When you are in the need to hire new employees, you make sure you search for the right person to join your team. It can take some time to find the right applicant. You want someone who is open-minded, ready to learn and has a strong work ethic. Not an easy task.
After all this effort to find the right person for the job, it would be a shame to have a low-quality onboarding process. You invested a lot of time and usually money into the hiring process, and not taking care of the onboarding process will leave you with a low return on investment. You have a new employee, who has all the qualifications to do this job perfectly (you made sure of this) but in the first few weeks, or even months, he or she is not using their full potential. Your new employee (let’s call him Sam) has to learn everything from his superior who is already very busy. Sam gets a basic explanation on the first day and is told that if he has any further questions his colleagues will gladly help him out. Motivated as he is, Sam tries to figure everything out on his own. When he finally gets stuck, he asks his colleagues for help. They put their running project on pause to offer Sam the help he needs.
Do you see what’s going on here? Multiple employees are restrained from doing their job. Sam gets some explanations from different people, but there’s no consistent transfer of information. Every colleague has their own take on how to do the tasks, and not all of them are right. It takes Sam a long time to figure everything out. After all he just missed the annual training about the new software updates, which was held just a week before Sam came on board.
Not only is this frustrating for him, it is highly inefficient for your company.
So, what can we do to improve this scenario?
Use online onboarding! If you have an online academy with an effective onboarding process, your new employees will learn much faster. They can learn on their own pace, without the interference of someone else. Once they learn everything there is to know, they can start implementing their knowledge. When they get stuck, they can easily look up the information online and refresh their memory. What’s even more interesting about online onboarding, is that your new hires can even start learning before they start their new job. As soon as they signed their contract, you can give them access to the company’s online onboarding portal.
In the onboarding process you can also prepare new hires for their first day, sort out all the paperwork, give a quick introduction about used tools and introduce the company. A well-thought-out onboarding process will not only improve employee performance, it will also increase retention because new hires will feel happier. Once you set up this online onboarding system, it will serve you for many years! An investment worth making, right?
To figure out the right onboarding strategy for your company, contact us to have a strategy meeting. We would love to help you!
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