Improve Your Employee Onboarding Process In 3 Simple Steps

The employee onboarding process is a vital step when hiring new workers. It’s the procedure they go through to embed them into your company. A good onboarding process helps them get up to speed quickly without hampering your business’s productivity. On the flip side, an inefficient onboarding process does the opposite and can drag your company down.

It’s a business area that needs your attention, so here are three simple steps to improve onboarding now and forever:

Step 1: Send Out An Employee Handbook

When you’ve hired a new employee, the onboarding process should start before their first day. It all begins with an employee handbook - this is their version of the Bible; it should give them all the information they need about working for your company. Key things to include are: ‍

• Information about how to use the handbook

• Your core company values and what’s expected from the employee

• All the main workplace policies

• General employment information

• Payroll process

• How to book paid time off

• And so on

Use an employee handbook builder to help with all of this, and you end up with a nice document that they can read through prior to starting their first day. It should clear up most of their common questions; a good employee handbook leaves them in a position where they’re up to speed with their role, how your business works, and more. ‍ ‍

Step 2: Start With Training

Never thrust an employee into their full-time role straight away. A good onboarding process involves careful employee training to coach them into their role. This may involve getting to grips with your software solutions, understanding who to contact if there are problems, etc.

Even if someone has a lot of experience, they’ll benefit from simple training to get up to speed. It’s far more productive to focus on training now than to deal with correcting mistakes in the employee’s first few weeks.

Step 3: Introduce Shorter Days

Again, don’t throw your employees into the deep end the moment they join your company. Spend a few days or weeks working on their training - and make these days short. Perhaps they only come in for a couple of hours to complete a training course for their first week. Maybe they’re only doing three out of five days for the first couple of weeks as they train.

The idea with this is to slowly acclimatize your employees to their new workplace. They get used to how everything works - and they also don’t feel overrun by training. You slowly start increasing their workload until the training is complete, upon which they should be ready to work full-time.

Following these steps for your employee onboarding process will help new hires fit in at work and slip into your way of doing things without causing complications. It’s mainly a case of slowly encouraging and teaching new employees how your business works, instead of expecting them to catch on right away. In the long term, it pays to be patient now, as you’ll see the pay-off later.

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