The importance of effective onboarding
The importance of effective onboarding
Many businesses will claim to have an onboarding process when bringing new employees into the fold, but how many of them can say how effective that process really is? In too many cases, onboarding is an exercise in paper pushing, but getting a new recruit set up on payroll isn’t quite the same as helping them integrate with a brand new team in an alien environment. With the right approach to onboarding, new members of the team will integrate faster, be happier and more productive, and they’re far more likely to stick around for longer. It’s an easy win for businesses, so why isn’t onboarding being taken more seriously? As any business will attest to, turnover is expensive. According to the Human Capitalist Institute, businesses that are wholly invested in their onboarding process are rewarded with higher levels of engagement, better employee focus and, you guessed it, drastically reduced turnover. However, coming up with an onboarding process isn’t a ‘one and done’ deal. It’s a living project that will require constant evolution to stay relevant and effective. This is most easily achieved when great ideas meet ground-breaking new technology, but that means little if an organization isn’t prepared to put its people first.
A 2017 Gallup Poll found that only 1 in 10 employees agree that their employer does a good job of onboarding new candidates. Combine this with the notion that a whopping 20% of new hires are likely to leave in their first 45 days, and a sad picture starts to emerge. Onboarding and retention are inextricably linked. In fact, research by Gillespie Associates found that having an effective integrated onboarding process meant that employees were 60% more likely to remain with an organization for at least three years. In other words, if a business gets its onboarding strategy right, it’ll make huge savings on what can be an expensive hiring process.
It isn’t just about retention either. The Harvard Business Review tells us that it can take new starters up to 12 months to reach their full productivity level with little or no onboarding strategy in place. Should that really be a cost businesses continue to pay as we move into 2020? Of course not.