Is Your Onboarding Process Disengaging New Hires?
Onboarding is the first step in the employee engagement lifecycle. A crappy onboarding experience is going to flick your new hire’s mindset switch to the negative and likely won’t budge for their entire journey with you. They’ll probably become one of the 20% who quit within their first 45 days at a significant cost to your bottom line.
According to AON Hewitt’s 2018 Global Employee Engagement Trends Report, 35% of employees are disengaged. Right now. Even yours.
SO – the million dollar question is, how can a kick-ass onboarding program help you turn all those frowns upside down? How can onboarding positively engage new employees and strengthen their relationship with your company?
It’s useful to think of onboarding as a part of a spectrum of continuous engagement with the employee, so it actually segues seamlessly with existing programs like continuous training and upskilling, feedback, crossboarding (or transitioning, which includes parental leave, role changes, and office moves), and eventually, offboarding (when an employee leaves the company).
The problem with employee onboarding now
The thing is, onboarding is usually all checklists and paperwork, induction modules, and decades old training videos (we can hear the mundane 80’s soundtrack as we write). People don’t get excited about ‘onboarding’ – but the reality is, they should!
There’s a perpetual war between HR and hiring managers as to who has ownership of onboarding. It’s a game of hot potato – no one’s willing to take hold.
For HR, the onus is on managers to ensure a positive and engaging onboarding experience, yet, they’re generally understaffed and overwhelmed = new hires not being a high priority = poor onboarding experience = employees feeling neglected, unvalued, regretful. They’ll also take longer to find their feet and contribute productively.
Cue: HR breathing hot fire down manager necks when the employee survey data trickles through.
When new hires have no emotional connection with you, it doesn’t take much to break the link, shatter their dreams, and send them looking to your competitors for a better offer.
But, getting your recruitment and onboarding experiences right can cement their engagement and commitment to your brand, your workplace, and their role. SO?
Get it right!
Stop treating onboarding as a burdensome process!
Awesome onboarding does sparkly things for your bottom line – but another huge and often overlooked benefit is the influence it has on your new hire AND manager experience. Because don’t forget that for every painful onboard your manager is ‘put through’, they’re loving you less and less.
They’re loving the employee less and less, through no fault of the employees – but when managers are tasked with arduous, time-consuming, inefficient and impractical internal processes, they can’t help but feel a little bit pissed off.
They end up loving their own job less and less, too.
If your managers are bogged down by lengthy paperwork and approvals, it’s quality time taken from the new hire which could be used to establish and strengthen engagement, enthusiasm, and trust.
It doesn’t require mammoth effort to make an employee feel welcome, special, and valued. But the payoff is invaluable. (We make it super easy, just ask us.)
Enough fluffy talk – here are some mind-boggling onboarding facts
Tellingly, 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding.
Allied’s 2012 Workforce Mobility Survey found that new employee retention rates and productivity could be higher if companies spent more money on onboarding. It found that companies considered ‘best in class’ at onboarding are more likely to:
- Retain employees
- Get them to full productivity, and
- Develop them into corporate leaders / influencers.
IBM found a link between employee experience and performance and retention, revealing “that employees who experience a sense of belonging, purpose, achievement, happiness and vigor are more likely to perform at higher levels and contribute “above and beyond” expectations. They’re also less likely to quit.”
Which is why we say enchant them before Day 1.
Wanna see how Enboarder’s turning our clients’ frowns upside down?
The proof is in the pudding, they say.
So here are just a few of our clients #winning since adopting our best practice engagement-driven onboarding workflows.
One global retail company recorded:
- Average sales productivity improved by 25% in comparing 6 months prior to implementing Enboarder and 6 months after implementing Enboarder.
- In comparing 2016 to YTD 2017 results, within the first three months of employment, LTO decreased 16%.
More?
Eventbrite have seen a whopping 73% manager engagement rate across all their workflow communications in their first six months of use.
More?
oOh! media’s re-engineered onboarding process achieves a near perfect 92/100 eNPS score with new hires.
Employee Experience-driven onboarding can help to increase not only employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention, but also brand equity, competitive advantage, and sustainable growth (see why Forbes predicted 2018 Year of the EX). Umm, #win?
Wish you could onboard better and faster, too?
With a strategically-designed onboarding program you’re able to welcome more engaged and inspired employees who’re ready to kick butt before they first sit down in their custom ergo chair.
You’re able to build and retain your much loved, much respected workplace culture by proactively nurturing and educating newcomers in the culture, mission, and values of your organisation.
You’re able to improve employee engagement organisation-wide, from new-hire to manager level and everyone in between when you focus on providing a simplified, meaningful, and positive onboarding experience from the moment an employee contract is signed.
Ready to change the onboarding game?
To find out more about how best-practice employee onboarding can improve your employee engagement and business performance metrics, talk to us today.