Engagement is like trust: It’s much easier to maintain than repair. This makes onboarding a key point in the employee lifecycle because it’s your chance to foster engagement from the very beginning of an employee’s tenure.
It really, really matters: Great onboarding means that a new hire has a nearly 70% chance to stay with the company for 3+ years [5]. For sales employees who only stay about 1.8 years on average, this is an improvement of almost 50% [6]. And good onboarding can shorten time-to-productivity by up to 70% [7] as well, which directly translates into increased revenue. Just imagine getting a whole extra quarter of sales activity from every new member of your sales team!
There’s nothing mysterious about great onboarding and no secret formula.
The steps are simple:
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Create and share a structured onboarding and training plan.
Outline a clear plan for new employees’ first days, weeks, and months on the job. Starting a new job is already a time of uncertainty, so every reduction in ambiguity will be appreciated.
Get social and make it easy to engage with your people and culture. Help foster positive relationships between new hires and their colleagues. Mentors or buddies work well for this and it’s best practice for managers to lead the way in introducing new hires to the broader team.
Plan for ‘upboarding,’ which is the onboarding existing employees require when changing teams or roles. Skipping this can be disastrous: There’s nothing worse than taking an exceptional performer and then putting them in a new role where they aren’t set up to succeed.
Collect data and use it to power continuous improvement.
To assess the impact of your onboarding and training programs, you can measure ramp-up time, product knowledge, performance and productivity, and more.
That’s it. But of course, ‘simple’ doesn’t equal ‘easy.’ Maybe that’s why only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job of onboarding [8].
Focus on manager training and enablement. Odds are, there are many great leaders in your organization that aren’t great at onboarding new employees, especially virtually. However, when managers are actively involved in the onboarding process, new hires are more than 3x as likely [3] to rate the experience as ‘exceptional.’
Gather feedback and have regular manager check-ins.
If you teach new hires that it’s ‘sink or swim,’ they’ll never soar. To avoid this, managers should check in with new hires regularly so they feel heard and are getting what they need.
A great LMS can help you excel. It can unlock the content new hires need.
It can connect them to their team and integrate into the flow of work. But the real magic is this: A great LMS can give you the data you need to create clarity out of complexity (and even grow your business). 55% of businesses don’t measure the effectiveness of their onboarding programs at all[7], so taking a data-driven approach can help set you apart. An LMS can even help you deliver personalized learning to every user, so they get a tailored experience just for them—starting from their very first day.
Here are some concrete steps you can take:
Engage employees from day 1 with exceptional onboarding
Impact
Make new hires feel welcomed, informed, and supported.
Ensure they know what's expected of them and have the tools and resources to get it done.
Help them build connections and become part of a team.
Train and enable your managers to properly deliver your onboarding plan.
