4 Best practices that will transform your employee onboarding

• 2 min read

Learn how to increase employee retention with these onboarding best practices

You’ve got a solid hiring process in place, but when your promising new recruit actually shows up for work on his or her first day, are you confident that their time is being used in a meaningful way?

A recent article by Harvard Business Review reports that too many new hires slip away because of a poor initial experience with their new companies. Consider the following statistics, which represent broad data in the United States:

Research shows that only one in three companies actually have onboarding best practices in place, which suggests that the vast majority of employers may failing to introduce their people to the company’s values at the right time.

Four best practices to optimize onboarding best pratices

1. Set up a comprehensive, multimodal onboarding process
Offer new hires a healthy combination of training, performance management, mentoring, coaching and goal-setting. Instead of allowing a push-only modality for learning content (online or instructor-led training), enable a pull modality, where new hires can access learning assets and reach out to subject matter experts when they need them, whether they’re looking for information on process or product.

2. Address learning at the point of need.
Make it easy for new hires to find what they need, when they need it. Avoid information overload by devising a roadmap that supports and directs the learning process, and make available mentors and coaches for trainees to learn from during onramping.

3. Take it global.
If you have international teams, build an onboarding process that accounts for regional differences. Start with your highest priority region first, then expand from there. On the national level, start small with one department or organization, implement more training components, measure the impact, optimize, rinse and repeat.

4. Extend your onboarding best practices to learning and development.
The best onboarding doesn’t stop when someone’s “onboard.” It’s important to provide support and opportunities for personal and professional development beyond the first year of employment.

Find out how companies in your industry have found success applying these best practices for employee retention to their online training platform.