Did you know that 78% of companies surveyed said they would hire new workers without the required experience for a role (as long as they had transferrable skills)? This could mean a lot of new employees at your company.
Making sure that a new hire is set up for success is a difficult job. After all, if you’re the one tasked with making sure that they know what’s going on, how to complete documentation, and what to do first, you may feel overwhelmed by the thought. You don’t want to mess up and cause a new hire to have a terrible time starting out at your workplace.
If you’re planning to begin offering a comprehensive onboarding process at your company, it’s not as simple as just throwing together a slideshow or handing your employees some paperwork to fill out. You want to make sure that the process is thorough, memorable, and useful for any new hire that joins your team.
Keep reading below as we discuss 9 of the best ways to make your onboarding process simple, yet effective.
1. Organize The Necessary Paperwork
When you have a new hire, the first day can be a little overwhelming for everyone. You want to make sure that this process starts on a good fit by having all of the paperwork and documentation you need ready to go.
Providing benefits, tax, and payroll information to your new hire right away on that first day is a great way to make them see how professional your company is, but it also gives them very necessary information that they will need anyway.
The best way to do this is to create folders with all of the paperwork in them beforehand. These can be ready to go for new hires, and you can update the information as needed.
Having an onboarding system for files and documentation will help you be more organized so that nothing gets missed as well. Always create a checklist for what documents need to be signed and returned from the employee. You can work with your HR department to make sure that you legally have complied with any necessary paperwork for the new hire that makes them a full employee of the company as well.
2. Solve The Puzzle
Solving the puzzle in this sense means figuring out what you want your employees to learn from the orientation period and how you will help them get there.
Make a list of what you need any new employee to know from the very beginning. Figure out what they need to know within the first month to do their job well. Find solutions to any problems that previous people starting out in that role faced from the beginning.
Ask for the team to help come up with some ideas about what the role means, what the new hire should learn right away, and what the schedule should look like for them within the next few days, weeks, and months. If you’re the team lead in charge of this new hire, you can do this on your own if you have enough information about the role.
The important thing is that you tell the new hire what the expectations are and give them tasks to complete. Otherwise, they may feel like they are not a valued part of the team, which is not a positive way to start a new professional relationship.
3. Provide Information To Other Managers
Work with other team leaders at your company to create a strategy for success that helps new hires blend with the company with ease. If you have good ideas, don’t be afraid to share them.
Once you have a structured approach in place, it’s a smart idea to coordinate with other managers to make sure that everyone else follows the same guidelines. While it may not be up to you to create these guidelines, it is a good idea to have a cohesive approach so that each employee gets the same training and onboarding experience.
This also allows other team members to be of more support during the onboarding process since they will know exactly what is going on.
4. Be Willing To Adjust
If you’re new to the onboarding process because you’re a newer company or you’ve decided to totally change your ways, remember that it is a process that takes time to perfect. Remain open to new possibilities and opportunities to grow as a professional as you work with new hires.
Every time you have an orientation with a new employee (or a group of employees), pay attention to what goes well and what goes poorly. You can use this time as a reflection period to see what changes may benefit the next new hire.
Consider asking questions after the process is done, such as:
- What was most helpful during your onboarding process?
- What do you wish had been different?
- Is there anything you would have added that wasn’t part of the process?
- What was most memorable about the onboarding process?
These can be useful to know even a few months after the onboard process ends so that you can know how big of an effect the entire orientation had on the employee.
A smart idea is to offer a survey at the end of the process to see what the new hires actually have to say about the process overall. They will be able to give you anonymous, honest answers that will help you improve in the future.
5. Trust Your New Hires
Although it might be easy for a manager to feel like they need to be in control of everything the new hire does right away, that’s not always the case. In fact, it may be more beneficial for your overall relationship to give them a little bit of space, but enough support that they feel like they can ask questions
Depending on your field, new hires tend to be extremely capable right after the onboarding process is complete. As long as you create a space where they feel comfortable asking for help when needed, you should be able to trust that the new people hired at your company are smart, capable, and competent in the field.
Give your new employees some space to find their own footing while offering a helping hand from time to time. Set up regularly scheduled times to discuss their progress and ongoing projects right from the get-go so that everyone is on the same page.
6. Consider Going Paperless
During the onboarding process, there is a lot of paperwork that needs to be signed, read, and collected by the new hire. As we mentioned in our first point, this can be a bit of a confusing process at the beginning, especially when the new employee is trying to figure out where their desk is or how to get to the bathroom.
Instead of dealing with physical examples of forms and having to make copies for everyone, consider going the paperless route as an alternative. New employees can store these documents on their computers for easy access (or print them themselves if they want to have a hard copy).
You’ll cut down on some of the time needed to go through this documentation as well because the employee can read it all on their own if you send it to them before their first day. This can be helpful if you have a lot you need to get through during their initial orientation or if you’re dealing with a big group of people that are just starting out at your company.
7. Work With Remote I9 Options
Do you want to truly show your employees that you are a genuine company with legal documentation that they shouldn’t be afraid of? If so, this is a great way to showcase that transparency.
Remote I9 verification software allows employees to have a representative review their hiring documentation and ensure that it is completely valid. The best part is that this can all be set up virtually, so the employee doesn’t have to do much else besides send it in.
Let your new hires know that this is an option available to them and explain how it works in your initial discussions after they are hired. This legal reassurance will allow your employees to feel confident in your company and their trust in the new job they plan to do for you.
8. Try Pre-Recorded Videos
For some companies, the idea of training every new hire for hours and hours can seem extremely daunting. Unless you work for a larger company with a lot of employees, having specialized roles just for training might not be within the budget.
Because of this, rather than waiting for a large batch of new employees to come in for training, you can send pre-recorded videos with some essential information they can learn before their start date. Some systems for this type of orientation component will also allow you to record personalized videos and create a quiz for the end to make sure that the employees are retaining that information.
If you want to ask people on your team to volunteer to act in these videos, you can do this as a special project. Otherwise, it may be worth it to outsource the job to professional companies that design these types of videos for a variety of companies. This may be a smart move if you’ve never done it before, as you want to make sure that you don’t miss anything and are compliant with all laws and regulations.
This will give your employees a chance to learn on their own, but it will also free up some time that you otherwise would have had to spend with them in training. These videos could be viewed before their first day, or it could be something that they do within their first couple of days on the job.
9. Try To Keep It Simple
As a new hire, it can be really frustrating to have a complex or confusing onboarding process. As a new employee, a person is already overwhelmed enough with the change in job, so you need to make sure that you’re not overloading your hires from the start.
Additionally, it’s essential that you pay attention to how the process is unfolding, and make adjustments as needed. Although we discussed previously the importance of reflecting when a training session is completely finished, you also want to make changes during the process if something isn’t working correctly so that every employee gets the training they need during onboarding.
Don’t attempt to do too much in a single day or week. Make sure that you have a schedule of when things will happen, and consider giving this to the new hires so that they know what to expect.
Making The Onboarding Process A Breeze
There are a lot of things that go into a good, successful onboarding process at any company. No matter how technical your company might be, you can always make this process a little bit simpler by focusing on all of the details and creating a solid plan of how you will execute the onboarding strategies.
Using some of the tips above, your employees will have a great learning experience during their onboarding and orientation that helps them feel valued and appreciated by the company.
Did you find these tips helpful? If you did, take some time to look at some of our other business-related articles on the rest of the website next.
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