Next-Level Onboarding

March 13, 2019

Nowadays with Utah unemployment at record lows, without an end in sight, employers are all clamoring for employees. This would appear to be a good thing for those looking for work because there are so many jobs available and so many employers eager for you to accept their offers.

Unfortunately, the downside is that some employers are spending so much time trying to find and hire any of the few available employees, they aren’t giving a second thought to how they are onboarding their employees, which leaves new-hires feeling underwhelmed and feeling like another cog in the system.

Business Growth or Employee Turnover?

A question I would like to pose to any company struggling to fill so many positions is: Are you having to hire so many employees due to rapid growth or because you have high levels of turnover? Growth is a fantastic reason to be in the market for new talent but if a company is struggling with high turnover, they might want to reconsider their onboarding practices.

A recent Gallup poll indicated that, “Only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees.” This means that while companies find and hire quality employees, they fail to make a meaningful impact on those new employees during their training period.

This could mean a variety of different things:

The new employees didn’t feel they were given a warm welcome when the arrived
The new hires felt they weren’t given clear expectations of their roles and responsibilities
They didn’t feel they were able to find common interests with their teams or coworkers
The employees feel they were not given the proper tools to effectively perform their job
They are not given a chance to be heard or to provide feedback on their experiences
The new employees felt like they were poorly trained and then surprised when their performance was put into question

Employers who do a poor job at onboarding their new employees miss an excellent opportunity to earn the new employee’s trust and buy-in. How can employers expect a new employee to be productive and integrate in the company if the employees have poor first impressions of the organization?

Employers and Customer Service

One of my favorite quotes regarding the way we treat employees came from Stephen Covey: “Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customer.” If your best customer walked into your building, what kind of energy and excitement would you treat them with? As you walked them around and introduced them to everyone, how would you want them to greet that customer?

Now use that same level of energy and excitement with your new employees! Make it fun! Make it memorable!

Next-Level Onboarding

When I thought of a title for this post I chose “Next-Level Onboarding” because “standard onboarding” should never be the goal for any organization. You have to elevate the experience. You have to go above and beyond the norm. You have to make your onboarding process intentionally awesome!

Suggestions for how you can take your onboarding to the next level:

Teamwork! Create an onboarding committee full of your most energetic employees that will evaluate your current process and brainstorm ideas to supercharge it!
Expertise! Bring in a 3^rd party expert on process improvement to consult with your hiring team and help them break-through their outdated routine and create something special.
Collect and review the data! If you never ask your new-hires how you did, you’ll never know how good/bad your process is. Take the feedback to heart and commit to improving the area where you scored the lowest and reinforce the areas that are already strong.
Google it! Yes, Google seems to hold the answers to an infinite number of questions. Do your best to sift through the millions of pages of results and find the ideas you think will work best for your situation.
Baby steps! You can’t move a mountain in a day but if you never start, you’ll never even make a dent. Start small, start soon, but whatever you do, start now!

If you would like some perspective on your current onboarding processes, feel free to reach out to us at YES. As a leader in the staffing industry, we’ve worked with hundreds and hundreds of companies over the last 20 years and have seen some pretty fantastic examples of both good and bad onboarding situations. We can help identify areas where you can improve and take your company’s onboarding to THE NEXT LEVEL!