Creating An Effective Onboarding Process
It’s Monday morning, and you’ve spent the past few weeks looking for that key hire to keep business moving forward. You want to make sure you do everything you can to allow your new hire to adjust to their role and your company’s culture. This starts with an effective onboard process. Here are some things you can do to help ensure you have a great onboarding process in place.
Have a Plan Ready to Go
Before your new hire is due to arrive at the worksite, make sure you sit down with everyone who will be part of the onboarding process, and develop a plan. Include everything that will need to be done in order to get the new employee off to a smooth start. Make sure all onboarding tasks are distributed among the team evenly and that nothing is overlooked. One key thing to keep in mind when creating your plan is to not include orientation items with onboarding items. Things such as where to park, office basics, and other housekeeping tasks should be reserved for a separate orientation time, while onboarding should dive deeper into coaching and mentoring a new employee.
Follow a Schedule
You want to make sure your new employees gets off to a good start. Giving them as much guidance as possible is important since they won’t know what to do right away. Have a schedule mapped out that includes a list of goals. This will help the new employee understand your expectations, and will allow them to get an idea of what needs to get done and when it needs to be completed. The goal here is to get them into a routine.
In the schedule that you create, make sure to allow enough time for the new hire to not feel rushed through orientation. Make sure they understand the company culture and office polices before moving on to the actual onboarding process. This will help them feel welcomed and ready to get to work.
Get Into It
During the first few weeks of having a new employee start at the company, make sure you are not throwing too much new information at them all at once. The onboarding process should not be a day-long event. A great alternative to this is to provide new employees printed copies of information that they can digest at their own pace and refer back to later. Make sure to share the most important information with them on day one along with follow up information later.
Include other members of the organization in the onboarding process and not just members of HR. One great way to do this is to designate mentor buddies for the first week or month of a new employee starting. This person can be someone they can go to for help or questions, and just give the new employee a sense of what the day-to-day office flow is.
Follow Up and Check In
Once you have gone through the initial onboarding process with the new employee, it is important to check in with them on a weekly basis for the first month. As they become more familiar with their role and the company you can start to meet less. Always make sure any of the employee’s questions or concerns are addressed, and always ask for feedback. You want to make sure you are working to improve the onboarding process for future new hires, and this is a great way to do so.
Conclusion
Not only does having an effective onboarding process in place help new employees feel welcomed and supported, but also it allows you to refine the infrastructure on which your entire business operates.
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