Onboarding is a very important process in helping the new hire become a good fit for the corporation or organization. A great experience during the onboarding stage will leave a lasting imprint on your new employees. Often, it creates a good first impression to these beginners on their first day if the onboarding process makes them feel welcome, excited to start, and ready to deliver.
Onboarding entails a lot of work. This includes filling out new hire paperwork, helping these employees nest into the company culture, and making sure they’re made aware of company policies, salaries, benefits, grievance systems, and many other things. There are now various kinds of onboarding software being offered as solutions for human resource (HR) departments to facilitate this process.
Simplified Onboarding In Five Steps
As you map out your company strategy for onboarding, you would benefit a lot from knowing a few simple steps you need to do if you want your onboarding process to help you make a good fit between your company and your new hire.
Here are five simple steps to achieve this goal:
- Streamline The Hiring To Onboarding Process
Before you’re able to onboard your new employees, you’ll have to go through the whole process of defining the job requirements, posting job listings, taking inquiries and answering phone calls or emails, accepting résumés and applications, administering tests and conducting interviews, and then selecting successful applicants.
After the tedious interview or series of interviews and a job offer is made, you can then assign your winning candidates to their designated teams and give them their first shift schedule.
One best practice that your company can observe is to make the process from hiring to onboarding a seamless one by streamlining the connection and shift from the hiring process to the onboarding process.
- Prepare For Your Employee’s First Day
A large part of ensuring the success of the onboarding process is done through the employer’s preparation. If your company wants the onboarding of new hires to be as seamless and hitch-free as possible, they should make all the necessary preparations for the employee’s first day.
Preparing for your new employee’s first day would usually be about having an onboarding checklist and getting the paperwork done before the new hire’s first day on the job. Paperwork includes not just getting basic contact information or making them sign employment contracts. Laws and other government regulations usually require new recruits to fill out federal and state forms.
One important aspect of your new hire onboarding process is making sure their documents are stored properly. If they fail to fill out required forms, or if you lose them or fail to submit them, you’ll most likely have to face serious fines and penalties. Most onboarding software now allows you to take in scanned digital copies of those documents in your system.
Some of the most advanced onboarding software can now automate almost the entire onboarding process. Some even have a self-onboarding process wherein new hires can upload their own documents.
- Start With The Basics
With many corporations and organizations shifting to remote or offsite work-from-home set-ups, the process of onboarding has become even more important and crucial to the future fit of the new hire to the company.
You have to keep in mind a few things, though, when you’re doing remote work. The first thing you have to note is that things are done a bit differently through virtual or remote work. It’s just not the same as onsite work.
Not everyone can pass the criteria or standard to manage a remote team or even just be part of one. One crucial criterion is that your potential new hire for a remote team should be action-oriented. You’ll know this if the employee makes it a priority to get something done even though no one assigned tasks.
Another important criterion is that your new staff member should be trustworthy. This is important because if you have to micromanage your remote workers, you’ll eventually see them become less and less productive.
- Introduce Your New Hire To Your Team
The next step you have to take is break in your new recruits to the organization by introducing them to your team. It’s important that your new hires quickly feel welcome to the organization and find their place in the team.
You should give a role to your existing organization and the teams already in place at this stage of the onboarding process so the fusion of new employees into the team becomes as fluid as possible. It’s important for anyone new to feel they’re being genuinely welcomed by their teams. The sooner your new people feel comfortable with their team assignments, the sooner they’d be able to focus on doing the job at hand.
It’s important that your new employee quickly feels comfortable around their coworkers. Often, a new hire doesn’t know anyone in the workplace other than maybe one or two employees if referred by a friend working in the same place. And when they suit up for work, they’re mostly shown around busy workers who just pause to say hi, and go right back to what they’re doing before the new hires could even reply. Often, what happens is just a basic introduction and small talk with some employees.
Some onboarding software allows for interaction between the new hire and some team members. Early interactions through video calls or chats help make some connection between new workers and existing ones.
- Settle Your New Hire In
Another crucial step of the onboarding process is settling in your new hire. For many companies, their HR departments think their job is done the moment the winning applicant or selected recruit accepts the job offer. Some think their job is done once the new employee is shown around and introduced to the rest of the staff.
Many times, a new hire just sits around on the first day or first week with nothing to do while waiting for log ins to company work emails, work platforms, and messenger tools. You can help give your new workers a great onboarding experience by being ready with their account log ins and passwords for all their work tools. They can hit the ground running or just start warming up by exploring their work ecosystem.
Onboarding And Keeping The Best
Onboarding is a very important process of breaking in new hires into your organization and fusing them into the existing work teams. Know these simplified five steps to make the most of this process for your new hires, with the least disruption to your operations and maximum benefits for your existing teams: streamline the hiring to onboarding process; prepare for your employee’s first day; start with the basics; introduce your new hire to your team; and, finally, settle your new hire in.
