Businesses need to change how they onboard employees if they want to engage and retain talent.
Getting your team all trained and onboarded isn’t the easiest thing to pull off. Right now, around half of companies have a “somewhat successful” program and, even worse, just under a quarter of companies have no formal program at all.
Come on guys. We all know that the best, most innovative companies owe their success to having the best, most innovative staff. Onboarding plays a big part in that – it’s how you integrate someone into your company and, without giving it the love it needs, you’ll never be able to attract or retain top talent.
Here are five simple strategies you can use to jumpstart a new employee onboarding program.
1. Start a buddy program
These days, managers are too busy to hand hold a new starter through their first week, especially at larger companies. That’s why startups (who are often more time poor than the rest of us) invest so much in buddy programs. Mailchimp has even named and branded their program: the Chimpanion program.
These programs aren’t just social outings. These companies have built up a culture where it is encouraged that buddies spend time away from their normal office work to bring new employees up to speed. Even if that means losing a big chunk of their day over the first few weeks (or even months), it will pay off in the end as new hires reach full productivity much sooner.
2. Take action on the first day
First days are usually an information overload: all those key-codes and names, instantly forgotten. It’s often a wasted day, but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re going to be a fast-moving, innovating company, your new hire should dive in. So, by the end of the day, you should ensure they’ve taken some action.
One company who gets this right (and I really admire) is Gitlab. They’re a remote only company so their onboarding revolves around a comprehensive pre-planned onboarding manual. New hires have to go through about 80 different actions on the first day and, for the final step, they have to suggest a change to the manual.
3. Build an onboarding portal
In that weird space between starting at your company and leaving their old one, new hires are anxious and start looking for as much information as they can find about their new job, company and coworkers. That’s why you should set up a static welcome site for them to study before they start.
At Twine, we tried to keep the tone light and friendly to better present the way we work, A few photos of us at conferences and hackathons reassures new hires that they’ll be treated right. And, for everything else, there were links off separate resources, such as a map of a local area and the employee handbook.
4. Automate the process
As you’ve probably gathered, those first few moments on the job are important. But often they’re spent filling out paperwork and wrestling with a computer set-up. Unless your new job is as a proofreader or computer technician, these activities are wasted time.
Thankfully, there’s a ton of software to make these easier – freeing you up for more important onboarding work. Using automation software such as Zapier, you can make sure an employee’s email, Slack and handbook are sent over in time for their arrival. You can even get more advanced, having a system that asks for their bank details and then automatically inputting them into your account system.
5. Set up regular check-ins
Onboarding doesn’t stop at the end first day, week or month – it continues until the end of first year (at least). In that time, you should be checking in regularly to see how they’re doing These check-ins shouldn’t be too formal either, you’re trying to check they’re happy and engaged – it’s less to do with their performance, and more to do with yours.
These should be done in a different environment, preferably outside of the office. If you use Slack, the Donut plugin is a great tool that randomly pairs users up with someone else in the organisation for coffee, lunch or donuts.
Moving forward
The tactics above are just some of the things I’ve seen work. There are many more out there that I encourage you to try and adapt to your business. Keep iterating on your onboarding program, getting constant feedback from new starters and you’ll be well on your way to building a place people love to work.