The Benefits of Proper Employee Onboarding

After the interview process and your new hire signing off the offer letter, you may think your job is already done. What's left is filling in all the paperwork, giving away documented resources, and having someone ready for the position … right?

Well, that's never the case.

After getting the signature, starts one of the most important people processes inside your organization. The onboarding process. In which you not only finish filling up the dreaded paperwork but make sure your new hire's introduction to the organization is smooth while setting them up for success.

And the return of doing so is quite significant.

This blog post, backed up with data and proof of onboarding benefits, will have you reconsidering some of your processes.

🚀 What is onboarding?

An employee onboarding process is a series of steps in which a new hire is introduced to the culture, policies, products, or any necessary knowledge of an organization to succeed. This process gives new employees a clear path into what they need to achieve in their first months.

The onboarding process usually takes 3 months. But it can go from 6 months to a year depending on the position, industry, or company.

🎁 7 Benefits of a good onboarding process

1. Higher employee retention

About 75% of recruiters claim they've seen a candidate change their mind after signing their offer letter. And the reason for that is more likely because of a poorly designed roadmap for onboarding that leaves a bad first impression on your new hires.   

On the other hand, if your onboarding process has a clear framework and the steps introduce your new hire from general knowledge to specifics, they'll feel more engaged. An onboarding process should be tailored to acclimate employees to the new organization and build trust from the beginning.

Plus, a survey of over 50,000 employees found that engaged employees are 5x less likely to leave your company than those who aren't engaged. And about 87% engaged employees said they'll stay.

2. Increased productivity

Even experts in their field aren't sure what they need to do on their first day. Every person has their own way of doing stuff. So, you can't expect a new employee to do a job the same way as one of your veteran employees. They may use different methods that don't align with your guidelines.

Letting employees learn as they go isn't going to work, and that's why one of the benefits of a proper onboarding process is productivity.

New hires with longer training programs gain proficiency in their role four months faster than those with shorter programs.

3. Top talent attraction

According to a study by Glassdoor, 84% of job seekers say the reputation of a company, as an employer, is important. The best candidates want to be at the best companies, that in return, offer the best career path and training.

If your first step towards introducing your company to new hires is a disorganized and poorly designed onboarding process, turnover rates increase.

New hires who had a negative onboarding experience are 2x more likely to look at a different opportunity. And as a result, you get bad reviews on job sites like Glassdoor, Indeed, and Lensa. Not ideal for your employer branding.

4. Stress reduction

If you don't have a proper onboarding process, when new hires don't know what to do, they'll go looking for managers or coworkers to ask them questions about processes. Processes that should've been taught during the onboarding process.

And it's no surprise managers and coworkers already have their own workload and don't have time to teach new hires general procedures.

It has come to the point where 40% of new hires say getting a response from HR about their questions takes too long.

5. Connected company culture

Another benefit of a proper onboarding process is to have employees that are aware of your company's values and culture. By making this clear from the beginning, you set standards for how things are done and give your employees a better experience.

If one of your company philosophies is "quality over time", you know employees will focus on delivering high-quality work without minding the time it takes. And it works the same way if you have zero tolerance for missed deadlines.

6. Knowledge retention

If you send all the documents for procedures to your new hire, hope they read it once and the next day are ready to apply all that, you're up for a surprise.

Learning is a process in which reading is just 5% effective while practicing gives you 75% of knowledge retention.

That's why longer and proper onboarding processes work better. These give your employees the chance to learn, make mistakes and refine what they learned. It also prevents you from being that organization that sends a bunch of paperwork or processes and then doesn't follow its own guidelines.

‍7. Understanding of organizational procedures and goals

If employees aren't properly trained in organizational procedures, they won't know who to ask or where to go for answers to their questions in a process that can seem simple for more accustomed employees.

And if employees don't know how their work impacts organizational goals, they won't have a strong sense of purpose. 

Studies have shown that employees are 54% more likely to be motivated by a strong purpose to do their best at work.

With a proper onboarding process in place, your employees can learn all your organizational goals and procedures. This also benefits you as it boosts your productivity and your employee's morale.

⚙️ 5 Benefits of using onboarding software for new hires

Having a good onboarding process certainly gives you many benefits. But a way to make it more effective is by using an onboarding software to automate (parts of) the onboarding process, so it doesn't require as many repetitive actions.

1. Saves manual work

Doing onboarding well means taking care of many things at once. For every single new joiner.

A few examples:

• Introducing new hires into all the tools,...
• Giving and tracking tasks for IT, colleagues, managers,...
• Introducing new hires to compliance and tracking completion
• Scheduling events like orientation, founder intros,...
• Bringing employees up to speed on best practices
• and much, much, (much) more

Our friends at Storyblok cut down manual onboarding time from 15+ hours every week down to 30 minutes. That is 2.448€ they are saving every month.

“What surprised me most was that you can automate so much without sacrificing experience. We are sending people trackable tasks, engaging content, fun reminders via Slack, and connecting them to their onboarding buddies. All with a single click." Markus Schwarz, People Experience Manager at Storyblok.

Instead of manually introducing all new hires into the company processes every week and repeating the same things over and over again, the main "work" they are doing now is an informal 30-minute chat with everyone.

Everything else happens at a click.

➡️ For a detailed breakdown of how they achieved that, read the full case study here.

2. Employees have a consistent experience

Your new hires won't have to go through all their emails looking for the one task that comes next. Another benefit of onboarding software is that, by using a user-friendly interface, the structure of the onboarding process becomes clearer and easier to go back to.

Following the case study of Alasco, the overall employee experience improved with new hires giving a rate of 4.7/5 to the new onboarding process. What new hires valued the most were:

• The clear structure of the software by using a candidate's portal
• Rich mix of engaging formats (with tools like Loom, Google Drive, Slack, and Youtube)
• Visible progress as there's a little "table of contents" with every assigned journey

All this contributed to new hires having a fun and easy experience through their onboarding process.

3. Helpful resources tailored to the role

An onboarding process is usually one general framework of tasks and documentation to complete. This means it's the same for every role. But with onboarding software, you have the benefits of making a more personalized journey.

And employees automatically get assigned the correct journeys according to their role.

Some roles require much more information, while others need the essentials to start quickly. Having a journey tailored to your employee's roles can boost their productivity and help you save time. 

And the things you may need in your role can highly differ:

• Developers may need little coding exercises;
• Sales managers may need role plays and job shadowing;
• Marketers need more focus on brand guidelines;
• etc.

In sales, the ROI is particularly easy to calculate: The sooner people are productive, the sooner they create actual revenue for the company.

In the above example of Alasco, the team cut time to productivity in half.

4. Easier onboarding for remote workers

The pandemic set new standards for how people prefer to work now. That's why Storyblok grew as a fully remote company, but despite that, they were committed to creating human connections and being truly welcoming to new remote employees.

They structured a process with human interaction by making sure:

• New employees would meet the founder and other team members
• Hires would feel welcomed with coffee chats and even onboarding buddies
• And for employees to feel included in a 30-min chat with their onboarding manager 

This resulted in new hires giving Zavvy a rate of 9/10 as an onboarding software and positive reviews.

5. Tracking completion of tasks

Instead of checking directly with every new hire if they've already completed their paperwork or assigned tasks, which is time-consuming. You can log in to your manager's account for any onboarding software and check if the task has been marked as complete.

Also, onboarding software makes the experience smooth and consistent as the new employee's progress is saved. And thanks to that, employees can go back to their accounts whenever they want and start where they left off.

👀 What does a good onboarding process look like?

A good onboarding process starts with your 30-60-90 day plan, which is called like that as the rule of thumb is that onboarding an employee should last a minimum of three months (90 days). And it has three phases that we’ll go through.

Stage 1: The first 30 days

This stage is all about learning the culture and procedures inside your organization and your products. It's characterized by:

• Introduction with team members and manager
• Going over software and otder tools the candidate will be using
• Assigning an onboarding buddy
• Setting goals and expectations for the first 30 days
• Get feedback every week

The goal here is to acclimate your new hire and for them to feel more engaged with the company. This also helps retention as they see you're taking the time to show them around and not rushing into letting them learn as they go.

Stage 2: 60 days

This is where training occurs. Now that your employee is more used to your tools and coworkers, it is time to assign more elaborated projects. Employees will be more independent in their deliveries but will still work with older employees in collaborative projects.

This is what you can expect from the training stage are:

• Checking on the goals set for the first 30 days
• Setting the goals for the first 60 days
• Assigning bigger tasks (more responsibility)
• Attending and participating in project meetings
• Getting feedback every week

What you want in the training stage is to monitor if your new employee can handle the new responsibilities assigned to them. This is also where you check if they'll need more time to get used to some of your processes. Or if you need to enforce company knowledge or fill in some gaps.

Stage 3: 90 days

In this last stage, you give your new hires more independent work and little guidance.

This is what the last month looks like:  

• Checking on the goals set for the first 60 days
• Set goals for the first 90 days
• Assigning complete projects (employees will have full responsibility for the outcome)
• For new employees to propose solutions
• Get feedback on details that need to be addressed
• Checking on the goals set for the first 90 days

The highlight of this stage is to see if your new employee is ready to be entirely autonomous. You set them up for success by notifying them of the goals for the next six months.

🔓 Unlock all onboarding benefits with a click

If you’re curious about getting all these benefits without drowning in complexity, check out our intuitive, yet powerful onboarding solution.

With Zavvy you can build a unique and motivating journey for your new employees and deliver experiences with one click.

Book a free demo to see it in action.