Let’s face it, onboarding new employees and training them can be a pain for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be. At the end of the day, both the company and employee would like the new hire to be able to get to work sooner.
However, employees’ success at the company often relies on their level of confidence and competency that only a proper onboarding experience can provide.
Once you have the right people on the team the list of employee onboarding best practices below will help you get the best of both worlds:
Onboarding Tip #1. Utilize Micro Learning
According to Stephen Baer, Head of Creative Strategy and Innovation at The Training Arcade, microlearning is a unique training technique that companies can implement in order to help employees retain what they have learned.
This is important, according to a concept known as Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve, which describes the way people tend to forget what they have learned after 30 days when no effort is made to retain the new information.
Case in point — I was videotaping my son’s high school soccer games all season, but then did not use the camcorder over the summer months. After my 90 day hiatus I somehow forgot how to delete old videos. It took a half a dozen tries for me to jog my memory.
So, when you’re onboarding new employees microlearning serves as a solution to this problem, as it relies on a series of small learning modules designed to offer employees a more effective way to retain information.
Onboarding Tip #2. Help New Employees Feel Connected to the Company
In a recent article for Inc. Magazine, James Sudakow, author of ‘Picking the Low-Hanging Fruit … and Other Stupid Stuff We Say in the Corporate World,’ writes about the importance of helping new employees feel connected to the company during their onboarding program. This is foundational for creating high performing teams.
Sudakow notes that one of the primary reasons employees decide to leave a company within the first year of being hired is due to a misalignment of expectations. However, this can be prevented by ensuring that the employee feels a strong connection with the company from the beginning. This means linking the onboarding process with the company’s values, and implementing ways in which new employees can build relationships within the company.
Onboarding Tip #3. Give New Employees Space and Time to Acclimate
Generally speaking, most new employee onboarding experiences are overwhelming, both for the new employee and the company. Negative onboarding experiences can leave a lasting negative impression of the company in the eye of the new employee. Not too mention, providing the new employee a boring day of filling out paperwork and reviewing the employee handbook can lead to information overload.
Instead, it’s best to spread out information over time. Some possible ideas include the following:
- Give new employees their training materials and employee handbook before their first day, so they can spend some time looking them over and getting comfortable with their job expectations before they arrive.
- Allow new employees time to get comfortable in their new work space.
- Space the onboarding experience out over time.
- Get creative and gamify the onboarding experience to make it less boring.
- Provide the new employee with a mentor, coach, or go-to person who they can feel comfortable approaching with questions.
Onboarding Tip #4. Go Digital to Make Onboarding Efficient
A recent article published by the Human Capital Institute notes that a good onboarding process should get new employees engaged with their work as quickly as possible. In 2018, achieving this means relying on digital tools which make the onboarding process more efficient.
Today there are various tools in existence which help place important information in an easily accessible digital location that all employees can reference, while other digital tools provide easy ways to craft tutorials and onboarding lessons. Still, some digital tools offer ways to make paperwork signing a breeze.
Conclusion
A successful new hire onboarding process leads to better employee retention and performance. Therefore, it’s important to spend some time thinking about your existing onboarding process to ensure that it is as good as possible. We hope these innovative best practices are helpful in assisting you with designing an up-to-date and highly successful new hire onboarding process.
Be sure to download my free checklist on Creating High Performing Teams here:
https://staging7.paramountbusinesscoach.com/creating-high-performing-teams-checklist/
QUESTION: What is your #1 biggest frustration when you are training new employees for your business? Share your comments and questions below.
