You've hired someone, great! What now? This article will help you develop an efficient and memorable onboarding experience. We'll go through the five phases of the employee onboarding process:
- Pre-boarding
- Company general onboarding
- Team and role onboarding
- Ongoing development
- Off-boarding
Why is onboarding new employees important?
New employee onboarding is crucial because it contributes to a positive overall employee experience. Effective onboarding has a positive effect on your employer branding, employee engagement and employee turnover.
Less employee turnover
With Millennials making up most of the newly recruited workforce, the demand for a better employee experience is rising. Losing a Millennial employee can cost a company $15,000 to $25,000, according to research. Recruitment and onboarding play a vital role in battling high turnover rates.
Recruitment is not only about finding the best match for the job, it's also about setting the right expectations.
For an optimal onboarding experience, start by making sure recruitment and onboarding roles collaborate and communicate well with each other.
More employee engagement
Onboarding your new hires is all about making them feel welcome, landing in the company and the team, and getting them up to speed and ready to start their role.
The onboarding period is also what sets the tone. If you work in a self-organised environment and value autonomy, this should be reflected during your onboarding process. A good onboarding plan finds a balance between holding your newbies by the hand and letting them immerse themselves in your culture and swim on their own.
What are the different phases of a successful onboarding?
In my experience, there are five key phases in every effective onboarding process. You'll notice I make a distinction between a general onboarding programme at company level and a specific orientation programme at team and role level. Some information, skills and training are relevant for all employees, whereas some are role or team specific. Both need to be addressed, and I find it's best done separately.
Phase 1: Pre-boarding
You've found your match, they accepted an offer and there's a starting date. Your onboarding starts now. Don't be mistaken thinking it only starts when your new team member walks into the office or checks into Zoom for the first time.
Effective employee onboarding starts the moment your recruit signs their contract.
Often there's a month or more between signing a contract and the first day. What you want to avoid is wooing new team members during recruitment, just to ghost them until day one. Keep the contact alive. This phase is a great time to warm up and prepare for their start.
A great way to do that is for the HR manager to assign the hiring manager and an onboarding buddy to the new recruit. Both can then go through a new-hire checklist to make sure the new team member feels welcome from the moment they agreed to join. That checklist could include things like:
- send a welcome email from the CEO
- send a team photo with a welcoming message
- give the new employee early access to your internal chat
- send a welcome kit with goodies and documentation
- ask the new hire to choose their preferred computer setup
Pre-boarding is key because it lets the new hire immerse themselves in your culture early on. This is especially important for remote employees who may not get to visit your offices.
Phase 2: Company general onboarding
For the new hire, this part is about understanding your company culture and history, going through your employee handbook, getting acquainted with company-wide tooling, seeing your structure and org chart, and learning how you work.
For your organisation, it's about arranging office keys, a desk and hardware, creating accounts and access to the right tools, and filling out the right forms for HR and payroll. I'd advise these general onboarding accountabilities to sit in a circle like your HR or People team.
Although I recommend separating general onboarding and team & role onboarding, both programmes should align, and I'd strongly suggest starting with general onboarding before your new hire starts in their role.
If you jump too quickly into their role, the general onboarding easily gets pushed aside. In the long run, this can negatively affect productivity and retention.
Without transparency and a strong company-wide onboarding, the new hire will struggle to find the information they need to do a great job at team level. Before you ask new team members to get on with the job, give them at least three days to a week, some companies give a few weeks, to get to know the company, spend a day with other departments and absorb the general knowledge they need. Train them properly in your way of working, your tooling and your communication before introducing them to their role.
Finding the right balance between company-wide and team-level information
While optimising the onboarding programme at Springest, I solved this tension by creating a role called "Newbie". Whenever someone started, they'd immediately begin with one role, the only role they held in their first week. Once they'd completed their onboarding programme, I'd notify the Lead Link, who'd assign them the "Springeteer" role.
This in itself marked progress, as they were growing into their next role(s), a first small win early on. The Springeteer role is the only role held by everyone in the company, and the only one in your contract that you can't drop.
Phase 3: Team & role onboarding
Team and role onboarding is done mostly with the new hire's onboarding buddy. The number one piece of advice I can give to increase efficiency is to assign one person, the onboarding buddy, to be their go-to for questions. Because new hires have lots of questions. That's completely normal, but it can also be extremely distracting and damaging if you're not careful.
According to a University of California Irvine study, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after being interrupted. As nice and helpful as the team might be, you want to prevent newbies from pulling everyone out of their work with questions to the general audience.
Assign one person to answer all questions
Make sure your new hire sits next to their onboarding buddy during their first few weeks, so only one person, who is actually accountable, gets distracted. Use the same logic for remote onboarding: if a new hire posts a general question to no one in particular in a large group, everyone gets a notification. If they get into the habit of firing all questions to their buddy in a DM, only one person gets distracted. Indeed, helping others when it's not part of your role can have unintended, adverse consequences.
Inspire a culture of problem solving
If you've worked at the company for a while and know the answer to most questions, it's very easy and quick for new hires to just ask you, and very easy for you to give a straight answer.
What's an easy and quick solution now may not be the right approach in the long run. Especially in a self-organised environment that values autonomy.
In a self-managed organisation, training new hires to take ownership of their roles is one of the primary objectives of onboarding. If you don't encourage autonomy during onboarding, don't be surprised if new hires take time to get up to speed and show entrepreneurial qualities. For this to work, you'll need to make sure the information is available and findable, with clear expectations, a visible org structure, and a clear picture of who does what.
How to protect your time and stay kind
You want to find the right balance between being available for urgent questions and getting your own work done uninterrupted. A technique that works well is scheduling daily or weekly onboarding Q&A sessions where your new hire can ask all their non-urgent questions. If several people start at the same time, make these group Q&As to save yourself from answering the same question repeatedly.
When a new hire interrupts you outside these check-ins, make it a habit to ask whether they need help right away or if it can wait until the Q&A. If they need help now, ask what they've tried so far and where they've looked. Can't figure it out? Then show them where to look. The buddy should adapt to the situation: if someone is shy and finds it hard to ask for help, check in throughout the day so they're not lost for hours. During remote onboarding, make extra sure the new hire feels supported and part of the team.
Phase 4: Ongoing development
Collecting feedback to fine-tune the process
To optimise your onboarding process, schedule regular check-ins for at least three months to ask every new hire for feedback. How are they feeling about their onboarding? What do they like? What can be improved? Are they missing any information? Do they wish some steps had happened sooner?
A fresh set of eyes means a fresh batch of insights
New hires have fresh insights on all levels of your organisation, not just the onboarding process. They're not yet stuck in your way of doing things. That's why I love asking new hires for candid feedback on how we run things, and for a list of improvements they'd make if it was up to them. It's incredible what you learn about your own processes, and about the ingenuity of the people you hired. Keep doing check-ins with the onboarding buddy throughout the first three months.
Phase 5: Off-boarding
The way you treat team members who leave says a lot about your culture. Take a second to reflect on your current off-boarding: is it in line with your values? Does it make the person leaving feel valued? Does it reassure the people staying that you can be trusted?
It doesn't have to be anything fancy, as long as it's sincere and kind. Depending on how long someone has been with the company, a simple coffee break where you gather people to thank someone for their time is fine. You don't want to be a phoney and pretend everything's OK when a difficult collaboration ends, but you also don't want to ignore someone completely.