How to Update your Onboarding Process
Onboarding is a critical part of the hiring process that shouldn’t be overlooked. Once you’ve found the ideal candidate, training them effectively and getting them up to date with your organizations’ way of doing things can make or break their success.
An important point to note when discussing onboarding is that you cannot have a static strategy. You must continuously update and improve your onboarding techniques to get the best results.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to update your onboarding process to optimize it and ensure that every new hire can thrive and succeed in your company.
What is an Employee Onboarding Process?
An onboarding process for new hires helps them get up to speed with the company and their new role. Onboarding includes explaining company policy and rules and showing the new employee how to do their job within the organization.
While entry-level employees may need to be taught everything about the role, experienced employees use onboarding to learn how to do their job within the new organization. For example, you want to explain things like what project management systems are used, the tone you take with clients, how to bring up issues and concerns they have, and the like.
Why is an Onboarding Process Important?
Before we discuss how to update your onboarding process, it’s critical to understand why onboarding is important. Without onboarding, your employees won’t be working in a synchronized way, efficiency levels will decrease, and employee output quality and productivity will likely fall too.
Even the most accomplished and experienced new hire needs to be taught the company way of doing things to succeed. Onboarding helps employees fit in and creates a seamlessly blended team that can grow and help the company achieve goals.
A successful onboarding strategy is crucial for helping new hires fit into their role.
Ways to Update Your Onboarding Process
Think your onboarding strategy needs an update? The following are some expert tips on how to update your onboarding process to develop the best working practices from your new staff.
Involve Your Current Team
The first step in updating an onboarding process is discussing your current onboarding method with your employees. Questions to ask include:
What would you have liked done differently during your onboarding?
How could we improve the current onboarding process? What needs to be added or adjusted? Do you have any suggestions for how to do that?
What would help you to make onboarding new employees easier?
Update and Improve Onboarding Documents, Handbooks, and Guides
Giving new staff access to documents that answer questions and outline processes can reduce pressure on the employees that conduct the onboarding (and likely still have a large workload of their own to get through.) Referring to documents instead of an actual employee also saves time for the new hire and allows them to get on with their tasks. They don’t have to wait for the employee they’re paired with to get out of meetings or reply to messages if in a remote setting.
Due to the importance of onboarding documents and guides, optimize these as much as you can. Make the content easy to understand and consume but detailed enough that hires won’t be left with questions.
As processes and policies change or are added to, update all related onboarding materials.
Add Interactive Elements
Using documents and having peer training (whether in-person or virtual) is great. But adding interactive elements can help too. For example, videos can be a useful resource for new hires. To create videos, have an employee film content outlining department and position responsibilities, processes, and answers to FAQs. You can also create general videos outlining company policy.
You can also add content like a hierarchy model with pictures of employees, their names, titles, and main responsibilities to onboarding folders. Adding graphics and things like headings, and bulleted lists to break up text makes consuming and understanding text documents easier for the new hire too.
When updating your onboarding process, ask for suggestions and opinions from your current team.
Create an Extensive FAQs Document
You're likely to find that many new hires have similar questions when they first start. Therefore, another thing to consider when updating your onboarding process is creating a document with the most commonly asked questions and answers. Point employees to relevant resources too, if responses need more explanation.
As with videos, create one general FAQs document for questions relating to policy. Also, have FAQ documents for each department and each position. As new hires ask questions, add them to the document.
Have an Onboarding Guide for Current Employees
Before you can help new hires get up to speed with the company through onboarding, you must help your current employees that will be onboarding new staff members. You can create the best documents and guides in the world but if the employee(s) training the new employee isn’t effective, the recent hire will take longer to get updated with how the company and their new department works.
In addition, the staff training new employees may have never onboarded people before. Throwing these individuals in the deep end with no training is almost guaranteed to fail. Other staff may have picked up bad onboarding habits while training employees at a previous job. Picking up on these errors and fixing them before that employee trains others is equally critical.
A good starting point is to create documents with onboarding advice and have a checklist of everything that must get covered during the training period. You could even have training sessions with those that will be onboarding. For example, you could do a mock onboarding session. A manager can make notes on the employee’s performance, the current employee playing a new hire can make suggestions, and the employee that will be onboarding can ask for advice on issues they encountered.
Add a Pre-Day One Element
Onboarding should start as soon as the employment contract is signed. Even if the new employee’s first day isn’t for a few weeks. Provide access to documents and guides in advance for the new hire to read if they want.
You could also invite them to have an onboarding day before their first day where they learn everything they’ll need to know to be ready to go on day one. Of course, if you want to do that, you’ll have to compensate the new hire for their time and ensure this works with their schedule.
Training your current staff to onboard new employees is a critical element that’s often overlooked.
Consider Team Building and Bonding
Onboarding shouldn’t just focus on getting the new hire up to speed with company policy and how to perform their role. You also need to help with the initiation of team bonding and the forming of relationships. While this should happen naturally over time, it’s important to get the ball rolling, especially if you have a remote team.
Set up meet and greets or host a team event when a new hire starts (a lunch or happy hour, for example). Also, consider setting up one-on-one or department “getting to know you” meetings. You can implement quick tactics too, such as adding an ice breaker plugin to a department’s internal messaging system. That way, the new hire can quickly get to know their coworkers by everyone responding to a daily question or discussion prompt.
Continuous Adjustment and Incorporation of Feedback
Updating your onboarding process shouldn’t be a once in a while consideration. The needs of employees are always changing, and the way your company does things will be changing too.
Therefore, updating your onboarding process and leaving it as is for an extended period is not best practice. Continuously updating your strategy is the way to go! You want to create a culture of updating guides and handbooks given to new hires as soon as a process/way of doing something is adjusted.
Gathering and Incorporating Feedback
In addition, continuously incorporate feedback to improve your onboarding process and documents. As you onboard staff, ask the new hires and those onboarding them what could be improved (and what worked well).
If possible, build feedback into the actual onboarding process too. Allow new hires to offer suggestions on the process as they go. For example, after explaining company rules on day one, ask if they have any suggestions for presenting this information more effectively. If working with high-level employees, you can even get feedback on your processes as you explain them. Encourage new hires to suggest improvements.
Considerations for Remote Onboarding
The reason for updating your onboarding process now could be to make it more appropriate for a work-from-home setup. With so many organizations moving to full or part-time remote working, there are definitely things to consider to make onboarding easier for all those involved when not in-office.
The following are some things to keep in mind for onboarding remote hires.
Create Cloud-Based Guides and Documents
If you have remote team members, ensure every onboarding document gets uploaded to a cloud-based system. That way, the new hire and those onboarding them can digitally access all needed documentation from anywhere.
When updating your onboarding strategy, make necessary adjustments for remote workers.
Provide All Equipment Needed Ahead of Employee Start Dates
When a new hire starts in an office, they should have access to everything they need. This includes computer monitors, phones, ergonomic office furniture, software, and any other resources needed for their job. When working from home, however, this is not always the case.
Discuss what is needed to do the role successfully with employees currently in the role or who have had the position in the past. Also, check with the new hire to see what they need. If they’re already working remotely, they may have an effective home office setup and simply require access to company systems.
If a new hire hasn’t worked from home before, they may then need office furniture and tech equipment too. Similarly, if some of an employee’s at-home work items were from their old company, they’ll need to get replaced before their first day.
Launch Virtual Meet and Greets
As discussed, initiating team bonding is an important part of a successful onboarding process. When working remotely, relationship building can be challenging. Help the new hire to feel like they fit in by hosting virtual meet and greets and other events. There are many additional ways to do this, some of which are discussed earlier in this article.
Still don’t know how to initiate team building when working from home? Read our article on how to implement a successful remote team building strategy!
Suggest In-Person Meet-Ups
Ask both the new hire and those onboarding them if they would like to have an in-person meeting to go over onboarding documents and explain processes. If you have an office space still, suggest they meet there. If you don’t, pay for a day or week at a coworking space or other area with private office spaces/meeting rooms.
Initiating in-person meetings will depend on where the employees involved are located and if they feel comfortable doing so. Don’t force any employee to meet face to face and make it clear to all parties that everyone must be comfortable. If one person doesn’t feel good about a meet-up, stick to virtual onboarding.
Read our article on onboarding remote hires for some more top tips!
In Summary
Your onboarding strategy is critical to every new employee’s success, and it’s crucial to update your onboarding process regularly. If considering optimizing your onboarding techniques, these tips should have given you a good idea of where to start.
To get the most from this part of the hiring process, you must continuously gather feedback and update your strategy. In doing this, it’s almost guaranteed that your new employees will fit into your team well and become significant assets to your organization.