Onboarding a new employee can be a complicated and difficult endeavor. This is especially true since first impressions are enduring and new employees who receive a disjointed, or broken onboarding experience can form a negative opinion of your company that can be very difficult to overcome.
It’s not unusual for new employees to struggle to find their place in a new setting. It’s understandable acclimating to a new position, they’ll need some guidance before they can become an effective member of the team. This is especially relevant if this new employee is replacing a previous member of the team.
Finding ways to ease a new employee’s transition into your employment is necessary for recruitment. With this article, we hope to offer some pointers you can use to make bringing new employees on board a simpler and less chaotic act.
#1: Be Pre-Emptive
One of the most important steps to easing the onboarding process is making sure your forms and paperwork are in order. That’s table-stakes onboarding. If you don’t have the right material, it can create a very unflattering image of your company.
Don’t wait until a new employee comes into the office for the first time to fill out their paperwork. It will leave them working on formalities rather than getting to know the office, their coworkers, and the tasks they will have to complete.
It’s a great strategy to provide them the forms to fill out before their first day to finish before they walk in the door. This can go a long way to streamline the process and ensure they can begin working as soon as possible.
#2: Provide Information
New employees need patience and guidance to find their way. It’s critical to their success to give them clear information about the nature of the work they’ll be doing. Give them all the information they will need to know about the job and how they can meet your expectations rather than letting them try to figure it out on their own.
Both clarity and guidance can make them feel more comfortable working at your office and could help you minimize turnover in the long run.
#3: Communicate
In the same vein as guiding your expectations for the employee, ensuring you actively communicate with them is extremely important to the onboarding process.
One good strategy is to let them ask questions and help lead their onboarding process. Be prepared to provide answers rapidly and effectively to ensure they have the resources they need to do their job. And for those questions to which you don’t have the answer, demonstrating that you’re proactively finding an answer is a great way to help new hires feel comfortable and that their questions are valid in the onboarding process.
A lack of communication with new employees can lead to confusion and mistakes that would otherwise be avoided just by being straightforward. Ignoring, or failing to act proactively for those questions
Clear communication ensures consistency and cooperation between you and your employee and promotes a new employee’s eased transition into your staff.
#4: Personalize The Experience
Many employers are avoiding using a generic onboarding process for multiple new hires at once. Instead, many are personalizing the process to fit their new employee.
Personalizing the onboarding experience can simplify the process by making sure an issue specific to that new hire is both addressed and resolved.
It helps to view the onboarding process as a unique experience for the individual in question. It might seem more complicated, but it can help simplify things for your new hire.
#5: Update Your Technology
Many employers are realizing they just don’t have the time and expertise to create an effective onboarding process, much less carry it out with every new hire. They’re turning to HR & recruiting software to do the job for them.
Not only is HR & recruiting software saving employers time and money with onboarding new employees, but all new hires get the same experience. Employers love this because they can be sure each new hire is covering the same content, and has the same on-demand access to critical information that will make all the difference in a successful hire.
That’s why ESSG offers comprehensive, cloud-based staffing and recruiting software to all our clients. It is our goal to provide a convenient and reliable workforce management solution that will make the hassle of onboarding a worry of the past, with an intuitive workflow and automation technology that can run on any device.
Our HR & recruiting software is the most effective solution to onboarding, and can have an expanding effect on your business as a whole, creating happier employees, reducing turnover, and in the long run, improving your employer brand.
ESSG Can Help
Onboarding new employees is not something that should be viewed as a task to check off. It is both a celebration and a highly important tool.
Onboarding is designed to help your new employee feel at home in their new position and understand their expectations. Giving them the information and resources they need to better understand their new role will make the entire process much simpler in the long run.
Onboarding a new employee should have to be a difficult process. You can rely on us at ESSG to not only help streamline your onboarding process but effectively handle all your “back office” workforce management tasks. Contact us today and see what we can do for you.
About the Author
ESSG
Founded in 2005, by an ex-labor law attorney, a financial banker, and a business development expert, Employer Solutions Group's purpose is to help businesses (of any size) , lower the operating costs that come with having employees. Partnering with ESG to assume these responsibilities will increase your company's profitability, decrease employee turnover, so you can stay focused on your business' mission. Someone once asked our CEO what business he was in. His response: “We are in the business of helping people”.
