You never get a second chance to make a first impression. You also don’t get do-overs with employee onboarding. What a worker experiences during their first days and weeks at a new job will impact their entire experience. Too often, poor onboarding can cut that experience short. In fact, employees often decide within their first 30 days whether they are going to stick with a company. Or, maybe they’ll quit as soon as they can find somewhere else to work. Here are 4 onboarding tips to reduce turnover.
#1 Engage Peers in the Onboarding Process
It’s nice to have a buddy system. It’s not uncommon to have a new hire shadow a more experienced mentor during their orientation. However, this is just the foundation. Give everyone who will be working with the new hire a chance to become acquainted. This can happen during a status meeting, during a slow time on their shift, and even over the company’s social media platform, email, or text. Have the new hire share a few facts like where they grew up, where they went to school, and their hobbies. It will give their co-workers an instant way to connect around areas of shared history or interests.
#2 Make Onboarding Easy from Start to Finish
This means having a simple system in place to get all the right documents completed, signed, and stored without placing stress on the new hire. An online process is easiest to implement. It’ll save money, time, and frustration for everyone involved in onboarding. Perhaps most important for the new hire, their information can be sent automatically to Payroll. That way, there is no worry about whether their wages will be paid in a timely, accurate fashion. Our employee onboarding solution is one option that you can consider.
#3 Take the Time to Reach Everyone
Does your company claim to care about its workers? Make that value visible by making it personal. Someone in management should meet personally with every new hire within the first week. That doesn’t mean taking them out to lunch. It does mean taking at least a few minutes to provide a warm welcome. Show some interest and answer any questions the new hire might have.
#4 Allow New Hires to Customize Some of Their Training
There are some parts of orientation that everyone needs to go through, such as safety or anti-harassment programs. But there are other aspects of training that can and should be available to employees at their own pace. For some aspects of their work, modularized, web-based, and even gamified instruction can be implemented. It lets workers pick and choose topics as they go. As long as everyone has the basics covered, giving workers some autonomy to guide their own training can make them feel empowered. It’s a very good way to demonstrate that your company is geared toward helping employees grow over the long term. Finally, it will help more workers decide to stick around.
Practicing these 4 onboarding tips to reduce turnover will help you grow a team that will be most productive!