How to Make Your Managers Fall in Love with Employee Onboarding
Managers aren’t onboarding experts. But with the right onboarding solution, you can coach them to become engaged onboarding rock stars and enhance the employee experience. Learn how.
It's unfair to expect managers to "just know" how to work onboarding miracles.
For one, they’re often not knowledgeable in organisational HR processes and systems. It’s not until managers welcome a new hire that they understand there is a process which, at this late stage, is so foreign to them they stumble their way through it. Frustrated.
Therefore, new starters show up on their first day with no idea who they’re meeting, and without a clean desk or network access to be of any valued service to their team. Hello ops manual!
Processes and checklists aside, managers also aren’t marketers (well, unlikely). They haven’t been trained to be experience-makers – to WOW new hires; connect them with your brand story and dazzle them with your efficiencies and sleek systems before even setting their first foot through the front revolving door.
No. Managers are trained to lead, to perform, to negotiate. They have targets to meet, a team to manage, a workload to fulfil.
Disorganised, inefficient, labour-intensive onboarding burdens your managers because they don’t have the time, the knowledge, or the will to perform this function to an exceptional standard. So, they disengage.
Managers are the first impression
As many as 20% of new hires decide to leave a new employer within their first 45 days. Most of which is time spent onboarding. Most of which is influenced by the experiences and relationship with their manager.
It’s been said 70% of the variation in employee experience is due to their manager. And if the manager is fumbling their way through the onboarding dark, having a terrible time or simply operating in ignorance, how can you expect them to provide a mind-blowingly awesome onboarding experience for their newest employees?
Exceptional onboarding is a trainable skill
Just as leadership skills can be developed, managers can be coached on how to be onboarding rock stars, too. With the right tech.
Many onboarding solutions help HR manage the paperwork side of onboarding (hello superannuation forms, hello system access). Some have branched into improving and measuring the employee experience with better system integration and feedback reports.
But what’s really needed is a tool that helps improve manager communication, attitudes, and behaviour towards onboarding – to inspire them toward onboarding superstardom.
We automate things on your managers’ behalf, so it doesn’t matter how dreadful someone is at welcoming new team members, we still make them look good.
Loveable onboarding is all about that tech
Whether you have an existing solution that’s not cutting the mustard, or you’re on the hunt for something that makes onboarding a delight and a breeze, there are 3 crucial areas to consider that will ensure you’re onto a winner:
Does it make it easy for managers to get basic tasks done?
- Are painful account set ups or logins required? (sayonara, apps!)
- Can reminders be set and automated? (ex. book in a meeting to set goals)
- Can you send nudges to employees to complete outstanding tasks?
- Is it easy to collect data and share it automatically with key people? (ex. employee details to IT to create security passes and network access)
- Can you create personalised dashboards for employees and managers to manage and track tasks with ease?
- Is it user-experience-focused so you can easily remind employees to complete something with one simple click?
Does it coach managers to be onboarding rock stars with minimal effort?
- Does it provide pre-populated messages (for texts, emails, or calls) your managers can send with 1-click?
- Can it create calendar invites and sync schedules?
- Is there automated communication? (ex. your new hire says they love eating Snickers and their manager is sent a discreet note)
- Does it alert managers automatically if their new hire isn’t feeling great or has concerns?
Does it work the way you do now, and when you scale in future?
- Is it a paperless experience?
- Does it remove the tick’n’flick checklists?
- Can you choose how and where to communicate; via Slack, SMS, email, Facebook Workplace?
- Is it future-focused? Can it handle high volume recruitment with simplicity and grace without bombarding managers with a stream of messages that could be consolidated and coordinated more efficiently?
Loveable onboarding doesn’t need to take forever
Perhaps this is all sounding like a dream; like colonising Mars, you might think this is years away. That frictionless, efficient, enjoyable onboarding isn’t yet tangible for you to grasp and make a difference in and for your organisation.
You might think that disengaged new starters and high employee turnover are something you must grin and bear for now because any change will take *forever* to implement.
But it is possible to empower managers to own onboarding, like, right now.
We know that to create a truly enjoyable onboarding experience for your new hires, you must first create a truly enjoyable onboarding experience for your managers.
You must empower them to create mind-blowingly awesome experiences by providing them a mind-blowingly awesome onboarding solution.
Loveable onboarding doesn’t need to be ‘the long road’. Loveable onboarding can happen today. We get most of our global companies up and running with best practice manager coaching and onboarding in just a couple of weeks.
We even had one customer ready to onboard in one afternoon!
Give your line managers the power of onboarding
We think it's super important that managers take on a greater part of onboarding.
After all, these are new hires that they will be working with closely on a day-to-day basis.
But we also hear you. "Managers don't want to be dealing with all that paperwork and admin."
That's why it's also important to shift the mindset away from thinking of onboarding as just administrative, paperwork type tasks.
The fact is, managers can engage with and get to know new hires without adding a whole lot of workload to their day.
How? We've written an entire guide about it! Check it out here:
Give your managers onboarding superpowers 💪
If you want to discuss your specific onboarding challenges and what you could do to resolve them, then you'll want to book a demo with us. We'll show you the tools behind the scenes you can use to coach managers and make it easy for them to adhere to onboarding best practices.