THINGS TO AVOID WHEN ONBOARDING
NEW EMPLOYEES
BY : Alex Moyher
If you are hiring , congratulations ! One of the chief signs that a business is heading in a good direction is when the company begins or increases the number of people it is hiring ( as long as it ’ s not due to constantly having to replace people leaving , aka high turnover ). In recent years , HR experts have the hiring process down to a science , so much that they have broken it up into multiple smaller sub-processes .
Onboarding is used to describe the process between a candidate accepting an offer of employment and roughly when they begin their first day ( or week ). Well-managed companies know that the hiring process is very important and onboarding is no exception .
Here are some things to avoid when onboarding new employees .
The first thing is to make sure you are not overlooking the onboarding process . In other words , make sure you are constantly collecting feedback from new employees on how to make it better , instead of just assuming “ it ’ s just one of those things everyone goes through ” and not giving it much thought beyond that . Properly tweaking an onboarding process improves productivity and morale while neglected onboarding processes cost employee retention .
Next , you will want to keep the onboarding process well-documented so it will be consistent and complete . This saves time and money from having to go back and fix things , such as missing access for an employee to an important computer system or the lack of a parking pass that gets a new employee ’ s car towed . Remember the feedback regarding the onboarding process mentioned previously ? That fits perfectly in here with the need to keep the process well-documented .
Make sure you include a sufficient number of people in the hiring process . What is sufficient ? Of course , that varies widely from company to company and who is being hired . For companies that have thousands of employees , naturally , it is not feasible for everyone to be involved in the hiring process , but having a new employee only talk to someone from the HR and legal departments before getting straight to work is also lacking and impersonal . A sufficient number of people is somewhere in the middle ; enough to make the new employee feel welcome .
As important as it is to make a new employee feel welcome though , it is also very important to properly equip them with everything they need to do their job . As much of this as possible needs to take place during the onboarding process . Training with other employees on a company ’ s specialized or proprietary processes naturally will take an extended period of time . But setting up a new employee ’ s workstation , giving them proper office supplies , having access to the necessary information systems , and more , all need to be handled during onboarding to get the new employee off on the right foot .
11 WWW . RSSM . BIZ | United States Staffing Association WWW . RSSM . BIZ