Onboarding and awkward first dates

Improving first impressions for your people and saving you money.

 According to ServiceNow, one in three employees would prefer to go on an awkward first date than attend onboarding or orientation for a new job! Everyone knows how painful an awkward first date can be, so why are companies causing such dread at the thought of taking part in their onboarding process?

The last twelve months have seen dramatic transformations in the world of work. With large numbers of redundancies and high unemployment rates, the business world is set for a comeback. When companies do begin to rehire, they will need to think about how to best get their new employees up to optimal speed as quickly as possible.

How can you achieve this?

Assimilating quickly into a new environment, particularly a fast-paced workplace can be difficult.  Ensuring that your new employees get up to speed as quickly as possible is crucial to productivity. Your onboarding process is the most important tool to help you achieve this.

The first stage of the onboarding process, or ‘preboarding’, begins when a job offer is made. All communications and contact with the soon to be new employee are part of your onboarding process. Something as simple as sending a welcoming email prior to their first day to provide basic information on what to expect for their first day. Not only does this provide information but it also demonstrates your enthusiasm to welcome them to your team. According to Recruiter Nation, in 2018 75% of recruiters experienced candidates changing their mind after signing an offer letter. This goes to show that making contact as soon as possible is critical to ensuring that the talent walks through your doors in the first place!

So, once you have successfully landed your new employee getting their first day right is critical to settling in fast. Using a buddy scheme is a good way of fast tracking their integration and making them immediately feel involved. According to HCI 87% of organisations that employ this strategy have found it to be an effective way to fast-track development. This will firstly give the new employee a friendly face and allow them to ask questions with confidence.

“Giving your new employee meaning and direction as early in the process as possible will go a long way to settling their anxiety.”

All human beings in new and uncertain situations will feel vulnerable, anxious and excluded. These basic human emotions are unavoidable and as an employer the importance of minimising these first day fears and doubts cannot be understated. Giving your new employee meaning and direction as early in the process as possible will go a long way to settling their anxiety. Getting them to feel included and confident that they are valued. As an employer laying out a clear and comprehensive overview of your company's goals and culture is a key part of building a positive relationship with your new employee. Employees who understand the goals they are working towards and how they are expected to contribute towards those goals, are significantly more motivated to do so. The employee needs to know where they stand and what is expected of them. Without proper direction they may end up aimless and confused, hindering their own growth and your company’s productivity.

A good onboarding process also highlights what the company offers to the employee and makes them value and appreciate their new place of work. This two-way trust and dedication builds healthier and more productive workers and increases employee engagement. Having an engaged workforce will improve motivation and effort. As a result, your company's output will be far greater. Getting this stage right, early on in the process is critical to create employee loyalty to the company; simply put, if employees don’t feel valued, they will look elsewhere for opportunity.

Onboarding can often fall short after the first few weeks. However, many job roles will require significantly longer periods of onboarding to attain good levels of contribution. Typically, the more complex the role the longer the process. It is vital for employers to maintain their strong start and ensure the employee is getting the most out of their new role and vice versa. Onboarding can and should be used to progress and develop your employees with a long-term goal to strive towards and along the way, smaller attainable goals. This will set the tone for your assistance with their continued professional development and performance management and ultimately feed into a mutually beneficial culture.

What’s the cost to your business of failing to onboard effectively?

As well as the above-mentioned benefits to company engagement and productivity, a successful onboarding process will reduce employee turnover. Research by Glassdoor indicates that companies with a strong onboarding process will see employee retention improved by a whopping 82%.

“...an average employee earning £25,000 or more per annum would cost approximately £30,614 to replace.”

Employee turnover is exceptionally costly for businesses, the costs to recruit and train new employees all the while operating at a lower level of productivity is very expensive. Studies in 2014 undertaken by Oxford Economics and Unum, show that an average employee earning £25,000 or more per annum would cost approximately £30,614 to replace. There are the more obvious ‘hard costs’ to this process such as the advertising of jobs, running interviews and the hiring process. There are also the ‘soft costs’ such as loss of productivity and re-training costs. These add up to a massive sum of money and when multiplied across a number of employees it could cost large-scale business millions of pounds a year.  Based on the research by Glassdoor, it would seem that effective onboarding is a must for any growing business to prevent significant financial losses!

These financial implications of employee turnover are scary stuff, with the average turnover rates in the UK at 15% according to Monster. That would cost a business of 100 employees £459,210 per year in rehiring and retraining costs!

Yet there are even more reasons beyond the financial costs to get your onboarding right. The constant overhaul of staff means that continuity is ruined; building a trusted workforce with a wealth of experience is very difficult to achieve. The lack of consistent long-term employees will also create a negative atmosphere in the office, with employees finding it hard to buy into the company and lacking the social connections with their coworkers. Humans, being the emotional creatures that we are, need these positive social settings to feel comfortable and perform to our best. Do not underestimate the importance of the collective emotion of the workforce, it will drive your company to great things if it is managed well. 

So, are you doing enough?

All of these benefits of having a strong onboarding process would seem to be obvious, however this does not appear to be the case. Sapling HR claims that 93% of employers find that a good onboarding experience is critical to positively influencing a new hire’s decision to stay with their organisation. This would imply that companies are aware of the impacts of onboarding and place great emphasis on getting it right. However Gallup found that only 12% of employees felt that they had received an excellent onboarding process. While in a December 2015 ADP study, 91% of managers, 81% of HR administrators  and 75% of employees said they believed that their organisations did not do onboarding well.

This shows that there is a serious gap between employers knowing what the right thing to do is and what employees actual experience of onboarding is.  This leaves significant room for improvement across most onboarding processes and statistically speaking, yours could well be one of them!

What can you do to improve?

Firstly, employers need to understand the basic elements of what they are trying to achieve with their onboarding, getting the foundations of the process right is vital to making the process a success. More employers need to involve their existing employees by asking them what they feel could be done better. After all, they are the people who determine whether the process is a success or not!

Lose the documents and minimize the paper trail; while having a clear and structured onboarding process is key to its success, it doesn’t have to be an arduous,  bureaucratic slog! Use online platforms to make it more engaging and less time consuming. The online format can include visual aids, informative videos or interactive games to increase employee engagement while still providing the necessary information.

Tracking employee progress throughout the process is also a great way of making sure that they are moving forward. Setting small milestones along the way will help motivate them and create a sense of achievement for your employees.

As well as all of these improvements that can be made to the onboarding process, employers need to apply them to their reboarding as well! With the imminent return of furloughed workers and a return to the ‘next normal’, the reboarding process is more important than ever.

Are you ready to review your onboarding practices?

So, in summary the evidence above shows that while companies know about the benefits of onboarding, they do not do enough to make sure it is working. Moving into the post pandemic world, businesses need to make sure they change their onboarding approach, using employee feedback and innovation to enhance the experience. In addition to this, understanding the length of time needed for an effective onboarding process is a must for employers - this includes emphasis on both reboarding and professional development. In essence a great onboarding process needs to remove the anxieties of a new job and convert the feelings of exclusion, uncertainty and lack of purpose into inclusion, confidence and valuing the meaning of their work.