Are you trying to improve your employee onboarding practices to get the best out of them? Setting up the correct procedures ensures that every employee can hit the ground running and they will feel part of the team sooner rather than later. This allows your business to grow faster and employees to become productive team members.
Furthermore, improving your employee onboarding practices can lead to 82% higher retention. This is great if you want to ensure that high-quality employees will stick around for the long haul. Retaining the best employees is important since they are the main ingredients in a highly functioning business.
1. Make Preparations Before the Employees Starts on Day 1
It’s essential to put your employees in the best position to succeed before they arrive at their workstation. Whether that’s at home as a remote work position or in the office. The correct preparation includes anything that is required to get the job done. The type of things you should consider include login credentials, computer, monitors, office furniture, uniforms, tags and more.
It would be counterproductive and unprofessional if the employee could not work on the first day if any of these components were missing. To avoid making a mistake, you should look at what existing employees use to get work done. Also, you can create a checklist that current employees approve since they are best positioned to understand the needs.
2. Onboarding Documentation
Onboarding documentation is a fast and automated way of getting your message across to the new recruit. However, it should not be too overwhelming, since it can confuse the new employee. Here is a list of the things you can include in the onboarding documentation.
Training: instead of manually training every new employee, why not create a document that can do the job for you? The document should be easy to follow and provide automation of the learning experience.
Also, it should allow the employee to learn quickly so they can start their work as part of the team.
Company philosophy: conveying your company philosophy to the new employee is important. This allows them to better understand the culture and the company’s values. Therefore, the employee can better represent your brand.
Rules: do you have specific rules that employees must follow or guidelines that are not commonplace at other companies? These should be provided in the onboarding documentation. For instance, if you have a dress code or how many hours per week employees must work, then lay the information out during the onboarding phase.
3. Allow Them to Make Mistakes
Don’t expect the employee to start off by perfectly getting everything right. Otherwise they might be too scared to make a mistake and work slower than what the role requires. Instead, make them feel at ease by sharing that making mistakes during the initial stages is acceptable.
Encourage the employee to ask for help and provide the best assistance possible along the way. This ensures they will have the freedom to make mistakes and not be scared to take full advantage of their skills.
To aid with this process, you can start the employee off by assigning simple tasks. This enables them to get properly orientated and build confidence towards more complicated tasks.
4. Provide Goals
It’s important for employees to be motivated by the work they do. Therefore, from the first day, you need to share incentives and company goals. This ensures that the employee will be naturally motivated from the start. Here are the type of goals you can share:
- Project goals: these could be the aim of the project that the new employee will be working on. Examples include increasing the ROI of a specific product range, increasing traffic from a marketing channel or improving the quality of email capture forms. Making the goals clear gives an employee something to aim for.
- Financial incentives: people work for money and that’s the main motivating factor. Therefore, give the employee an aim by offering financial incentives for meeting targets. This could be weekly, monthly or annual. Also, make sure that the goals can be tracked and achievable. This increases the engagement rate with the goal.
- Individual goals: share the weekly workload with the employee and what is expected of them. Also, provide reports that offer feedback and how they fared in achieving the various goals.
- Optional goals: you can add a few optional goals with no added pressure. These provide extra incentive for employees that want to go above and beyond.
5. Introduce Them to the Team
Making the new employee feel like they are part of the team is important. Therefore, make sure that you introduce them to each team member and who they can ask for help if they get stuck. However, don’t put the new employee on the spot by making them stand up in front of the entire team – public speaking is not for everyone.
Also, assigning a specific employee to be their partner or mentor during the first few weeks is a good idea. This individual can help them learn the ropes and figure out what the company expects of them.
It’s less intimidating for a new employee to ask questions from an assigned partner instead of random team members. Make sure that the selected partner can be a good mentor and has the capacity to spare the person for the role.
Final Thoughts
As a company grows, the speed at which employees are recruited and fired may increase. Therefore, it’s essential to implement scalable employee onboarding practices that do not distract a company from their work.
Hence an efficient and automated employee onboarding process is the best approach. Take advantage of online team management tools to reduce the burden of onboarding each employee separately. There are many tools that aid the process and reduce the cost of hiring.
