Employee onboarding is part and parcel of the hiring process and should be treated as such to provide new hires with a structured introduction to the company. In fact, it can begin before they start; keeping in touch after the job offer is accepted will sustain momentum and excitement for your new employee’s first day.
This article provides some tips on how you can level up your employee onboarding experience to ensure your new starters feel welcomed and settled in their first days, weeks and months.
Promoting your company culture
With a well thought out employee onboarding process, employers can not only educate their new hires on all they need to know to do their new job, but can give them a taste of the company culture such as reward and recognition, charity initiatives, social or hobby groups and sports clubs, to name a few.
Rival HR reported that 68% of employees believe their experience as a job candidate reflects how the company treats its people. If your employee onboarding experience seems haphazard, unstructured or non-existent, that’s not going to reflect well on perceptions of your company culture, no matter how good the benefits and social aspects of the role are.
So, what can employers do when onboarding new employees to ensure they can retain the strong talent that they’ve just hired? Let’s take a look.
Role-specific employee onboarding
The first few days and weeks in any role can be overwhelming while new hires get accustomed to their new workplace, colleagues and responsibilities.
The best way to support them to settle into their role as quickly as possible is to create an onboarding experience that is tailored to their role and department. For example, while all staff need to be made aware of HR processes, your restaurant staff will require different training to your finance team.
Focusing on the elements of induction that are relevant to each new recruit will keep them engaged and reinforce that they are appreciated and the scope of their role requirements is clear on both sides.
This is all well and good, but how can employers tailor the onboarding experience without creating more work for HR colleagues and line managers?
Digitise your employee onboarding process
Gone are the days of flicking through an employee handbook about an inch thick.
Even if your documents are hosted somewhere online, flipping between tabs across different digital filing systems and waiting on access being granted for your new employees is also not ideal for creating a strong first impression.
In 2022, Clickboarding reported that only 26% of companies were automating the employee onboarding process and that for the most part, it remained a manual, inconsistent experience.
With digital native Gen Z and tech-savvy Millennials expected to make up almost 60% of the global workforce by 2030, if you haven’t already transitioned to a digital onboarding experience, the time is now.
It doesn’t have to be daunting, either. Storing all relevant resources and documents in one central hub and providing access to just the ones that your people need to read, watch or listen to, can be quite simple and intuitive with the right tech. Access to multiple tools and software can be streamlined with seamless and flexible integrations, including Teams, Salesforce, Google Drive, Oracle and many more.
A modern intranet like Oak Engage can enable you to set up specific employee onboarding homepages for new starters, both on desktop and mobile, that pull through only the most relevant information to that individual based on their job type and department. Documents, useful links and other resources can be made available to specific new starters for a certain amount of time before they are given full access to the whole intranet, so as not to overwhelm them with information from the outset.
Modernise the employee experience
The digital landscape now allows us to create content in a large variety of formats. From long form articles to short form videos, podcasts and infographics, sustain engagement and interest from your new hires by diversifying the ways in which you present your content.
Software like Oak makes it easy to display any form of content with a homepage with its drag and drop functionality, so you don’t need any techy skills to create an enticing space for your new starters to explore.
Gather feedback
According to Gallup, only 12% of employees agree that their organisation has a good onboarding process. Putting that into perspective, for every 10 people recruited in a year, only one to two of them might say they had a good onboarding experience.
Gathering feedback from those who are going through the employee onboarding process is the best way to understand how it is being received.
Once your new hires have completed their onboarding phase, ask them to provide honest feedback on how engaging, useful and personalised it was. As your data set grows, you may see trends which indicate where you can make changes and continuously improve your employee onboarding experience.
Within Oak’s employee app and intranet solution, you can create surveys and polls with ease, tailoring the questions to help you get actionable answers. From star ratings to written feedback, or simple yes or no answers on a poll, select your audience and wait for the responses to come in.
Ready to step up your employee onboarding experience?
If you’re ready to modernise your employee onboarding process, Oak has all the tools you need to set your people up for success. Check out what we did for Sevita as part of their intranet revamp project.
If you’d like to know more about how we can help, get in touch to arrange a demo of Oak and we’ll show you how we can overcome your onboarding challenges with ease.