4 Best Practices for Onboarding New Staff: Tips from the Experts

Did you know it can take just a tenth of a second to form a first impression? The same theory applies in professional settings (but along a slightly longer timeline!).

With 90% of employees deciding whether to stay in a company within the first six months of starting, first impressions are crucial when engaging new hires. And that begins with onboarding. So, why is this process so often an afterthought?

Onboarding is more than just a box-ticking exercise to collect personal details and get employees set up. Effective onboarding also delivers an engaging new hire experience that’s more likely to retain top talent for up to three years.

Ready to optimise your onboarding process? Crafted by our experts, here are four of the best strategies for creating a positive new hire experience from day one.

1. Complete Paperwork Pronto

Slow onboarding fuels new job anxiety and gives employees time to get cold feet, particularly during the paperwork completion stage. The back-and-forth chasing missing signatures from various departments, for instance, creates frustration and resentment before they’ve even started!

How can HR teams prevent this? By completing essential paperwork before the first day. This approach also leaves more time for fun onboarding activities that truly engage new hires, such as team-building activities and lunches.

A streamlined onboarding platform like Onboard Express can significantly speed up the process. Swapping manual administrative tasks for automated workflows allows you to quickly and accurately create and distribute:

• Preboarding paperwork
• Employment contracts
• Company policies and procedures
• Payroll and tax forms

Replacing manual data entry with automatic contract and document assembly also eliminates errors that can prolong the process!

By investing in the Onboard Express platform, UnitingCare Queensland established onboarding pods that reduced the time taken to onboard new employees through to payroll from 2 weeks to just 2 days. The aged care charity also enhanced efficiency across all divisions and improved the candidate experience!

2. Prioritise Effective Communication

Along with building a poor first impression and overall company reputation, failing to communicate with new hires immediately after they accept the job offer can leave them feeling that they’ve been “ghosted.” In fact, over 50% of job seekers in a LinkedIn survey say they’ve been ghosted during the process, causing them to begin looking elsewhere. 

Avoid this by setting up a personalised portal through your onboarding software. This provides a dedicated communication space to keep new hires in the loop throughout onboarding. 

Line managers and team leaders can introduce themselves via welcome messages sent directly to this portal, ensuring employees feel comfortable and know who they can ask for help from day one. HR can also deliver tailored notifications and reminders to complete essential onboarding paperwork. 

Once filled out and securely signed, key documents are then automatically sent to all relevant departments. These workflows provide a fast, efficient process that ensures everyone stays connected.

3. Integrate New Hires Into the Company Culture

89% of employers agree that employees understanding the company mission is critical to its success. However:

• Only 25% of employees feel completely informed about their company’s mission.
• Just 32% understand the values of the organisation they work for.

Sharing your company values during onboarding is therefore key for early engagement and organisational success. This helps new hires immediately feel part of the company’s mission and that they are involved in working towards something bigger, hence keeping them motivated.

Introduce them to key team members and managers immediately, including those who can provide insights into an average working day. Give office or facility tours and ensure new employees’ physical and online working spaces are set up, with logins and personalised portals prepared before day one. These steps make new hires feel welcome and immediately part of the team.

New staff who feel connected to the company culture are four times more likely to be engaged at work, which equals higher productivity and performance. They’re also six times more likely to recommend your organisation to others, making it easier to build a highly skilled workforce over time!

4. Personalise Your Training Program

A targeted training program integrated into onboarding ensures new hires understand the role expectations from day one. This boosts their confidence, leading to a 17% increase in productivity and 21% higher profitability!

Online training allows new hires to work through modules at their own pace, without feeling overloaded. HR can easily track their training progress and celebrate milestones upon completion. Employees then feel that they’ve achieved something important before even beginning!

Measure the success of this training by setting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) during onboarding. OKRs are a goal system and talent management strategy that define clear, specific objectives and the intended results. They can also help you demonstrate how a new hire’s goals are connected to the overall company strategy early on in their journey. 

For example, your objective may be to boost customer satisfaction. The key result could be a higher Net Promoter Score or increased conversion rates. For the individual employee, this could be measured by the number of mentions by name in customer surveys.

And the results speak for themselves. Psychological research shows that employees who understand the significance of a task are more engaged and display higher job performance.

Successfully Onboarding New Staff with Onboard Express

Excellent onboarding involves engaging new hires to become fully competent, inspired team members in the long term. It’s also about ensuring they feel mentally and physically prepared to start the role and perform to their full potential. 

This means that onboarding doesn’t stop after day or even week one. With one-third of new hires leaving within the first 90 days, it should be an ongoing process that’s continually reviewed and optimised to enhance the employee experience. 

Looking for even more expert onboarding tips? Contact the Onboard Express team today to book your free demo.