10 Metrics That Define Onboarding Success in Modern Workplaces
We’ve all heard the saying from management guru Peter Drucker: “What gets measured gets managed.” And in the case of your employee onboarding program, if you get your metrics right, the more likely you are to build an onboarding program that ramps your new hires to productivity quickly and efficiently.
Why Is It Important to Track Onboarding Success?
HR has an image problem. That is, we’re often seen as a cost center to the business. That’s because it can be challenging to clearly demonstrate the value of HR programs like onboarding. But if you start tracking metrics like time to productivity, employee net promoter scores (eNPS), and voluntary turnover rate, you’ll be able to clearly draw a line between investment in your employees and organizational success.
Tracking specific metrics of onboarding success will also allow you to identify any gaps in your program and areas for improvement. For example, if you’re seeing an uptick in 90-day turnover, you might want to take a look at how well your onboarding program is clarifying your culture to new hires and outlining job responsibilities.
10 Onboarding Metrics to Measure Success
What you measure will depend on the overall goals of your onboarding program. If you’re trying to fix a retention issue, for example, you’ll want to specifically track voluntary and involuntary turnover. If you’re trying to make a case to your leadership team to invest more in onboarding, you may want to focus on time to productivity or time to first achievement.
Here are some examples of metrics you could track:
Time to Productivity
This metric tracks how long it takes for a new hire to reach full productivity in their role. Full productivity will vary by the role. For a sales rep, as an example, you might look at the time it takes for them to meet their sales quota consistently. If you have a cohort of new sales reps, add up the total number of days for the reps to hit their quotas and divide that by the number of new hires. If it takes 450 days for five reps to hit their quotes, the average time to productivity for that cohort is 90 days.
New Hire Satisfaction Scores
The most important stakeholder in the onboarding process is your new hire. Ask them how satisfied they are with the onboarding experience on a scale of 1-10. You can then average that score across your new hire cohorts to get a sense of satisfaction across various departments and job functions.
New Hire Net Promoter Scores (eNPS)
Happy new hires are more likely to recommend your company to their friends and former colleagues – making recruitment a lot easier. Ask them “How likely are you to recommend this company as a great place to work?” at various stages in the onboarding process and notice any dips or patterns in the answer.
Time to First Achievement
A best-in-class onboarding program provides new hires with clarity (one of the 4 Cs of onboarding) around their goals. So in order to track time to first achievement, you’ll want to make sure 30-, 60-, and 90-day goalsetting is part of each new hire’s ramping period.
Survey Participation Rates
Another simple way to track the engagement in your onboarding process is through survey participation rate. According to Contact Monkey, employee survey response rates can range from 25% to 60%. Giving employees choice in how they receive communications and drip-feeding content in smaller chunks can go a long way in improving survey participation rates. Learn how Monash University increased their participation rates by 6x with Enboarder.
Completion Rates of Onboarding Tasks
There are so many little details and handoffs that make up the onboarding process, and if any of them get dropped, it can really put a damper on the new hire experience. So you’ll want to look at completion rates of onboarding tasks such as hiring managers submitting IT tickets for new hires’ laptops. Moneysupermarket Group was able to achieve 95.5% competition rate for this task by automating onboarding with Enboarder.
First-Year Retention Rate
This is a longer-term metric that tracks the percentage of new hires who stay at your company for at least one year. According to Michael Watkins’ book “The First 90 Days,” every employee will reach a “break-even point” – where the value they contribute equals the value they’ve consumed. Only after the break-even point do they start to add value and contribute to the organization. For more junior roles, the break-even point can be in 90 days, but for more senior roles it can be at six months.
Peer Feedback on New Hires
For a well-rounded understanding of onboarding success, you could also include feedback and ratings from a new hire’s team mates on how well the new hire is adjusting to the team and company culture. To mitigate any bias, you’ll want to ask 3-5 stakeholders who are interacting with your new hire during their onboarding.
Manager Feedback Score
Similarly, you’ll want to understand the hiring manager’s perception of how well their new hire is performing. Consider asking hiring managers to rate their new hire’s performance – based on agreed upon goals – at one month, three months, and six months.
Training Completion Rates
Some industries are more focused on training during employee orientation and onboarding than others, because they have to be. Take healthcare as an example. When you’re dealing with patient safety, medical compliance, and complex medical procedures, failure to complete training can have dire consequences and put your organization at risk.
How Enboarder Can Help Streamline Your Onboarding Process
Trying to make progress on all of these metrics with limited resources might seem daunting. But by choosing onboarding software like Enboarder you can automate and streamline the entire process and see results much faster. Here are a few of the ways we can help:
Automating Administrative Tasks
When you’re bringing on lots of new hires at once, there are many repetitive onboarding activities like document collection, task reminders, and compliance tracking that can’t fall through the cracks. Enboarder automates the entire workflow, saving you time and resources. Our customer Sandvik uses Enboarder for onboarding, promotions, internal comms, employee referrals, and offboarding. By automating all of these administrative tasks, they save nearly two months annually.
Personalizing Onboarding Experiences for Each New Hire
You want each new hire to feel like their onboarding experience is tailored to their specific role and preferences. With Enboarder, you can easily embed forms into your workflow to gather information about your new hire. For example, you can ask them about their favorite 3 p.m. munchie and have it sitting on their desk for their first day (or have it shipped to their home office – check out this remote onboarding checklist for more information). These personalized touches are what sets Enboarder apart according to Sarah Floyd, internal communications and engagement manager at Dermalogica: “Enboarder is creating those little moments of wow, intrigue, excitement. And I think for us, that’s the biggest thing that we were missing.”
Simplifying Communication Between Teams and New Hires
The last thing you want between offer signed and day one is radio silence, which can lead to no-shows. Enboarder helps HR and recruiting teams with preboarding communications to keep new hires excited and connected to your company leading up to their first day. Cisco Meraki does this really well, with simple, mobile-first workflows that automate surveys, welcome messages, team introductions, and company information. Now 88% of new hires and 88% of hiring managers feel prepared for day one.
Integrating with HR Systems for Seamless Data Flow
Back in the day, most of the tech HR needed to manage their workforce lived in an HRIS – human resources information system. That’s where you manage your employee data and compliance at scale. It’s hugely important. But when it comes to making employees feel connected to each other and your company, your HRIS tech falls flat. Enboarder acts as the experience layer that makes sure information is delivered at the right time and through the right channels. Sanvik, for example, integrates Enboarder with its HRIS so new hires are automatically launched into the right journey as soon as the offer is signed.
Improve Your Onboarding Success with Enboarder
Tracking the metrics mentioned above will help you not only refine your onboarding process over time, but also shift the narrative about onboarding internally. Onboarding is not just HR’s job and it’s not a nice-to-have. It’s a critical piece of the employee experience that feeds productivity, engagement, and long-term retention.
Onboarding success is achieved when recruiting, HR, hiring managers, colleagues, and the entire organization rally to help ramp new hires to productivity so they can smash their goals sooner and help your entire company win.
Ready to learn how Enboarder’s automated onboarding software can level up your onboarding? Schedule your demo today!