink and stretch their legs a little. Where you can, encourage interaction between those that are participating in the training, to keep things a little more interesting.
Onboarding can be one of the most stressful times for a business, not only is it a labor intensive process, but how well it is handled can make a big difference in terms of staff retention, productivity and overall job satisfaction. Hopefully these tips help you make your onboarding process seamless.
