Employee Onboarding: How to Help Your New Hires Succeed

If you’ve followed Helpjuice’s blog for a while now, you know that we’re all about strategic employee onboarding.

But, we’ve yet to really dig into an all-encompassing discussion of the nitty-gritty purposes, benefits, and best practices of a killer employee onboarding initiative — until now.

In this article, we'll discuss:

• The importance of good employee onboarding
• The business benefits of creating an employee onboarding program
• The positive impact of effective onboarding for new employees
• Best practices to help create an effective employee onboarding process

Let’s jump right in, shall we?

Key Purposes of Employee Onboarding

First things first, let’s identify the main things an organization should aim to accomplish when onboarding a new hire.

Align New Hires with Company Mission, Vision, and Overall Strategy

Creating and maintaining organizational alignment is crucial to the success of your business.

(In fact, highly-aligned teams see 36% more business growth than the average company.)

It just makes sense, then, to begin creating this alignment within your new employees from the get-go.

Throughout the employee onboarding process, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to:

• Define (and reinforce) your organization’s overall mission, vision, and goals
• Showcase how you intend to achieve your mission and bring your vision to life
• How your new hire fits into the equation, on both a large and granular scale

In turn, your new employees will quickly learn how to best use their knowledge and abilities for the good of the organization as a whole.

Immerse New Hires In Your Company Culture

A strong company culture is a major asset for your business.

For one thing, today’s high-quality candidates are attracted to companies that share their values. In fact, Jobvite found that 46% of job seekers say company culture is very important — with 88% saying culture plays at least some role in their decision to apply with an organization.

(Source. The report also found that 32% of churned employees cite poor company culture as a reason for leaving.)

What’s more, 91% of managers say alignment with company culture is actually more important than an employee’s skills or experiences.

As we’ll discuss, the onboarding experience provides numerous opportunities for new hires to become immerscomped in their organization’s culture, including:

• Collaborative tasks and processes
• Team-building and organization-wide events
• On-the-fly engagements and experiences

Create Impactful Relationships

The onboarding experience also provides opportunities to form professional and personal relationships with new team members, as well.

On the professional side, the goal is to connect new hires with team members who can help them get up to speed, supercharge their efforts, and guide them to success. 

Mentorships, for example, allow new hires to follow in the footsteps of veteran employees — and to rely on them for assistance when the need arises. Cross-team partnerships can also enable new hires by pairing them up with colleagues whose skills and abilities complement one another.

On a personal level, the onboarding experience provides ample opportunity for new hires to get to know the people they’ll be working with. This, again, ties in with company culture and organizational “fit” — and applies it to the individual relationships that the new hire will form over time.

Provide Early Career Support and Guidance

Overall, the employee onboarding experience should set the stage for a productive and fruitful career for your new hires.

For one, they’ll know what will be expected of them in terms of effort and performance moving forward. They’ll also be able to set their own expectations with regard to professional growth and career progression.

With the path laid clear, your new hires will be able to take better control of their future with your organization — while also knowing when to reach out to their new colleagues for assistance. 

The Business Benefits of Effective Employee Onboarding

Developing a comprehensive and cohesive onboarding experience for your new hires is a pretty big investment.

But, the payoff for your business will be huge — in a number of ways.

Shortens Time-to-Productivity

New hires don’t reach 100% productivity overnight.

As TLNT explains, it can take anywhere from three months to two years to fully onboard new employees. Needless to say, the quicker you can ramp up your new employees’ productivity rates, the better it is for your business.

A strategic approach to employee onboarding will enable you to streamline the experience for your new hires, and ultimately enable them to hit the ground running in their new position.

In some cases, it’s about removing friction, bottlenecks, and unnecessary downtime. In others, it’s about supercharging your new hires’ efforts with laser-focused information, prompts, and experiences.

Need some real-world examples of organizations using onboarding to improve time-to-productivity?

• Newington College now trains new staff and students 30% faster with better onboarding
• DaVita reduced onboarding time by 50% by taking a more strategic approach
• Apptegy onboards employees 2x faster with a revamped approach to their process

Overall, the idea is to create an onboarding experience that’s exactly as long as it needs to be — and that doesn’t unintentionally hold your new hires back from putting their best foot forward.

Reduces the Cost of Hiring New Employees

Between training initiatives, instructional resources, and administrative tasks, onboarding new employees can be a costly venture.

In fact, the average company routinely spends $3,000 bringing each new employee up to 100% productivity.

Once again, a strategic approach is essential for keeping these costs to a minimum. As discussed above, streamlining processes and eliminating bottlenecks are crucial to this end.

More than just keeping costs down, though, strategic onboarding also ensures that the money you do invest on these processes is well spent. By systematizing your approach to onboarding, you’ll know exactly where to focus your spending in order to maximize your new hires’ productivity and performance.

Similarly, effective employee onboarding also enables you to squeeze even more value out of your existing knowledge assets and other resources. This, in lieu of spending more and more money and time creating additional instructional materials for onboarding purposes.

(We’ll come back to this when we discuss the importance of a self-guided employee onboarding experience.)

Increases Employee Retention (and Minimizes “Regrettable” Attrition)

As we said earlier, one of the main goals of employee onboarding is to set new hires up for a long and fruitful career within your organization.

Your onboarding process, then, can have a huge impact on your ability to retain new employees over time.

For one thing, a great onboarding experience can improve employee retention by up to 82%. Looking at this another way, high-quality employees are two times more likely to look for a new job after a poor onboarding experience.

Note the key part of that last sentence:

High-quality employees.

It’s no coincidence that the job candidates who look for an engaging and valuable onboarding experience make the most talented and driven employees. If you can meet their expectations from the get-go, they’ll almost certainly stick around for the long haul.

How Effective Onboarding Impacts New Hires

With the above in mind, it’s probably pretty clear that a more strategic and effective onboarding experience is beneficial to the employee as well as the company.

Still, it’s worth taking a closer look at how new hires are impacted by a proper onboarding experience. To do so, we need to think of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — and how it applies to employee engagement and productivity.

(Source)

A strategic approach to employee onboarding acknowledges that your new hires simply cannot reach peak levels of productivity if their underlying needs aren’t met along the way. The onboarding experience then serves to meet these needs in a structured and scaffolded way — in turn paving a clear path to self-actualization and optimal engagement for your employees.

Let’s take a quick look at how onboarding meets the needs of new hires at each stage of the hierarchy:

• Survival: Before signing on, potential new hires agree to contract terms that guarantee their overall survival. Failure to ensure this will inhibit the employee’s ability to thrive — and will cause them to look for a new position immediately.
• Security: New hires need to feel secure in their new position — and they need to know that their successful performance will guarantee them a spot on the team well into the future.
• Belonging: New hires yearn to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than the job-related tasks in front of them. The onboarding process places heavy importance on culture building — which is exactly what’s needed to bring employee engagement to the next level.
• Importance: As new hires become more engaged with and dedicated to their new team, they’ll want to know the feeling is mutual. A proper onboarding experience ensures that new employees see and understand just how much the company values them as individuals.
• Self-Actualization: At this top tier of the hierarchy, employees are highly engaged within their position, and are able to operate with near-autonomy. Though it typically takes years to reach this stage, the journey to self-actualization begins with an empowering and enabling onboarding experience.

How to Create an Effective Employee Onboarding Process

Now that we know exactly why it’s so important to optimize your employee onboarding processes, let’s dig into the key things you need to do to make it happen.

Note that while the following isn’t necessarily sequential, there are certain tasks that will need to be completed before you can effectively tackle others. Also, some of the following will happen concurrently — often on an ongoing basis.

“When it comes to best practices for effective employee onboarding, we firmly believe in implementing the same mindset for our employees that we do for our customers which is the idea of the employee journey/life cycle. The employee journey is crucial and should be treated as such. 

We believe it is important to be deliberate about every step from the first recruiting call, to onboarding, day-to-day happiness, and L&D. You’ll find that in being deliberate with these small actions and touchpoints, the needs are met within employee engagement.” - Liz Everett, People Operations Manager, GoCo

With that in mind, let’s dive in.

Develop a Blueprint for Your Onboarding Experience

Your first order of business will be to create a blueprint for your employee onboarding experience.

The goal here is to standardize your onboarding processes as best as possible. Yes, you will end up tailoring the onboarding experience for each new hire you bring on...but you’ll need to nail down the “big picture” tasks involved in onboarding before doing so.

Your onboarding blueprint will define what needs to be accomplished, along with how it will be accomplished — and what the new hire will then be able to do once they’ve finished the task.

For each area of onboarding — administration, training, cultural alignment, and organizational alignment — you’ll have a number of questions to answer as you develop your blueprint.

A few examples:

• Administrative Tasks: What information do you need to collect from your new employees? How will they complete and submit forms? Who will they submit the forms to?
• Training: What does the employee need to know and know how to do? What training tools and resources will they need to optimize their learning? How will you assess their performance?
• Cultural Alignment: What structured events will you plan to introduce new hires to the team? How will you facilitate structured and unstructured engagement? Who will be involved in these experiences?
• Organizational Alignment: How will you instill the values of your organization into your new hires? What events and experiences will you develop to welcome and immerse them into your organization? Who will be involved throughout this process?

You’ll then need to use all this information to develop a cohesive onboarding “journey” for your new hires to embark on. By creating a logical, practical course of events, you’ll ensure your employees are always able to accomplish the task at hand — and always know how to proceed once they’ve done so.

It’s also important for your new employees to understand what their onboarding journey will look like, and what it will require of them.

This will allow your new hires to:

• Anticipate their next steps at every stage of the process
• Visualize their progress over time
• Experience cognitive closure as they complete each task in front of them

Employee onboarding checklists are a key tool for these purposes. 

Thinking “big picture”, you can provide a checklist of major tasks, events, and requirements that encompass the entire onboarding experience. You can also get more specific, focusing on the step-by-step processes involved in certain onboarding tasks.

“When I started working at Hypercontext, my manager created a shared onboarding checklist to help me get set up. 

The checklist included things like setting up my laptop, reading through onboarding documents, orientation, attending coffee chats, my first writing assignment, etc. On her end, it included getting HR documents sorted, inviting me to meetings, etc.  — and I could see the status of all those tasks. 

It was incredibly helpful to have a concrete list of tasks to tackle in my first two weeks on the job, and visibility into the admin set up as well. The checklist helped me feel set up for success from day one.” - Nicole Kahansky, Content Marketing Manager, Hypercontext

Example employee onboarding checklist from Hypercontext

Again, creating this overarching blueprint will allow you to streamline and optimize your employee onboarding processes — while also leaving room for tailored instruction and experiences for your individual employees.

Create an Onboarding Timeline of Events

This goes hand-in-hand with creating an onboarding blueprint.

In the interest of minimizing time-to-productivity — while also ensuring maximum preparedness for your new hires — you’ll want to create a timeline for the journey to follow.

CareerPlug, for example, developed a 30-60-90 day plan for onboarding their new hires.

“Onboarding isn’t just a first day with HR and then a week of on-the-job training: it’s a long process of downloading not only the mechanics and processes of the role but the context of the organization: the history, the whys, the communication, the culture.

We create a 90-day plan for all of our roles, breaking down the first few weeks into tactical to-dos -- watch this training, talk to this person, learn this task -- and then transition to learning objectives they should hit at thirty, sixty, and ninety days.” - Natalie Morgan, Sr. Director of People, CareerPlug

Example onboarding checklist with a 30-60-90 day plan from CareerPlug

Now, this timeline will vary from industry to industry and company to company. 

In most cases, though, the onboarding timeline can be broken down into the following stages:

Preboarding

In the days leading up to the new hire’s official first day, there are a few things to accomplish.

Administrative tasks, for one, are best taken care of at this preliminary stage of the onboarding process. Contracts, payroll sheets, emergency forms, and other necessary paperwork should be completed before the employee officially gets up and running.

You’ll also want to use this time to begin introducing your new hire to the team — and to the organization as a whole. Though more formal introductions will take place in time, now is a good time for new employees to dig into company literature, internal documents, and organizational knowledge.

Finally, you can start getting your employee’s workplace ready for their first day on the job. This may involve giving them a quick preview of the tools and technology they’ll be using, but will overall be about enabling the new hire from the get-go.

First Day(s)

For new employees, the first day or two will be focused on getting acclimated to the work environment, and on preparing for their first few job-related tasks.

At this stage, new hires will likely need to wrap up any administrative tasks left on their plate. 

A few examples:

• Setting up voicemail and other phone-related processes
• Ensuring email and other digital accounts are functional and accessible
• Documenting their daily and monthly calendar and schedule

You’ll also want to introduce the new employee to the people they’ll be working most closely with. From fellow department members to cross-team colleagues to veteran team members and mentors, now’s the time to plant seeds for future collaborative efforts from your new hires.

Lastly, you’ll allow for some guided practice with real-world tasks. With an experienced colleague close at hand, your new hire can begin learning the ropes — and start setting the stage for future growth in their position.

These first few days are critical for getting new hires started on the right foot. 

As Morgan explains:

“Onboarding is a significant time commitment in the short-term, but in the long-term, that employee will be more independent, knowledgeable, and able to make a real impact sooner.”

First Week(s)

Throughout the first couple of weeks on the job, your new hires should become more involved in their duties, more acclimated to their work environment, and more dedicated to the organization.

As competency grows, new hires will be asked to take on additional responsibilities. At the same time, they’ll gradually need to become more independent, overall. Still, managers and mentors will need to stay close by should they be needed at any time.

This is also the time to introduce your new employees to your performance expectations. By providing real-world experiences before digging into all this, your new hires will now have context in which to understand what’s expected of them moving forward.

On that note, you’ll then want to give the employee a chance to clarify anything they’ve learned up until this point. They might also need to request additional assistance or resources in a certain area, as well. Or, they may have some suggestions as to how to improve their workflows and processes.

By the end of this stage of the onboarding process, your new hires should begin to feel like full-on members of your team — from both their and their teammates’ perspectives.

First Months

This point of the onboarding experience involves a cyclical process of continuous improvement.

Based on the new employee’s performance thus far, you’ll provide more laser-focused training and development experiences, educational resources, and mentorship sessions. You’ll also provide more open-ended opportunities for them to dig deeper into certain areas as needed.

From there, you can monitor their efforts and progress, while providing focused feedback to keep them moving in the right direction. Even if everything seems to be going well, you’ll always want to look for ways to help your new employees go the extra mile when they can.

As in the previous stage, you’ll then want to collect feedback from your new hires regarding their experiences so far, and their potential future needs. From there, you can create laser-focused training programs and provide more personalized learning experiences — starting the cycle all over again.

First Year (or Two)

The final stage of the employee onboarding process is both retrospective and focused on the future.

In both cases, there’s a much more formal feel to the experience.

Looking backwards, employees and their managers can take a look at the new hire’s growth over time. As important as it is to recognize, acknowledge, and celebrate their strengths, it’s also vital to point out specific areas in need of improvement for them to work on in the future.

Speaking of the future, you’ll then work with your nearly-onboarded employee to create a formal, individualized professional development plan. This will help your new hires understand what’s expected of them in the years to come — and what they can expect to receive for living up to these expectations.

Remember:

Optimizing your onboarding timeline is the key to decreasing time-to-productivity.

While you certainly don’t want to rush your new hires through onboarding, you also don’t want to draw it out so far that it hinders productivity. 

As time goes on, fine-tuning your timeline will be an ongoing priority. Keep this in mind, as we’ll come back to it towards the end of this article.

Tailor the Onboarding Experience and Allow for Self-Driven Progress

A one-size-fits-all approach to employee onboarding just isn’t the best course of action.

For one, the onboarding process will look different when bringing aboard employees in different positions. Aside from mandatory paperwork and the like, the onboarding as well as training methods and experience should vary from department to department.

It’s also important to tailor the onboarding process to the individual employee’s needs. Though the process will follow the same general workflows and timelines, there needs to also be some flexibility built into the process as well.

This flexibility is what will allow you to enhance the onboarding experience for your new hires — in two ways.

Firstly, you’ll be able to tailor their overall onboarding journey before they get started. With a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses from the get-go, you’ll have a better idea of how to best help them get up and running.

What’s more, this flexibility will also enable you to tweak their experiences in near real-time throughout their onboarding journey.

For example, if you notice them struggling with a certain task, you’ll want to be able to:

• Allow for extra practice time in that area
• Provide helpful, relevant resources
• Connect them with a mentor for additional guidance

Taking all this a step further, you should allow your new employees to tailor their own onboarding experience as necessary, as well.

Check out how Edyoucated allows for a personalized, self-driven employee onboarding experience:

Through self-assessments, checklists, and surveys, new hires can identify the areas they know they should focus on throughout their journey. This not only results in an optimal onboarding experience for the new hire, but also allows them to take ownership of their professional development from their very first few days on the job.

Provide Open Access to Organizational Knowledge

In order to provide the self-driven onboarding experience we just mentioned, you’ll need to give your new hires open access to your organization’s collective knowledge.

(Source)

This serves a number of purposes — for both your new hires and your company as a whole.

For one, your new employees will be better equipped to tackle their new responsibilities as they unfold and become more complex. With your knowledge assets close at hand, they’ll easily be able to:

• Clarify their confusions or misunderstandings
• Find solutions to common issues or problems
• Identify best practices and optimal workflows for specific processes

Moreover, your new hires can dig even deeper into these resources at their leisure over time. Again, it’s about allowing them to take ownership of their own learning and development — even when there’s no immediate need to do so.

Finally, you’ll eventually want your new hires to start contributing to your organizational knowledge in any way they can. Providing them early and open access to this content will ensure they know how to best do so when the time comes.

"What is there to hide? Companies that are transparent and provide open access to knowledge make it easier for employees to align to company goals. Having a centralized point of truth for information is a great way to build trust with your employees, and accomplish desired outcomes together.

At Impact, we have a centralized knowledge hub for all employees to find relevant resources for learning (this includes internal documentation as well as customer-facing materials). As part of my onboarding process, there were dedicated times that I could reach out and connect with team members to learn more about them as well as the inner workings of the role that I was hired for. This fostered a sense of collaboration and inclusion with the team that immediately made me feel welcome, even though the onboarding process was remote. 

I like to consider myself a self-starter - by having open access to organizational knowledge, I felt I was equipped with the necessary tools and resources to better prepare for my role. This allowed me to be engaged and independent while still knowing I had my team to help me along the way!" - Nicholas Rohr, Channel Partner Manager and Growth, Impact

Note: Providing easy access to organizational knowledge assumes you’ve gotten your knowledge management initiatives underway in the first place. If not, we’ve got you covered with our knowledge management guide.

Some general advice for knowledge management:

• Be Structured: Organize your knowledge content in a logical and intuitive manner to ensure employees can always find the information they need.
• Be Comprehensive: Be sure that your knowledge content covers every inch of the topic in question, leaving no information out or questions unanswered.
• Be Practical: Repurpose knowledge content into various formats to enhance effectiveness, and/or provide convenience.

A knowledge base is at the core of your team’s knowledge management efforts. Learn more about creating one that can help you with your onboarding goals with our step-by-step guide.

Provide Learning and Development Opportunities

More than just teaching new hires how to properly do their job, providing learning and development opportunities aims to maximize a new hire’s potential at work.

A few things to consider here:

• Offering specific L&D sessions based on individual strengths and weaknesses
• Delivering instructional and informational material using multiple formats
• Providing opportunities for colleagues to learn collaboratively and practically

These L&D experiences can be more formal (i.e., scheduled, guided learning sessions.), or they can happen “on the fly” (i.e. on-demand engagements). In either case, they should be created in a way that ensures all team members will get maximum value out of the experience.

"We have implemented learning and development opportunities in both synchronous and asynchronous delivery in order to find success in onboarding.

For example, when new hires (Newpers, as we like to call them) join the team, their first day begins with a meet and greet including myself, and another member of our People Operations team. They then go on to partake in live onboarding sessions with members across all departments of our teams. These live onboarding sessions take place over the span of two weeks to ensure our new hires get breaks, the time to ask questions, and complete their personalized onboarding schedule curated by their manager.

Asynchronously, we provide our new hires the ability to learn at their own pace through Lessonly, a learning management software. New hires are given a “path” to follow in the platform during their onboarding that contains content essential to their onboarding. The content ranges from how to navigate our product to learning how we are creating and fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. In partnership with our Learning and Growth Lead, Kelsey Kett, we track completion rates and scores." - Cassy Beals, People Operations, Loopio

Facilitate Socialization with Mentors and Other Team Members

Your new hires should never feel like they’re going it alone throughout the onboarding process.

(Even a self-driven experience shouldn’t happen in isolation.)

Simply put:

Your new hires will need some hands-on guidance from time to time. 

And it’s crucial that your team is able to provide the best advice and assistance possible when they do.

So, you’ll want to provide ample opportunities for your new hires to socialize and engage with their new colleagues in both structured and unstructured ways.

For more structured interaction and collaboration, you have a few options.

First, collaboration should be built into the new hire’s job-related workflows. Whether it’s working with a teammate on a certain task, connecting with a separate department on a larger project, or checking in with a supervisor at specific moments, your new hires need to know that collaboration isn’t something “extra” — it’s a necessary part of the job.

Mentorships are another effective way to keep new hires on the fast-track to success. Onboarding mentorships can form in a variety of ways, such as:

• With veteran teammates who had worked in the same position earlier in their career
• With managers, team leaders, and those in charge of certain initiatives (e.g., communities of practice, etc.)
• With IT and tech support for training purposes

You might also set up dedicated communication channels for your new hires to connect with others on. A Slack channel specifically for onboarding assistance, for example, can allow for focused guidance at all times.

(Source)

Facilitating less-structured — and even recreational — engagement throughout onboarding is important for creating a sense of belonging and camaraderie. Providing opportunities for your new hires to interact with their new colleagues on a personal level will have a major impact on the employee, the team, and your company.

(Source)

The goal is to make your new employees feel like true members of the team as quickly as possible. In turn, they’ll become more comfortable connecting with their new teammates for guidance and assistance — and eventually for more productive purposes.

Inject Automation Into Employee Onboarding

Automation plays a critical role in the modern employee onboarding experience.

For one, it ensures certain processes run as efficiently as possible. As we said earlier, streamlining processes is key to eliminating bottlenecks and the like — and automation is often the way to do it.

Automation also empowers new hires to be even more productive with their time. Since they’ll be spending less time and energy on more menial onboarding tasks, they’ll be able to focus on the more involved processes in front of them.

It’s these menial processes — typically relating to administrative documentation and such — that you’ll want to automate first. With so many document management tools available today, there’s no excuse to still be delivering and receiving employee documents by hand. There’s also no need for new employees to spend hours inputting the same information into multiple forms.

Take a deeper dive into the world of electronic document management systems.

Making use of employee onboarding software to help with automation can be involved in the more complex areas of onboarding, as well.

A few examples:

• Timely messages delivered via email drip (as Customer.io does with their new hires)
• Delivery of tasks, prompts, and comments based on performance
• Assessing employee performance and providing basic feedback

That being said, automation isn’t meant to replace the more personable, human parts of the onboarding experience. And it’s definitely not meant to make the journey “easy”.

Rather, automation should be used to keep your new employees focused on what matters most along their journey, while allowing the machines to do the busywork.

Provide Focused and Timely Feedback

Providing feedback throughout the onboarding experience is important for a few different reasons.

It allows you to:

• Reinforce everything the new hire has learned thus far
• Acknowledge the effort they’ve put into the experience
• Confirm and celebrate their successes over time

Feedback is also needed to correct your new hire’s course as needed.

• Providing constructive criticism
• Offering practical suggestions for how to improve
• Delivering additional tools and resources to aid new hires

For your feedback to be worthwhile and useful, it must be both focused and timely.

Regarding focus, your feedback must be:

• Individualized: As discussed, tailoring feedback to the individual’s performance expectations will further personalize the onboarding experience.
• Contextual: Suggestions and advice should go beyond “textbook” explanations, and consider how the new hire can best proceed given the relevant context.
• Comprehensive: Don’t assume your feedback will be understood as you’d intended. Rather, provide more than enough information to ensure your point is clear.

Regarding timeliness, there are two ways to go about delivering feedback.

In some cases, you’ll want to do so after the employee has taken a specific action. 

Again, you may simply want to acknowledge their progress as they complete a task — or you may need to provide further assistance should they fall short of expectations. Either way, giving immediate feedback is vital for keeping them on the right path.

In other cases, you’ll deliver feedback after a certain period of time has elapsed. These engagements will be a bit more formal in nature, such as with employee evaluation forms and performance appraisals, and will serve to:

• Summarize the employee’s overall performance, experience, and growth
• Revisit goals and OKRs that had been set earlier on
• Make a plan for how the employee should proceed

It’s also important for your other team members — those who have worked with the new hire — to give them feedback, as well. For one thing, each team member will offer their own valuable advice based on their perspective and expertise. What’s more, hearing similar messages and words of wisdom from multiple team members will reinforce what the new hire needs to know to be productive moving forward.

The onboarding process isn’t about “going through the motions”. 

It’s about preparing new hires to perform to their highest capacity from their very first day on the job.

Providing regular feedback throughout the onboarding process, then, is key to unlocking their true potential as effectively as possible.

Solicit Feedback from New Hires and Other Stakeholders

On the flip side, you should collect feedback from your new employees (and others) throughout the onboarding process.

This can have major benefits for both the new employee and your company.

For the individual employee, having the opportunity to give their own feedback means having the chance to:

• Engage with leaders and other team members to clarify information as needed
• Make their voice heard, and become a more integral part of the community
• Improve their own onboarding experiences (and other future experiences with the company)

For the company, collecting feedback from your newly onboarded employees means the ability to:

• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your onboarding workflows
• Better understand the role certain team members play in the onboarding process
• Make laser-focused improvements to the onboarding experience

(Again, these laser-focused improvements can apply to the individual employee experience in real-time, and to the company’s overall approach to onboarding.)

As with giving feedback, you’ll want to ask your new employees for feedback at relevant moments in their onboarding journey.

In most cases, it’s best to wait until the employee has fully completed a task to get their feedback. The more complete their experience, the more comprehensive and accurate their feedback will be.

(You wouldn’t want to get their feedback on, say, your document management processes until after they’ve completed the administrative part of the onboarding process.)

Context also determines the length and depth of feedback you’ll be requesting, too. For quick-hitting feedback about less-intensive experiences, pulse surveys can get the job done effectively. For feedback on more complex and in-depth experiences, more formal survey sessions and engagements may be necessary.

“Onboarding is such a crucial part of the employee lifecycle and it needs to set the new joiner up for success. Seeking feedback on the process is how we know what is working and what isn't.

The best way to get that information is to ask for it. At Learnerbly, we send a survey out to new joiners at the end of their onboarding but we also encourage feedback throughout the process and at any point after. Sometimes it takes a few months for them to realize what was missing from their experience.

The important thing when seeking feedback is to start with why - why their input matters and how it contributes to improvements that will impact the onboarding of all the new joiners after them.

That value makes them feel heard and their input valued.” - Marie Krebs, People Partner, Learnerbly

In all cases, though, your request for feedback should be backed by an open invitation for further discussion as necessary. While you don’t want to take up too much of your new employee’s time, you do want to collect as much valuable feedback from them as you can.

Which brings us to our last tip...

Make Continuous Improvements to Your Onboarding Efforts

Your employee onboarding processes should, in some way or another, be evolving on an almost constant basis.

This goes for making improvements to your individual employee’s experience in real-time, and for improving your approach to employee onboarding as a whole.

To be sure, there are plenty of areas to improve at any given moment:

• Streamlining administrative tasks and other procedural work
• Improving your instructional workflows
• Enhancing your learning resources and knowledge assets

Your collective performance data, qualitative employee assessments, and employee feedback will equip your team to make laser-focused improvements to your onboarding processes.

Zooming out a bit, look at how your onboarding practices are impacting your organization as a whole.

Consider metrics such as:

• Employee happiness
• Voluntary turnover (and length of tenure for new employees)
• New employee satisfaction and performance

Also, think about which employees are staying onboard: If you’re unwittingly losing those with the highest potential, you’ll likely need to make some improvements to your onboarding processes.

Whether making small tweaks or sweeping changes to your approach to employee onboarding, be sure to document them within your internal knowledge base. Having this single source of truth in place will allow you to make continued improvements to your processes — and will ensure that your team always follows best practices when implementing them.

Improve Employee Onboarding to Maximize Productivity

It’s pretty simple:

By making sure your new hires get started on the right foot, you’ll set them up for massive success as productive members of your team. The more successful your employees are from the get-go, the more productive your organization will be as a whole.

Helpjuice's knowledge base software allows your organization to centralize all of your onboarding materials in a single, organized location.  Get a 14-day free trial and see how this can help with streamlining and improving the employee onboarding experience.