A New Employee Onboarding Experience

Why is Employee Onboarding so important?

The team is excited that someone new is joining. The new employee is excited to be welcomed and supported by a new team. Both parties always start out with the best intentions. But for the new employee, the user experience before their first day begins online and how they communicate with the team during the first week can influence if they stay or leave by as much as 25%.

There are well known best practice tips for new employee onboarding, but this article focuses on what you can be doing before your new team member walks through the door, or in 2020, signs on for their first Zoom or Teams meeting.

Onboarding programs typically increase retention by 25% and can improve employee performance by 11%.

For those organizations who implement a well-structured onboarding program, statistically, they can expect that up to 69% of their employees will choose to stay with the company for 3 years or more.

In fact, according to the survey above from Truman State University, an ineffective or non-existent onboarding process can influence an employees’ reason to quit their role. This creates a need for organizations to strengthen onboarding programs in order to be able to retain employees, train fewer new employees and reduce HR costs in the long run.

What is an Employee Onboarding program?

Employee Onboarding is a formal process of welcoming and integrating an employee into an organization. It’s designed to provide new employees with the framework required to succeed and be productive as soon as possible within their respective role.

In most scenarios, new employees are provided with a set of tasks to review and complete before their first official day of work. These tasks typically included the following:

Paperwork

• Every employee comes with paperwork. These can include personal tax, bank account information, and even a contract or non-disclosure agreement relating to the role they are performing.

Role Preparedness

• Depending n the role the new employee is performing, outlining role expectations and any KPI’s that might be tied to their performance should be clear and concise

Work Apps

• How will the new employee get work done? What will be their tools of the trade? Are they familiar with how to use these apps, or will they require training during their first week of employment? Many of these are answered during the interview stage, but outlining the apps they will be expected to use should again be clear and concise

Authentication Management

• In the digital workplace, authentication enables employees to move between work environments quickly and efficiently.

Employee Onboarding makes an effort to increase productivity and reduce turnover by improving employee confidence and engagement, all before their first day of work.

Benefits of the CentricMinds Employee Onboarding experience

CentricMinds provides a quick-to-implement Employee Onboarding platform that enables you to configure and meet the needs of your new starters. Key out-of-the-box features include the following:

Extranet platform

• Enables you to create external user accounts (allow new starters to authenticate with their personal email)

External User Account Management

• Manage new starters who are currently outside of your corporate Active Directory

Targeted Content

• Decide what content to share with new starters, based on the role they are performing within the organization

User Analytics

• Review which new starters have logged in, what forms they’ve completed and which documents they’ve reviewed

The employee experience starts with a personalized environment that includes a welcome message, contact information for the employee’s team members, a ‘To Do’ list of Tasks, and links to operational documents that they may need to review.

Engage with your New Employee before they start

By creating a personalized onboarding experience, the new employee feels integrated straight away. The fact that the employer made an effort to create a workspace where everything is at reach demonstrates to the new employee that they are being considered and that the organization is making every effort to ensure the new starter is best prepared for their first day within the team.

These are important reasons for an employee to psychologically establish and engage with its employer from the very beginning of their employment.

As explained in the article “It’s not about Money, Things that Employees Value more than Salary”, show that you care and they’ll want to stick around and make it work at all cost.

Make them feel inclusive from the beginning

A virtual meeting place, or Team Directory, allows employees to navigate through their team’s likes and dislikes, their achievements, their social networking interactions and comments, making them relatable from the very beginning of their employee journey.

Deliver consistent and reliable Internal Communications

The Employee Onboarding Experience also allows you to communicate frequently and meaningfully with your new employees.

Ensure you post a welcome message to the rest of the team, encourage new employees to interact with others and ensure they are being welcomed in the new world of remote work.

Make your internal communication extraordinary from the start. Create bite-sized messaging and campaigns that get employee's attention, provides convenience and achieves results that deliver value and improve communication.

Give employees a purpose to work for you

As W. Clement Stone once said,
“Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.”

Give your employees a vision, a purpose and something to believe in and you will have created an unstoppable army to back you up, instead of 9 to 5 drones.

Create a Welcome Video, include your organizations vision, your long term objectives, what you aspire to become, why you’re more than capable to make it and how you are hoping to achieve it with their involvement.

Provide the opportunity to develop their skills from the very beginning

The LaSalle survey showed that most people ranked the opportunity for growth as the number one factor when considering a new role.

Offer reading material that will excite your new employee. Explore their 5 years objectives. Review their performance and aspirations every 6 months.

Employees consider work as a powerful platform to learn new skills, stretch their potential and become a better version of themselves.

Consider creating an education program with a set of tasks and documentation that gets your new employees excited.

CentricMinds named a high performer 'team collaboration' and 'employee intranet' on G2 Crowd's world's leading business solution review platform

G2 Crowd, the world’s largest software comparison site, has released its Summer 2020 Review Grid. Once Again, CentricMinds is thrilled to rank as a High Performer across both 'Employee Intranet' and 'Team Collaboration' software categories. Our customers rank us highly on a number of important factors including User Satisfaction and Ease of Setup amongst relative competitors.