Onboarding is not just giving appointment letters to new employees, but it is much more than that. The onboarding of employees is done so that the new hires can smoothly transit into their new roles and can fit into the company’s culture. By doing this, employees can feel comfortable in the organization and can immediately start their work with sufficient knowledge. It's an HR duty to help them to adjust in the company faster. Thus, you need to understand what is onboarding and how to onboard your new hires.
What is the Employee Onboarding Process?
An employee onboarding is the process of introducing a new hire to their roles and responsibilities in the organization. Introduce them to the company’s policy and procedure, workplace, colleagues, reporting managers, and more. Proper and adequate processes of a company can create an excellent first impression on the employees. Good onboarding can make new hires satisfied with the organization and gain success in less time. This can also lead to improve in employee retention.
How To Onboard New Employees
These are the steps by which you can onboard your new hires more effectively and smoothly:
1. Prepare Pre-boarding
Pre-boarding is as essential as onboarding of employees. After hiring the candidates, you can mail them all the required details. This will help them to prepare themselves for their first day in the office and save the onboarding time for both employees and the employer.
Mail them the company’s forms and the documents that are required on their first day:
- Prepare important forms that are needed to be filled out
- Mention details about their joining date, office hours, and office address
- Provide organizational manual
- Instruct to bring important documents like 10th/12th and graduation mark sheets
- Instruct to bring an aadhar card copy
- Ask to bring bank details
- Give information about the dress code if the company has any
By mailing these details before their joining day it will help them prepare well for their new start. This can also help them to complete their documents before joining.
In pre-boarding, apart from mailing you can also priorly set up their desk. With the help of the IT team of your company, make their system ready with login and passwords. To make them feel good, you can provide them with a welcome kit that includes necessary materials like stationery items, ID cards, t-shirts, bottles, chocolates, and more.
2. Conduct an Induction Program
When an employee comes to the office on their first day, make sure someone from your team is greeting them and making them comfortable. Conduct an induction program for them explaining the company product or services, client lists, vision, and mission.
The program deeply explains all the company policies like attendance, leave, social media, code of conduct, and more. This can give them an overview of the company and what is expected from their side.
3. Show them the Workplace and Introduce them to Their Colleagues
After induction, give them a workplace tour so that they can get comfortable with the office area. Giving the tour on the first day itself can make it easier for them to navigate the office. During the tour, you can arrange some snacks for them.
While giving a workplace tour, you can introduce them to the other employees or departments. This will make it easy for them to communicate with other employees, and they can better understand the company culture.
Introduce them to the HR department so that if they have any further queries they can directly contact them. Also, the most important thing for you is to introduce your new hires to their manager.
4. Introduce them to Their Workspace
After introducing them to the company, employees, and manager you can now introduce them to their workspace. Give them their system and help them with the login credentials. Give them the application overview that the company usually uses for the work.
Provide them with a list of important contact numbers they can use whenever they are having any queries regarding the system. You can use this opportunity to explain the security rules of the organization.
5. Follow up on Their Progress
Let the employee get settled with the work and the company culture. Make sure you have arranged the follow-up meetings with the new hire on a routine basis. By doing this, you can easily identify where they are struggling and how you can resolve it.
You can also set up a meeting with their reporting managers to clear the work-related doubts of the employees. Thereby, the manager can also get to know the employee’s skills to a greater extent and can help them accordingly.
How Does Onboarding of Employees Benefit Your Organization?
There are many benefits of the employee onboarding process but some major ones are given below:
Increases Productivity
Giving induction and a proper understanding of tools and systems can help them to fit into the role quickly and easily. Thus, it improves their productivity and reduces the time that is invested in learning about the tools. Therefore, it is necessary to invest in your new hire in their initial days so that they can immediately contribute to the growth of the business.
Improves Communication
During onboarding, HR introduces the new hire to their team members and the manager. So that they can get comfortable with everyone. Good communication between employees can help them coordinate with each other in the future and give better output.
Increases Employees Satisfaction
We all know that a good first impression is very much important for the employees. So welcoming them and giving attention to them will make them happy and satisfied with the company. As a result, satisfied employees always stay longer with the company and give more productive results than unsatisfied employees.
Better Understanding of the Company
In employee onboarding, you make new hires aware of the company’s protocol, operations, vision, and mission. As they will know more deeply about the company, they can follow the same rules in the organization. And when an employee knows the business’s value and objective, they can work accordingly to give more effective results.
Conclusion
Employees on their joining day have mixed feelings but by providing a good onboarding to them it will make their first day exciting and memorable. This has many other benefits, such as increased employee engagement, and improved employee retention rate, and helps to build a coordinated work culture. An effective onboarding program is worth the investment and can be proven as the most significant contribution to the organization's success. If you are planning to provide your employees with the onboarding program in that case, this article will definitely help you to understand what is onboarding, its steps, and its benefits.
The whole onboarding process needs to see an objective. The objective of onboarding is to satisfy UX best practices. Some onboardings can be educational, others will be centred on change, or meeting another objective, for instance, gathering some data about the client. Each application is a world and has its own objectives.
