One of the most important things you can do as a leader in your company is develop an employee onboarding process rooted in the fundamentals and adjusted for modern-day realities. Referring to employee onboarding process examples is a great strategy for building your own processes.
A positive onboarding experience helps ensure that your new hires:
- Acclimate to the company culture
- Learn the skills they need to succeed
- Feel connected to their colleagues
- Step into a new role that will provide your company with value for years to come
As your HR team will tell you, retention of new employees is a major milestone that provides a sense of employee engagement and workplace continuity. Implementing the best employee onboarding practices sets your whole company (and your individual team members) up for long-term success. Consider these best practices and employee onboarding process examples as you begin.
Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of August 9, 2024.
The four Cs of a successful onboarding program
The four Cs outlined by SHRM and Talya Bauer in 2010 are at the core of effective onboarding. These four critical elements are compliance, clarification, culture, and connection. These crucial components can act as a funnel that drills down into more complex and meaningful stages as the new employee moves through each phase.
Technological updates (including social media and the rise in remote employees) have shifted some of the norms of the onboarding period. But these foundational elements remain critical to creating a sense of belonging and ensuring adherence to the company’s mission.
- Compliance. At the base of any effective employee onboarding process examples is a training program designed to ensure compliance. New hires need to be familiar with company policies. They also must complete the necessary paperwork to get them full access within the workspace.
- Clarification. New employees typically enter an existing workflow with dynamic projects. This part of the onboarding process ensures they understand their own role in the work environment. Give them a chance to ask questions, fully understand the expectations, and get up to date on existing progress.
- Culture. Don’t overlook the importance of allowing your new hires to socially integrate into the work environment. Within the first week, most employees will have a first impression of your company (and their role within it) that will be hard to change. Make sure new team members feel welcomed, supported, and engaged.
- Connection. Once new employees have made meaningful connections with existing employees and found their own place within the workflow, they’re nearing the end of onboarding. Make sure this final and most complex stage is intentionally designed for a smooth transition.
The new face of onboarding practices
What’s changed about onboarding in recent years isn’t the fundamentals. But they can get lost in the reality of remote work, disparate workspaces, and a lack of connection among existing employees.
As Roy Maurer explains, “The remote-work revolution dramatically altered many aspects of the employment experience, but onboarding is not one of them.” What has changed, however, is just how challenging meeting the four Cs can be.
The relatively simple days of in-person icebreakers and day one lunches with the team aren’t easily replicated in many of today’s companies — even if they aren’t fully remote. Modern-day workplace practices mean that many team members aren’t in the same space at the same time. But this can leave new hires feeling lost in the shuffle if they aren’t intentionally included from the first day.
Here are the best techniques found across most employee onboarding process examples to implement for an effective, modern onboarding experience.
1. Preboarding
One of the conveniences of modern technological advancements is that a lot of the onboarding can happen very early in the process. Preboarding occurs when you give employees materials to work through before their official first day on the job.
By creating preboarding materials that mix compliance expectations with key information and training for a successful workplace experience, you’ll boost employee retention and set your new hires up for success.
Preboarding can begin with a welcome email that walks your new employee through the onboarding checklist. It can include compliance training modules, the employee handbook, and information about their positions.
For successful preboarding, set aside an onboarding period that allows your new hires to work through materials at a pace that won’t overwhelm them.
Providing asynchronous options (rather than live webinars) will save your company resources. It will also make it easier for your employees to focus on the training at a time that works best for them.
Ensure that your preboarding process includes immediate access to both hardware and software. Your new hires will need any laptops, tablets, or phones assigned to them. They’ll also need access to accounts with training resources. Make sure these elements are ready to go on day one to avoid frustrating barriers to successful and efficient onboarding.
In summary, a successful preboarding process will contain some or all of the following:
- Welcome email
- Asynchronous compliance modules
- Well-written employee handbook
- Immediate access to hardware and software
- Dedicated onboarding period to complete preboarding requirements
Make sure any templates or employee onboarding process examples you use for your own organization include these core elements.
2. Connection-focused onboarding
When you’re hiring remote or hybrid employees or your current employees work on remote or hybrid schedules, it can be easy to overlook the in-person aspect of onboarding.
Bring the best of in-person training into your employee culture by setting up regular check-ins with new hires. Also, schedule one-on-one meetings with their hiring manager at regular intervals from the hire date.
Knowing this timeline for check-ins from the beginning will give your new employee a sense of clarity. It provides a dedicated time for in-depth questions and answers. It will also give them a sense of belonging.
Consider assigning an onboarding buddy, a current employee responsible for guiding a new employee into the workplace. Task this “buddy” with the job of checking in regularly and building camaraderie through social engagements—virtual or in-person.
Many successful employee onboarding process examples also include physical markers of the new hire’s connection to the company. Swag bags with t-shirts, mugs, pens, and other symbols of workplace cohesion help provide a sense of value and team spirit.
Another strategy for building connections is ensuring company leaders appreciate and recognize the new employee. This is especially important for large companies, where face-to-face interaction with the highest levels of leadership may not be regular or guaranteed. One strategy is to use recorded welcomes from these leaders that are warm, friendly, and engaging. Putting a face to the company helps combat feelings of isolated bureaucracy that might otherwise give a new hire an anxious first impression.
A connection-focused onboarding process will take into consideration the following:
- Regular check-ins and one-on-one meetings
- Onboarding buddies (existing employees assigned to guide new hires)
- Welcome packages complete with swag
- Engaging welcome videos from leadership
3. Hands-on onboarding
When you hire a new employee, you’re bringing their perspective, talents, and energy into your company as assets to improve your service or product and the team as a whole.
Successful companies recognize this opportunity as a two-way street. They will set up onboarding experiences that give their new employees a chance to shine and find their footing in a new environment.
Hands-on onboarding goes beyond training materials and into experiential opportunities that let new employees check their existing skills against their new expectations.
Consider including small projects in your employee onboarding program. These can help:
- Check how your employee will work with different departments
- Provide real-life opportunities to test communication systems
- Allow your new hires to find any tensions or obstacles in the workflow in a well-managed format
Ideally, this project will be one that’s necessary and useful for the company as a whole but that’s also small enough to be completed in a short period of time. The best projects will require collaboration and communication that mimic the kind of expectations the new hire will be navigating on a regular basis.
Hands-on onboarding works best with the following conditions:
- Real-life projects founded in the company’s needs
- Opportunities for communication and collaboration
- Interaction with multiple departments or teams
Successful onboarding is worth the effort
Ultimately, your goal is to have a cohesive team of employees invested in your company’s success and growth. The employee onboarding process is ground zero for reaching that goal.
You only have one chance to make a first impression, and crafting an onboarding process that showcases your commitment to support, connection, and appreciation is well worth the effort. Starting with employee onboarding process examples and customizing them to suit your own organization can streamline the process.
When you have employees who feel connected and understand the expectations for their role, you will see greater retention rates, more collaboration between different departments, innovative solutions to workflow problems, and engagement that keeps your company moving forward.
Make sure that your onboarding program offers an intuitive, easy-to-use, and well-organized structure.
Putting materials in a high-functioning learning management system (LMS) allows you to easily customize templates and invest in high-quality onboarding practices that you can then easily duplicate and adjust for individual demands.
Start your new hires off on the right foot from day one (or even earlier) with a solid onboarding process designed to last. Review our resources, including some helpful employee onboarding process examples, and set your team up for success.