How onboarding can take your business to the next level
As the business world continues to evolve, progressive businesses are seeking contemporary ways to attract, engage and retain talent.
So once you’ve attracted the talent and they’re engaged, you need to screen, onboard, develop and retain them.
The advent of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) means you can seamlessly deliver a great candidate experience without compromise.
We’ve done some research to explore some of the best in the business to help you adopt great programs.
Research by Glassdoor found that businesses with a well-defined onboarding process improve the retention of hires by 82%.
An Allied Workforce Mobility Survey found that companies that participated in the survey lost 25% of their employees within a year if they failed to provide adequate employee onboarding.
Given the impact that onboarding can have on your business, it’s important to continue to review and evolve your onboarding program, so it remains contemporary and relevant. A study from CareerBuilder showed that 36% of organisations have no formal onboarding process for new employees.
Onboarding is often a new hire’s first point of contact with the business, and will set the tone for their future with your business. With more and more people ‘mobile’ and a new generation of prolific mobile users being engaged, your onboarding program cannot be a ‘set and forget.’
Netflix’s onboarding program focuses on leadership and culture, and ensures that new hires can feel like a significant part of the business from the get-go, rather than slowly integrating themselves. Poorna Udupi, an engineer at Netflix, described details of Netflix’s onboarding program.
- “The Netflix technology stack was outlined and introductions were made to ever-helpful co-workers which made my life as a software developer super easy and exciting”
- “I met with executive management including the Chief Product Officer, Chief Finance Officer and Chief Executive Officer in the first quarter, which helped to orient me with the company’s ethos and aspirations”
- “It gave new hires significant responsibility and allowed them to have a solid impact from the get-go”
Digital Ocean take a slightly different approach, and focus on getting people excited about their new job. Things that people experience when they begin at Digital Ocean are:
- A balloon on their desk so other employees can find and welcome them
- A handwritten welcome note
- A bottle of champagne
- Some Digital Ocean swag
They felt that this approach created a sense of belonging.
LinkedIn has more than 13,000 full-time employees, so it’s hard for people to feel like they stand out.
To circumvent this, LinkedIn has a new employee roadmap, which includes helping new starts to interact with each other on their first day, as well as learning about the company culture.
Enboarder helps businesses create personalised employee onboarding programs. They achieve this by:
- Using data and feedback from past hires
- Provide prompts and activities for employers to commemorate important dates
- Allows integrations with programs like Slack, Jira, DocuSign and more
Peoplestreame allows people to:
- Provide documents to new employees with ease
- Collate important information
- Equip the new employee with the ability to succeed from their very first day
So what about retention? It’s important to gain insight from real data to understand engagement and performance in order to understand the pulse across the organisation and plan for change with quantifiable evidence.
An example of a program we’ve been exposed to is Culture Amp. Culture Amp improves retention by:
- Personalised dashboards for individuals, managers and leaders
- A feedback program designed by psychologists and data scientists
- Automated employee surveys for each milestone in the lifecycle of an employee
WorkPro offers an unlimited module library with both general and industry-specific topics, written by subject matter experts, to convey what your new hires need to know most.
Try it for free. WorkPro also provides an extensive range of background checks and an easy way to manage documents, licences and tickets to ensure your business remains compliant.
