Seems to be that no matter what study you read (or several people I spoke to on this topic), there is a lot of room for improvement in regards to how companies conduct their new employee onboarding process.
According to a Paychex study from last year, more than half (52%) of employees were dissatisfied with their onboarding experience. A Gallup study found that a mere 12% of new hires strongly agreed their new company did a great job of onboarding them, with 24% expressing outright dissatisfaction with their onboarding experience. In a word: “Wow!” Or maybe “Yikes!” is a better word? I can’t decide.
Because the onboarding program is a new employee’s very first experience with their new company and can form strong (positive and negative) impressions about the company from the get go, companies need to get this program right. Great or poor, the onboarding experience can affect important factors such as overall employee happiness (morale), retention, turn-over, and even productivity.
I have worked for several companies during my 20+ year marketing career and have been through a couple great but mostly poor onboarding processes….and it really did set the tone (consciously and subconsciously) of my impressions of the company and how much they valued and were committed to their employees and their success. This is crazy, but some companies didn’t even have an onboarding process despite saying they had a really good one during the interview process….
So let’s get to it! There are so many ways a company can provide an amazing and fruitful onboarding program. Here are some of the top ways I believe a company can improve this extremely important program.
Provide General Then Role Specific Onboarding
One of the goals of onboarding is to provide new employees deeper information on the company’s history/origins, products/services, differentiation, near and long-term goals/mission, protocols, leaders, etc. All of this information is great, informative, and should get the new employees excited. However, companies need to develop a supplementary onboarding curriculum for specific roles and departments. This supplementary part of the overall onboarding program can take place in the form of breakout sessions during the general onboarding program or after the general onboarding program. I believe the former is better but either way is fine.
For example, suppose a company’s latest group of new employees goes through the general orientation all together. Then, all the marketing, IT, accounting, product, and engineering employees get a role/department specific onboarding curriculum. This approach provides each new employee with a well-rounded introduction to the company and their role, connects their responsibilities to the bigger picture, and better sets up each new employee for success.
Assign a Mentor to Each New Employee
I would have absolutely loved a mentor to take me under their wing when starting at every company I worked for. Only one company I worked for did assign a mentor to each new employee and I cannot tell you how much this helped me on several levels, including helping me feel more comfortable and acclimated quicker.
Progress check-ins, available to answer questions, provide guidance and support, easy introductions to key leaders/colleagues…there so many benefits a mentor provides! A great, open, willing, engaged, enthusiastic mentor who genuinely cares can accelerate a new employees feeling of comfortability at the new company, get them connected quicker, and help make the new employee more productive quicker. So it is very important a company selects the right mentors!
Diversify Onboarding Channels
I understand and advocate for pre-recorded onboarding videos. They are efficient; have a pretty good shelf-life; and can be an engaging, fun way to learn if the videos are done really well. Not all are! However, my issue with this format is that they are either overused or the only/primary format companies use during onboarding. That’s been my experience and several other connections.
Other channels and formats companies should consider to spice things up and better keep new employees engaged are:
- A company and onboarding specific AI platform/interface (developed by the company’s IT department or outsourced) containing only information about the company, where new employees are encouraged/required to use it as a tool to learn everything about the company, their role, the market the company competes in, and so much more.
- 65% of the population are visual learners. 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. 40% of all learners respond better to visual information vs. text.* Companies should incorporate more compelling, creative, fun, informational visual infographics into their onboarding curriculum. Transform key milestones, data, metrics, goals, industry data and information, competitive intelligence, etc. into captivating, cool visual handouts, slides, over-sized posters, etc. Visual aids (when done really well and creatively) are so much more easily scannable than text, making them more apt to be reviewed after onboarding.
- Bring in an outside industry analyst to deliver an on-site or virtual state-of-the-industry followed by a company leader explaining how the company fits into the industry and marketplace they compete in.
- Scavenger hunts aren’t just for kids. They are a fun, great, collaborative, unique way to learn more about the new company and a great icebreaker to meet new colleagues. The super creative possibilities are truly endless when designing a new employee company scavenger hunt.
Make It More Interactive
Based on my and several connections I spoke to experiences going through several onboarding programs, I found them to be mostly one-sided: a lot of listening and watching, not so much two-way interaction. Including LIVE Q&As with employees that represent every facet and seniority level of the company. This is such a great way for new employees to learn about the company, interact with all sorts of colleagues, get diversified POVs, and get questions answered on what the new employees are most curious about.
Don’t Overwhelm Them
Every onboarding program I went through was either not long enough (sometimes a measly day), too long, or what I felt was just the right amount of time. Oftentimes, you could tell the company didn’t put much, if any, structure or thought into the onboarding program….But there was usually one common thread: entirely too much information was being crammed down our throats. Companies should not overwhelm their new employees with too much information too soon. When this happens, it is counter-productive to every goal and purpose of an onboarding program. The onboarding length and amount of information should be carefully planned and include the feedback of employees who recently went through the onboarding program, which get us to the last recommendation….
Collect and Implement Post-Onboarding Feedback
At the conclusion of each onboarding program, a survey should be sent to each new employee about their onboarding experience. Not only will companies collect first-hand feedback to continuously improve and tweak their onboarding program, it shows new employees that the company actually values their opinions. Now that’s a nice first impression for the new employee!
These are just a handful of ways companies, no matter the size or budget, can improve the new employee onboarding experience. Nailing it is incredibly important when you consider that a positive onboarding experience can make new hires 18x** more committed to their organization while 69%*** of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they have a great onboarding experience (StrongDM) (Paychex).
Do you have an awesome or poor onboarding experience you would like to share? We would love to read and learn from it!
*GITNUX MARKETDATA REPORT 2024
**25 Surprising Onboarding Statistics in 2024 | StrongDM
***The Effect of Poor Onboarding on New Employees | Paychex
Who Is Periphery Staffing Solutions?
We are a boutique staffing and recruiting agency specializing in identifying, screening, interviewing, and placing better marketing and IT candidates as well as being a strategic partner to companies; lending our decades working in and leading marketing and IT departments. We are on a deeply passionate yet determined mission to enhance, transform, and significantly improve the experience for both companies and candidates through superior, refreshing, more human-driven, empathetic ways, processes, philosophies, and approaches.
Far, far away from today’s typical, overwhelmed, placement-driven, role-experience-lacking ‘recruiting machines,’ we are very proud to be on the periphery of all other staffing and recruiting firms.
We provide companies and candidates a refreshing, different, more insightful, and strategic experience rooted in decades of real-world experience in the marketing and IT trenches. Companies never again have to settle for life-long recruiters with little to no experience in the marketing or IT role they hired them to recruit for or worry that the overwhelmed ‘recruiting machine’ they hired is using applicant tracking systems or AI (and not real-world experience) to identify and screen candidates.
cdegobbi@peripherystaffing.com201.446.2217