How to avoid new-joinee attrition in the hybrid world of work?

Interestingly, most of the rhetoric around the Great Resignation has been centred on workers in office jobs, labour shortages are growing around the globe, across a wide range of sectors and a plethora of roles. With markets across the world in the midst of talent market turbulence, relating to both the so-called ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ labour. As the world’s labour market continues to shift, experts point that the organisations that retain key talent and invest in their workforces, will surely be the ones who invest in employee onboarding. The two-and-half years or so have meant different things for different members of the workforce. From layoffs to great resignation, to career switches to onsetting a completely new enterprising journey. Different employees have witnessed different professional experiences in the pandemic and post-pandemic world. With organisations looking at attracting and retaining talent, and many looking for jobs and joining new organisations, right onboarding gains greater significance. Many are also considering new roles or altogether new professions, as experts suggest poor onboarding can leave today’s employees disheartened. This can also result in lower confidence in their new roles, poorer levels of engagement, and putting them in a vulnerable risk of jumping ship when they see a new, and a more exciting opportunity elsewhere.

Companies that offer and implement a formal onboarding program could see greater employee retention among new recruits and greater productivity. This makes it imperative for companies to have in place an onboarding process that keeps the employees engaged as they ease into their new jobs and roles, stay with organisations, looking forward to great careers. This gains greater significance, especially at a time when effort and cost for hiring the right talent is on an upward trend and retaining the right talent is of prime importance. With the heightened importance of up-to-mark onboarding and given that how an organisation onboards its employees will determine their experience, HR and managers should initiate the following steps to ensure they set their new hires up for success.

What makes an ideal onboarding experience?

Firstly, set clear goals and measures for success, this will help new hires understand goals better and work towards achieving them. Secondly, create a multi-departmental onboarding team, and last but not the least provide support throughout the onboarding journey.

The very basic purpose of onboarding should be setting new hires up for success. It can work well by decreasing the time it takes for new employees to become comfortable in their new roles. This only works wonders, provided onboarding processes are designed strategically with a clear end objective in mind. But, in the recent past, owing to new ways of working, onboarding has become even more challenging with the rise of remote and hybrid work. Many HR professionals reported that remote onboarding or training has been the biggest hiring, especially during the pandemic and even beyond, and it continues to be a challenge for many employers.

Key to onboarding success

A short onboarding program isn’t the only thing that hurts a new employees’ experiences, it is a host of other things. The fresh hires also need and look for opportunities to form workplace relationships with their managers, peers, and other key stakeholders. Employees agree that they tend to have an exceptional onboarding experience whenever their managers had an active role in the entire onboarding process and were available for help whenever needed. But it is often seen that, many managers don’t have the time and capacity to support or implement onboarding programs, even for team members. Furthermore, a lot of t smaller companies (and for that matter even some larger companies) don’t offer or have mentorship programs, which play an imperative role in easing out the onboarding process. By failing to offer mentorship programs and opportunities to new hires, organisations steal employees of the chance to develop and foster the relationships that are much needed to succeed in their new working environment.

As a manager, it’s ones job to ensure each new employee’s experience in the workplace is a positive and cherished one, but knowing what steps you need to take to create an effective onboarding plan can feel overwhelming. The following three steps can help managers create strategic onboarding processes that set new hires up for success and improve employee retention.

Set clear goals and measures

The first and the foremost step is to have clear goals and objectives in place. Before establishing a new onboarding program, one should start by reviewing the onboarding goals. Once you have set the goals and it’s time to review goals, make sure to capture the four Cs: compliance, clarification, culture, and connection. To have a concise and effective plan, you should ask a few questions to yourself and evaluate the plan. Have in place clearly identified and explained the regulations, policies, and procedures new employees need to comply with. Have a clear set of employee job expectations and link them to concrete, time-bound measures that can be measured objectively. Will employees have a full understanding of your company culture, after completing the program and will they be supported to establish all the relationships vital to their success both within and outside the organisation. Do the organisation’s capabilities need to be improved upon to execute this new program. Once the onboarding program is completed, how will you improve and maintain the work-life balance of new hires on a sustained basis?

Once you’ve created a set of goals that address all four Cs, it’s time to decide how you plan plan on measuring success. These measures should be directly linked to set goals and include quantitative metrics and qualitative metrics, access retention of new hires, take feedback and incorporate suggested changes. Arriving at these goals and measures would require regular inputs from key stakeholders across your organization. All this will need to be done by keeping leadership in the loop and seeking their view moving forward.

Quick Tips: In the normal and a newer model of working, communication continues to play key role. More than ever the new hires are likely to have many questions and their own set of expectations for their new role and the prevalent working conditions. Providing answers to those answers and having conversations around the organisation’s expectations are extremely critical to future success. As part of the communication, clearly review the position, associated goals, the part of the communication, clearly review the position, associated goals, the organisational hierarchy, company policy and procedures (the most recent ones), and everything else that is expected organisationally. Ensure that these expectations are simple, clear, and measurable for smooth working. In many cases it has been observed, ambiguous communication can make employees sooner than expected.

Create a multi-departmental onboarding team

An ideal onboarding must be across departments and across functions. If as an organisation you want to improve the employee experience in the workplace, organisation needs to create an onboarding process that goes beyond HR and involves other organisational areas, especially relevant teams, integral stakeholders, and the leadership, till a great extent.

The earlier the managers can introduce new hires to their team, the better it is. Preceding the introduction, it is advisable to ensure the team knows the new employee has been hired and roles they will play in the team or across the organisation. Although facilitating strong team relationships can be a larger initial time investment, it can effectively help boost employee productivity and performance in the long run.

It’s important to understand and remember that new hires would also interact with stakeholders at various levels, also the outside their immediate team. However, at this point in time they are not sure, how they will be working with these people or what would be the best way to connect with the other employees. Line managers play a role here and help build these relationships by giving a quick low down on some people that new hires will deal with and how they’re important to the company. As a manager, it’s ones job to ensure that connections get formed fast are running smoothly, so initially help them connect well and ensure that new hires’ networking is coming together.

A great first meeting with the leadership stays with employees for a long time to come, positively impacting their sense of belonging and commitment, which, in turn, drives better retention and performance.

Quick Tips: In the current times, stress is a big put off for any employee, old or new. To keep the process simple and stress at bay, organisations today have to ensure that the onboarding process is fun, interactive, and informative. Irrespective of the position and industry, joining a new team/organisation can be stressful for most new hires. The onboarding process also needs to be informative and fun to relieve some of those anxieties that are commonplace. Getting to know new hires, and them getting to know the team, can also be fun and rewarding. The use ofgames and quizzes, or other similar options can lighten the mood and make your new hire feel comfortable. When a new hire joins a company, he/she wants to be a part of something bigger. These new employees are often wondering if the company will prove to be the right fit for them or not. If their objectives and values align with the organization’s values, the likelihood that they succeed is raised. New employees want to feel accepted and be an intrinsic part of a team or family. From the interviews and into the onboarding and beyond, these relationships must be formed to solidify their acceptance within. This especially becomes imperative in times of virtual or remote onboarding. Especially, when working remotely or in a hybrid of remote and on-site work, this can be challenging from day One. Providing new hires with mentors, networking opportunities, connecting them with others in the same role and making introductions to others is critical. Leave a new hire on their own remote island and the likelihood of resignation or future issues suggestively increases.

Provide support throughout the onboarding journey

For any new hire, support is one of the most important and opinion formative factors. During the onboarding process, managers should focus on cutting down the time spent on new hires’ administrative tasks and increasing time spent on performance coaching and creating connections. In today’s time put tech to use and use a technological platform that handles these key tasks. Use tech tools, to implement and track onboarding best practices in real-time throughout each stage of the process. Nowadays many organisations, start the new hire process even before actual joining, wherein they can register themselves on the company’s onboarding portal so they can view a welcome video, complete their initial documentation, and get their day-one schedule and overall customized onboarding program. It’s important to track whether the new hire has successfully completed their schedule for the day, including whether they were introduced to key stakeholders. Ensure they are placed in their workstation, received their business tools, and finished their day-one learning program. Take feedback from employees regarding their day one experience, this will allow course correction is required.

For the remainder of the onboarding program, monitor whether new hires have got critical company information, e-learning modules, and gauge the impact of the onboarding experience on the achievement of key onboarding goals at an individual level.

Quick Tips: Depending on the role and organisational needs, the process and duration of onboarding can be decided. But check-in regularly through the process is imperative. For some organisations, onboarding takes place over a set number of days. But over the years and in current times, many organisations do realise that onboarding must be a continuous process that can last for weeks or even months. Most of us have been there and know that the initial period can be thrilling for new hires. However, this energy bout can quickly subside if not managed correctly and without proper employee development. By checking in with new hires on a regular basis, you will help their overall success and minimise potential issues that would negatively impact their future with the company. Onboarding and the processes involved can be quite complex and this can help break ice. However, it is more important than ever in the new world and work environment we live in. The organisations that are able to excel and adapt to these practices can save time and money but will also have a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Those who don’t will find themselves in a cycle of continuous recruiting, training, and onboarding that will be costly and disadvantageous to the bottom line. To conclude, you will have a complete dashboard depicting the level of achievement in each of your onboarding goals so you can see what’s working and what needs to be improved.

At a time when organisations are struggling to attract right talent, retain talent, creating a strong onboarding process for new hires is imperative. By implementing a strategic onboarding program, organisations can build new hires’ confidence, increase engagement, and create an environment that retains talent for a long run.

In conclusion it can be said that even before the virtual shift, many organisations lacked a structured onboarding process, remote or even otherwise. Furthermore, many organisations tend to underestimate how long it actually takes a new hire to be proficient in their roles. Be it long or short, need of the hour is to have a decent onboarding program, that creates an exceptional onboarding journey for new employees and optimally help them reach their full performance potential.

Help new hires adopt and easing out in the new environment, this will help not only in retaining them but also attracting new talent pool!

Source: GWFM News