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New hire onboarding is more than just a formality — it’s a strategic opportunity to set employees up for long-term success and engagement. Yet, many organizations still struggle to get it right. This article explores essential best practices and how a new hire onboarding solution can help you create experiences that not only motivate new employees but also drive business results.
What is New Hire Onboarding?
New hire onboarding is usually defined as the process of new employees acquiring the necessary knowledge, skills and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders. Put simply, this process defines the first impression a person will receive from an organization, even before their first day at work.
The Importance of Onboarding
Getting onboarding right is crucial, affecting everything from employee motivation to ROI and retention. In fact, new hires who are satisfied with their onboarding at 90 days are twice as likely to stay with the company one and a half years down the road.
Yet despite its importance, the 2023 Global Culture Report found that only 43 percent of employees surveyed had an onboarding experience lasting more than one day. With so little time and attention dedicated to onboarding, it’s no surprise that only 52 percent of new hires feel satisfied with their onboarding experience, with the same percentage feeling untrained afterward.
Onboarding Best Practices Checklist
In light of these sobering statistics, it’s clear that many organizations are failing to prepare their new hires for success. To help bridge this gap, let’s delve into the best practices that can transform onboarding from a mere formality into a powerful tool for engagement, development and long-term retention. By taking a thoughtful, structured approach, companies can turn onboarding into a strategic advantage, ensuring every new hire feels prepared, valued, and motivated from day one.
Introduce Policies and Benefits Prior to Day One
One of the goals of onboarding new employees should be to settle them into their roles quickly, efficiently and with as high a degree of positive engagement as possible. And yet, more often than not, new hire onboarding typically begins with the monotony of a conference room, a stack of papers and hours of signing and reading.
Many organizations fail to take advantage of the period between when a candidate accepts an offer of employment and their first day on the job. This period offers organizations a unique opportunity to eliminate administrative tasks while introducing new hires to organizational policies and benefits from the comfort of their homes.
Although far from the most exciting part of onboarding new employees, policies and benefits are essential to understanding company culture and acceptable behavior. When paired with a robust employee onboarding solution, pre-boarding sets the tone for a positive, educational and rewarding new hire experience.
Define Roles and Responsibilities
Role clarity refers to the extent to which new employees understand the tasks and responsibilities associated with their position. Not only is role clarity a psychological precursor for new hire buy-in, but it’s also a prerequisite for productivity. Again, you can take advantage of the time between contract signing and a new hire’s first day at work to do this.
As role clarity proves most effective when viewed through the lens of performance expectations, organizations should consider clarifying roles in tandem with a goal-setting framework. It’s here that the objectives and key results methodology (i.e., OKRs) that we have previously discussed with regard to performance management prove instrumental in helping align new hires.
Organizations that struggle to communicate the what, where, when, who and how behind their role are failing to heed one of the most consistent predictors of new hire satisfaction and commitment. As a bidirectional exercise in goal-setting, OKRs provide clarity and encourage new employees to develop positional objectives that coexist with an organization’s overall strategic vision.
Incorporate Position-Specific Training
Many HR stakeholders view position-specific training and onboarding new employees as two separate elements of the productivity formula – the former a long-term investment in development, the latter an exercise in integration focused on company policy and culture. As such, it’s not uncommon for organizations to treat these two frameworks as separate components of the talent experience.
However, a successful onboarding process depends on the degree to which HR and management can achieve a smooth and complementary co-existence between the two.
Position-specific training is likely a long-term skill development endeavor. However, the primacy of role clarity necessitates that targeted training begins in the initial stages of new employee onboarding. Achieving transparency from the very beginning is key.
Similar to a new hire’s introduction to policies and benefits, organizations should begin delivering tailored training materials to employees in the pre-boarding period. Even the most experienced new hires will need an introduction to the tasks and processes that will define their role, so interactive video and e-learning content are essential resources in the quest for productivity — particularly in remote onboarding scenarios.
Familiarize Employees With Organizational Culture
Onboarding is also an ideal time to introduce your new hires to organizational culture. As it plays a relevant role in network building, having a tailored employee engagement hub such as Avature DNA will help introduce a fresh employee to the core values and ways of working at your organization. Discover how Epic used Avature DNA and onboarding solutions to transform the new hire onboarding experience and save over $50,000 in stamps alone by enabling new hires to sign documents electronically on their onboarding portal.
We ended up implementing Avature’s DNA solution to allow our staff to have a centralized, professional networking tool available from Avature’s onboarding portal to start getting to know their future coworkers before meeting them in person.”
Jeff Sonntag
Recruiter and Recruiting Systems Administrator at Epic
Particularly in remote working contexts, onboarding portals can help organizations make new hires feel at home by introducing them to their managers and team members before day one.
BMC leveraged a branded portal with tailored and dynamic content for new employees. Instead of the radio silence new joiners typically face post-signing, new hires are engaged through welcome videos from executives, resources related to their new role, useful links, location-related content and relevant company information.
Not only did the Avature onboarding portal create a positive onboarding experience, new employees felt prepared and comfortable in their new role and the company, reducing time to productivity.
If we don’t create that bond whilst they’re waiting to join, it’s very likely that other companies are.”
Jen Corio
Global Recruitment Operations & Delivery Manager at BMC Software
Those organizations that make a concerted effort to encourage network building will position new hires to develop the social fabric needed to not only understand organizational culture but to quickly contribute to it.
To Conclude…
With most new hires deciding to stay or leave within the first six months of employment, getting the onboarding experience right or wrong can make or break an organization.
As a best-in-class SaaS onboarding solution provider to some of the world’s most dynamic enterprise organizations, we recognize that the candidate experience doesn’t end when an offer is signed. To learn more about the steps our clients are taking to ensure a successful onboarding process, don’t hesitate to contact us today.
