Onboarding Upgrades: How To Successfully Welcome And Train New Employees

A good onboarding program is key to retaining employees and boosting productivity.

Once you’ve found that perfect candidate, here are just some of the different steps that could be worth taking to integrate them into your company efficiently.

Get started before their first day

Start the onboarding process before the employee steps into the office. This can help to reduce first-day nerves for your new hire, plus you can encourage them to do certain preliminary tasks like setting up emails and reviewing benefits packages, so that there’s less to do when they arrive. A virtual welcome kit could be sent out that contains all the important information for preparing for the first (e.g., what to wear, what documents to bring, what they will be doing in the first week).

If they are not scheduled to start work until a couple week’s time, keep communication within that timeframe to show you haven’t forgotten about them.

Assign a mentor

It’s worth assigning your new employee a mentor who they can ask questions to and receive training from. When appointing a mentor, choose someone who is experienced and patient, and aim to help reduce their regular workload for that week so that they don’t feel burdened with the extra responsibility of training. In a small team, you may be the most suitable individual to act as mentor.

Use Tech to Streamline Paperwork

There are likely to be a lot of documents to sign and read. Consider digitally storing all of these documents in one place and enabling e-signatures and automated fill-in features where possible. This can help to speed up and streamline this process. An AI-powered learning platform may be possible to integrate into the onboarding process to further simplify things. Compare different onboarding software solutions.

Avoid Overwhelming New Employees

Information overload will make new employees exhausted. This is often the result of trying to rush the training process and not giving employees time to practice one task before going on to the next. Aim to stagger out the training process – focusing on basic core duties first and then gradually moving up to more advanced procedures when they are comfortable with the basics.

Quizzes and physical tests can be used at the end of each training stage so that you know they’re ready to move on to the next phase. Hands-on training is key – don’t just tell new employees what to do, but show them and then monitor them while they do it themselves.

Introduce a Handbook

A handbook of all company procedures can be worth creating – employees can reference these procedures at any time to jog their memory, which may reduce the need to ask senior employees for help as often. This could be a physical handbook or a digital handbook. For certain tasks, it could be worth adding diagrams or photographs, or screenshots to help employees visually follow tasks. With digital handbooks, you can even include videos.

This handbook needs to be updated when your company procedures change so that information is always relevant.

Photo by Yan Krukau: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-and-woman-looking-at-the-screen-of-a-computer-8866764/