Reduce New Hire Churn With This Employee Onboarding Checklist process.st/employee-onboarding-checklist January 19, 2022
Grace Donaldson January 19, 2022
Despite many managers understanding the importance of employee onboarding, Sapling has found that 88% of companies don’t onboard well. This is a troubling revelation when you take into account that offering an excellent onboarding experience enhances employee retention by as much as 82%. Want to ensure you have high employee retention while also maintaining job satisfaction? I’ve got you covered. In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through exactly why good employee onboarding matters, the magic of automation, and what makes up a good employee onboarding experience. Check it out here: Let’s dive in!
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I’ve included a pre-made employee onboarding Workflow that you can start using today! It embodies many of the elements I’m going to walk you through in this blog post to offer an exceptional onboarding experience to your new hires. All you need to do is signup for an account with Process Street and add the Workflow to your library to use whenever you need to onboard a new hire. Click here to get the New Hire Onboarding Workflow!
Why does good employee onboarding matter?
The bottom line is that a negative onboarding experience can have your new employees running for the hills. Sapling found that new hires are two times more likely to look for alternative opportunities if they aren’t onboarded well. On the other hand, providing a good onboarding experience can help your new hire settle in and ensure they don’t regret joining your company. Instead, they feel completely satisfied with the role they have inside of your organization. Less resources are used on employees who aren’t going to stick around. Time, money, and effort is saved. Woohoo!
The benefits of automating your employee onboarding checklist
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Effortlessly outline your processes Automation has the power to take a good employee onboarding process and make it even better. Workflow management platforms, like Process Street, can help you effortlessly outline your onboarding process. This is the foundation to making sure you’re including the best automations in your onboarding.
Saves time and minimizes errors Automating your recurring tasks saves time but also greatly reduces the human error involved in manually performing them.
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Plus, automation provides transparency and a consistent onboarding experience for everyone – trainees and trainers alike. Your entire HR department can benefit from a reduced workflow throughout the complete employee onboarding process.
Elements of a good employee onboarding process Employee onboarding isn’t just involving HR; you should aim to include many different individuals from various departments and roles. This helps provide a proper introduction and helps your new hire feel welcome, forming those important workplace relationships. It might sound a little intimidating at first, but it’s easy! Think of it this way: you wouldn’t only introduce your significant other to your parents at a family lunch. To offer a fitting introduction, you’re going to want to take your partner around the entire house, meeting everyone from your favorite cousin to your weird uncle. That’s exactly what you need to do with your new hire. Like any family occasion, you can expect to encounter a few problems during your onboarding process. It might look a little intimidating at first, but an easy example to achieve this is by using interactive chatrooms for remote teams. I’ve broken down the elements that make up a good employee onboarding process and highlighted some of the potential issues you might encounter. But don’t worry! I wouldn’t want to leave you fending for yourself. I’ve also got you covered with some helpful solutions to prevent these issues from occurring. To make your life a little easier, I’ve already included these solutions in a pre-made employee onboarding Workflow that you can start using ASAP. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the elements making an effective onboarding process!
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Preparation: Making a good first impression Generally, the preparation stage of the onboarding process spans across the pre-boarding and first week of the new hire’s arrival. As you can imagine, the preparation stage is used to ‘prepare’ the new hire for their role. Nothing too technical, right? Despite its simple concept, many companies mess up this stage of the onboarding process. First impressions are almost everything, so this certainly isn’t a good start. Let’s face it, how many stories have you heard about employees not expecting a new hire, workspaces not being prepared, and paperwork not ready to be signed?
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In our sample employee onboarding checklist, we’ve helped to ensure this doesn’t happen. We’ve included form fields highlighting when the new hire’s start date is and suggested the necessary paperwork you might need to provide. To make things even easier, our Approval feature ensures the right manager approves these documents.
Orientation: Helping your new hire learn the ropes From first week to month, your new hire should go through the orientation phase. This helps the new employee get familiar with all that they’re required to know about their role, the industry they work in, and the company they work for (you). Company values and culture, employee handbooks, software training, and department policies and procedures are common topics included in this stage of the onboarding process. At Process Street, most of our company documentation is securely stored in Pages. It’s a convenient way to store information because you can easily pull it out when need be. Gone are the days where you’re required to spend hours searching for an employee handbook from 1987 in a filing cabinet you’re sure a rat has died in. In this employee onboarding checklist, I’ve included tasks where you can link your employee handbook for your new hire to read through and reminders to schedule introduction meetings where you can go through company policies and other orientation-related information. Quite nifty, right?
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Integration: Helping your new hire merge into the organization There isn’t any set time frame when it comes to properly integrating your new hire into their role. Like most things, this takes time. That doesn’t mean there aren’t tasks you can do to help streamline this integration. You might be asking, what tasks then? One word – MENTORSHIP! Lucky for you, I’ve already added a task to assign a mentor to your new hire to kickstart this integration. With this addition to your employee onboarding process, you can build your new hire to work more independently with limited supervision.
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Engagement: Reporting your new hire’s onboarding progress The engagement phase is also ongoing, and is centered around building personal relationships with managers, team members, and cross-functional teams. It’s all fine and well having your new hire perform their work responsibilities, but providing this engagement is vital to making them feel welcome and comfortable. Can you imagine working in an environment where you haven’t established any relationships with those you work with? Hard to see how you can perform well, right? As the saying goes, teamwork makes the dream work, so get your new hire engaging with others! This sample employee onboarding Workflow includes various tasks to encourage such engagement. You can see that I’ve included a team gathering to help new hire’s establish these relationships with other employees in the onboarding process’s early stages.
Follow-up: Completing and improving the employee onboarding process Following up with your new hire is crucial. It’s the place where managers can evaluate the new hire’s integration into the company and their overall performance. Each process needs a desired outcome, and employee onboarding is no different. You want it to be successful, and the follow-up phase allows you to judge if it was. It also helps HR managers evaluate the effectiveness of this process. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about this in the sample employee onboarding Workflow. The Workflow includes a task dedicated to reporting on your new hire’s performance. I’ve also added a survey for the new hire to complete. This helps evaluate the effectiveness of the onboarding process, which is then sent to the HR manager for approval.
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Start onboarding efficiently today with Process Street! ‘Human touch’ drives onboarding success. That’s why you want to create an employee onboarding experience that’s based on people, rather than tasks. Think of it like parenting – the tasks portion of onboarding is the ‘strict parent’ while human touch is the ‘fun parent.’ I’ve taken the responsibility of getting the tasks detailed for you in this employee onboarding checklist sample, so that you can be the ‘fun parent’ and focus on providing a great, personal onboarding experience to your new hire. Doesn’t that sound like a good deal, huh? Well, what if I told you that you could start using this employee onboarding checklist now? That’s right! All you need to do is create an account with Process Street, add this checklist to your library, and run it whenever you need to onboard a new hire. It’s that simple!
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