Make Onboarding Easy: 5 Ways To Simplify Your Onboarding Process
Image from Christina Morillo
As any business owner or operator knows, your employees are critical to the daily success of your business. This is why investing time into your employees is the best way to keep them invested in your organization and to keep turnover rates low. Investing in your employees from day one is essential, and by focusing on your onboarding process, you’ll ensure a seamless process for all. Starting things off productively with your new employee will set the tone for the relationship. Let’s talk about five ways to enhance your onboarding process to ensure long-term success.
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Checklists and Digital Forms
Creating a checklist for yourself during the onboarding process will keep you organized and focused on key points while effectively communicating with a new employee. By having a list, you won’t miss any crucial information you need to relay to your employee. Some of the best topics to bullet out are job duties, expectations for the role, company policies, and company goals.
Another way to simplify onboarding is setting up HR documents for your employee. New hires, whether they are in person or remote, don’t want to spend hours on their first day filling out documents. Instead, digital HR documents can simplify the process. Once an employee is hired, HR can start reaching out, sending the necessary forms, collecting signatures, and providing checklists of what the employee will need prior to their start date. This way, on the employee's first day, they can be focused on job specifics instead of paperwork.
Establish Strong Relationships
Whether your team is in-person or virtual, you want them to bond and share company goals. In-person teams have the luxury of organic relationships forming from conversations in the office space, at lunches, and at company events. If your team is virtual, there are more hurdles to overcome in order to build relationships. It’s important to make sure virtual employees feel just as bonded as in-person employees. It's crucial to set up multiple options for informal and formal interactions, from group meetings and conference calls to 1:1 style meetings.
Set Clear Expectations
Setting clear expectations is an important standard when onboarding new employees. An employee with a clear understanding of your company’s goals, job responsibilities, and access to resources when they have questions, will produce a more confident employee. Further preplanning and setting up your new hire with a mentor will also be beneficial. Assign one of your more seasoned employees to be a resource for the new hire. Every new employee will have questions. If you give them a designated person to talk to, it will allow them to build relationships early on, and give them the confidence to reach out, instead of shying away when they need help. Another easy option is to create a FAQ list. What are some of the top 5-10 questions new employees consistently ask? You can provide this FAQ list to your new hire during onboarding. This list can serve as a cheat sheet later on if needed.
Encourage Face-to-Face Interactions
Face-to-face interactions are so important, especially for remote employees. Typically, remote employees communicate more in writing. However, the written word can be interpreted in many ways. Providing opportunities for face-to-face interactions via Zoom or video platforms, allows employees to learn body language, and tone, and learn personality traits that can sometimes be hard to understand just by reading emails all day.
Give and Receive Feedback
As you onboard, be sure to welcome the feedback of new employees, both for your benefit and theirs. Usually, you will follow up by asking if your new hire has any questions, but also ask them if they have any feedback regarding your onboarding process: How did the onboarding process go? Is there anything you could have done to help them feel more prepared, etc? Allowing feedback also opens the door to having open and honest conversations with employees, encouraging them to feel more confident and sure in their position.
Starting strongly and with a successful onboarding process creates momentum for new employees, helping them stay motivated and excited about their new role! Onboarding should be the beginning of an ongoing developmental foundation for all employees. We hope these tips helped. For more onboarding resources, schedule a discovery call with us today!
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Creating a checklist, setting up digital HR documents, establishing strong relationships, setting clear expectations, encouraging face-to-face interactions, and giving and receiving feedback are all great ways to simplify the onboarding process.
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Some of the best topics to include are job duties, expectations for the role, company policies, and company goals. Additionally, HR should reach out and provide the necessary forms, collect signatures, and provide checklists of what the employee will need prior to their start date.
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