How To Improve Your Company’s Employee Onboarding Program

Companies often exert great efforts in finding new talent but far less in training and supporting new employees. A recent Gallup poll found that only 29% of new hires say that they feel fully prepared and supported to excel in their new role. The best practice for addressing this disconnect is to develop a comprehensive new employee onboarding program.

An employee onboarding program is an in-depth introduction to your company’s mission, workplace culture, performance expectations, and job roles. It’s a deeper dive than a simple employee orientation, and can take a month or even longer for new employees to complete the process. While a month may seem like a long time for training, comprehensive employee onboarding is absolutely worth the investment; it leads to greater job satisfaction, improved performance, and reduced turnover.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to create a more successful employee onboarding program, including how to assess your current training program. We’ll also discuss best practices for new employee onboarding, and explain how to use the onboarding process to achieve your company goals.

Assess your current program

The first step in improving your new employee onboarding process is to assess the current onboarding program—whether your program is brand new or has been in place for years. A thorough assessment can identify gaps in training and highlight areas requiring deeper development. Make regular assessments to further refine and improve your employee onboarding process. Here are a few best practices for conducting an employee onboarding assessment:

• Ask how it went. Provide a survey to new hires once they complete their onboarding program. Asking how satisfied they are with specific elements of the onboarding experience, like benefits reviews or company culture training, may reveal gaps in your program.
• Analyze your time. When assessing your current program, calculate how much time is spent on each aspect of employee onboarding. Knowing the time spent on different training areas will allow you to better align your onboarding to company goals.
• Assess your company culture. Happy employees will stay with you longer and be more productive in their jobs; one key to happy employees is a sense of belonging. Employee onboarding should include an overview of your company culture to help new employees feel comfortable when it’s time to join their co-workers. Use exit interviews to understand why employees choose to leave and conduct anonymous surveys to assess the feelings of existing employees concerning their work environment. Be open to receiving negative feedback and use it to improve the environment and better represent your company culture to new employees.
• Use metrics for manager performance. Create and monitor objective performance measures for the managers involved in the onboarding process. This identifies areas where managers need to interact with employees better.

Identify goals and objectives

If you want an effective onboarding process that gives a long-lasting positive impression of your organization, start by clearly identifying the goals and objectives of your program. While your new hire onboarding process goals must align with your organization's needs and strategy, you should work toward three broad objectives:

• Communicating expectations. Every new hire will need to clearly understand the expectations of employees and management, the tone and branding of the organization, company policies, and the philosophies that guide everything you do.
• Establishing foundational engagement. A fully engaged employee will positively impact every aspect of your business. Finding ways to engage them from day one of the onboarding process will lead to a stronger level of engagement over time.
• Developing employee loyalty. A great onboarding process will help employees understand their new roles and feel valued and needed by their teams. When employees feel appreciated and connected to their jobs, they’ll stay longer. High retention rates are vital for successful businesses because high turnover lowers morale and productivity, presents an unstable image to customers, and can cost 50% to 200% of an employee’s yearly salary.

Employee onboarding programs will have the greatest impact when goals include specific metrics to assess effectiveness. The following are examples of strong onboarding goals:

• New hires complete daily job tasks with 90% accuracy within the first six months.
• New employees pass a test on national regulations, industry standards, and company best practices with a score of 95 or higher within two weeks of being hired.
• Each new team member participates in weekly one-on-one meetings with their supervisors and team leads for the first four weeks.
• New employees spend a minimum of 140 hours shadowing and being supervised by an experienced team member during the first six months.
• Every new hire participates in a team-building activity with their future co-workers and collaborators within the first quarter.

As you analyze your measurable goals, remember to follow up with personal interviews to address lingering questions, clarify policies and procedures, and allow opportunities for feedback.

Create a comprehensive onboarding plan

Employee onboarding may start with orientation on day one, but a comprehensive plan goes beyond filling out paperwork and learning how to access the team’s project management database. The goal of employee onboarding is to give new hires the training and support they need to succeed long term. The employee onboarding experience should include the following:

• Training on company culture and values.
• Presentation of the organization’s vision for the future and how it plans to achieve those goals.
• Connections with co-workers using daily operations and activities or events.
• Authentic interest in the employee’s career goals beyond the onboarding process.

Think of your employee onboarding process as a springboard into the future. A successful program will instill confidence in new employees: confidence that they have the knowledge and tools they need to succeed, and confidence about their choice to work with you. The process should lead to continued employee engagement and development, with employees feeling supported in their professional goals and aspirations.

Utilize technology in onboarding

Two challenges that can arise in onboarding are the volume of paperwork, including digital forms, and the complications with onboarding remote employees. The good news is that incredible onboarding software tools are available to ensure your company doesn't miss a beat.

For both in-person and remote employees, online portals and apps can help set up a central source of information. Hiring managers and new hires can access the same information no matter where they are, including onboarding paperwork and employee handbooks. Access portals can also be customized to optimize workflow.

Additionally, you can use these programs to schedule formal training, individual meetings, presentations, and even virtual events to help new colleagues bond. These functions are especially important when onboarding remote employees, allowing them to virtually join in-person training events and build connections with their co-workers.

Onboarding tools also make tracking the onboarding process easier. Many apps include the ability to upload or convert templates you already have, streamlining your onboarding through automation.

A few standout onboarding tools include:

• Trainual. With Trainual, you can build online courses to cover anything your new employees need to know. The site has a relaxed, personalized feel for onboarding specialists and new employees.
• Sapling. Sapling (now part of Kallidus) is an excellent tool to scale your onboarding to include many employees, potentially across multiple departments. Sapling helps you create a workflow for your onboarding process, including using due dates and subtasks to stay organized. Onboarding specialists, new employees, managers, and mentors can use these workflows.
• Innform. Innform offers a fun, interactive onboarding experience. All new hires will rise on the leaderboard as they complete tasks and modules, introducing a little competitive spirit to your onboarding process. This approach works especially well for companies building a dual remote and in-person onboarding experience.

Measure the effectiveness of the onboarding process

Once you implement your onboarding process, it’s important to continue evaluating its effectiveness and make improvements. Consider several metrics you can use to evaluate your employee onboarding:

• Retention. To analyze differences, you can measure employee retention rates between new hire groups or hiring managers. Analyzing retention rates will help determine which programs are more successful.
• Turnover points. Keep track of when you lose the most employees. If, for example, you lose the most employees during the first year of employment, it may suggest a problem with your current onboarding process. If employees leave later, it may be due to a lack of career advancement, so creating a professional development plan with a manager can become part of the onboarding experience.
• Time. Look at the performance goals for each position and monitor how many weeks or months it takes for your new hire to achieve those goals. The strength of the onboarding program can impact how long it will be before a new employee becomes a truly productive team member.
• Team satisfaction. Your employee onboarding program is where employees form the first impression of your company, and first impressions are hard to shake. You can assess the impact of your onboarding process using anonymous surveys to gauge new hire satisfaction. You also want feedback from the people leading the onboarding process, including team supervisors and HR professionals.
• Ask for feedback. Create a focus group of new hires or conduct one-on-one interviews about the onboarding process. Keep it informal and use open-ended questions to determine how employees feel about their onboarding experience.
• Measure against the old program. Compare a group of new hires from the old program against new hires from your new program. Look for improvements in productivity, performance, employee satisfaction, and retention.

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Onboarding checklist

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Any HR manager can tell you that conducting onboarding for new employees starts long before employees arrive. The following is a general checklist for your HR team to follow.

Before the start date

The preboarding phase is where you ensure new employees understand next steps and expectations leading into day one.

• Send a welcome email with the offer letter and secure their acceptance, in writing, of the job offer.
• Prepare all necessary paperwork and have new hires complete as much as possible in advance online.
• Inform your current employees of incoming team members and their start dates. Ask everyone to greet the new arrivals with a warm welcome.
• Set up accounts, grant required access levels, install software, and prepare a physical or virtual workstation.
• Build their profile in your human resources system.
• Assign a buddy or mentor to personally welcome the new hire and provide “who to call” information for any issues that arise.

The employee’s first day

The main goal of day one is to introduce new employees to the company and familiarize them with the workspace.

• Conduct a tour of the office and point out the restrooms, break rooms, kitchens, meeting spaces, and individual workstations.
• Ensure that the employee can access all required websites and databases and knows how to get IT support.
• Briefly introduce new employees to their team, managers, and mentors. Provide an org chart and contact information.
• Complete any necessary new hire paperwork, including tax forms.
• Distribute employee handbooks and review the deadline to read it.
• Outline company policies, including lunch breaks, work breaks, and how to request time off.
• Review the company mission, goals, culture, and expectations.
• Meet individually with each new hire to review the job description, compensation, and benefits for their new job.

The first week

During the first week, you want to transition into the training phase of the onboarding process.

• Review work assignments.
• Set short-term goals and performance goals.
• Schedule one-on-one check-ins.
• Plan social and team-building activities.

The first month

During the first month, move through the training program using a combination of formal training, shadowing, and supervised practical experience.

• Complete training on policies, procedures, company values, and culture.
• Conduct regular check-ins to answer questions, clarify policies, listen to feedback, and offer encouragement.‍

Ongoing  

After the first month, you want to support employees in ongoing learning and help them become independent team members.

• Schedule regular check-ins every month.
• Continue training for job-specific duties.
• Check in with employee mentors to get feedback on new hire performance and possible gaps in training.
• Get feedback from new employees about how the onboarding process prepared them for their new role and affected their new hire experience.

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Upwork is not affiliated with and does not sponsor or endorse any of the tools or services discussed in this article. These tools and services are provided only as potential options, and each reader and company should take the time needed to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.