4 Ways To Elevate Your Onboarding Program

March 14, 2021

Author: Renqun Huang

Employees form the core of every organisation. Talented and productive employees contribute to the organisation’s business growth and overall organisational culture. On the other hand, employee turnover has a detrimental impact on morale and is expensive to the organisation as well.

There are numerous ways to tackle employee turnover. One of the key ways is to ensure proper employee onboarding as part of employee retention efforts. Here are four ways to design a robust employee onboarding program to ensure the robust employee retention.

Ensure onboarding content is up-to-date

Company policies and procedures change all the time. And the last thing you want to provide to your new joiners is outdated policies and procedures. Not only does this confuse your new joiners, it creates a poor first impression for both the company as well as on the new joiners. When there are changes to existing organisation policies, organisations should always ask themselves whether this should be included into the onboarding program or not.

Provide onboarding to managers

Managers play a crucial role in employee engagement. In an article featured on LinkedIn, it highlighted that "people leave managers, not companies". The problem is that some managers, as superb as they are at what they do, fail at being a good people manager. Most of the time, these managers do not have proper onboarding training and tend to onboard a new employee based on the way they were being onboarded in the past. It is imperative for organisations to have in place an onboarding training program for new managers to ensure that they can successfully onboard new joiners to their team or department.

Schedule onboarding check-ins

Onboarding programs is an organisation’s investment. It requires time, effort and cost to implement a good onboarding program for new joiners. And the last thing that any organisation would want is to train a new employee only to have him or her leave within the first year. Schedule regular check-ins with new joiners or gather feedback through pulse surveys on ways in which the existing onboarding programs can be improved.

Refresher onboarding for promotions and transfers

Onboarding need not necessarily be limited to new joiners to the organisation. When employees get promoted or transfer to another team or department, they should also receive some form of onboarding. While it does not necessarily have to be the same onboarding program as that of a new joiner, there should be sufficient information to allow employees to transition into their new role.

Today, onboarding programs are meant to set new joiners up for success in the organisation. At the same time, such programs are no longer a mere one or two days of training. It could be a week or even a month of thorough orientation program as well as constant follow up. From an organisation’s point of view, onboarding programs can be viewed as a long term investment. The benefits of this long term investment would ultimately come in the form of increased employee engagement levels and lower turnover rates.