Onboarding can monopolize your time—and your mind, too.
Many businesses struggle with onboarding new employees. Hiring globally only amplifies the challenge: You must bring people on board legally, no matter whether they are located halfway across the world.
Who, in this scenario, has the mental white space to think of the bigger picture?
But there is indeed a bigger picture to onboarding. Onboarding is a strategic imperative for HR. The value of doing better at onboarding is in more than newfound efficiencies and greater productivity just for HR.
Done intelligently, onboarding can be the launch point for a great employee experience. It can even make or break your company’s ability to expand.
Promote a positive employee experience from the start
One way you can garner big dividends for your business’ employee experience is by addressing it where it begins—at the moment of hire.
Positive employee experience begins with a new hire’s very first days as a member of the organization.
Remove a major impediment to business expansion
Few things impede an organization’s ability to expand more than a poorly designed onboarding process. Forbes found that 88% of employees feel their onboarding process was ineffective. Built-in inefficiency slows the process to bring on new hires. This inefficiency alone means badly-needed new hires take a long time to get up and running, leading to confusion, a poor employee experience, and ultimately attrition.
Take stock of the research
At the outset of their employment, new employees tend to make a quick decision on whether to stay. Indeed, long-standing research from the HCM industry analyst firm Brandon Hall Group reveals that a strong onboarding process improves new hire retention by 82% and productivity by 70%.
The numbers are significant, too, regarding the cost of replacing an employee. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) calculated it to be equal to a sizeable six to nine months of a lost employee’s pay. For senior and executive-level employees, that cost can be as high as 213 percent of their annual salary, according to the Center for American Progress.
Employee and customer experience are intertwined
Losing staff is expensive. None of the numbers we’ve already quoted account for the additional costs and risks of hiring internationally. Plus, there’s the impact on the customer experience, too. A way of thinking about this interplay is the service-profit chain.
The service-profit chain is a model of how the value of services provided to customers influences their satisfaction and loyalty, which stimulate profit and growth. As outlined by Harvard Business Review, the simple fact is that loyal and productive employees deliver better value.
Organizations that are understaffed face the threat of lost business. And where the employee experience is poor, there is also dissatisfaction among customers. As you can see, the beginnings of success or failure are already taking shape at the point of onboarding.
Provide proof of your culture with onboarding
In truth, the employee experience begins before one even becomes an employee. Your talent acquisition team is the tip of the spear, ambassadors for your organization’s culture and brand.
Apart from being more productive at work, happy employees become a natural expression of your organization’s culture and customer-facing activities, which eventually attracts more business and talent.
As researchers at the Saïd Business School found in this study, there is “a positive impact on sales performance, which is driven by changes in labor productivity – largely through workers converting more calls into sales.”
There is a lot that rides on your ability to sustain and protect all this. You want your new hires’ experience to reflect what attracted them to your organization all along. In turn, they will become a part of an interconnected fabric of business success.
Personalize onboarding to create fond memories for new hires
Through a great onboarding experience, you can create fond memories that inspire loyal and productive employees.
A strategic onboarding process:
- Provides a line of sight into career growth and how the organization supports it
- Connects new hires with your learning ecosystem
- Forges lasting connections between new employees and existing ones
This is where onboarding starts to become personalized. Reassuring new hires that they can grow in their careers at your company is an attractive approach, but it calls for a modern learning management system (LMS), a learning experience platform (LXP), and a trove of dynamic learning content.
Strategic onboarding: A once-in-an-employee-lifecycle opportunity
Strategic onboarding is larger than the sum of its parts. It’s about making the very event of employee orientation an experience.
You have a once-in-an-employee-lifecycle opportunity to instill self-motivation to advocate for your mission in your new employees. But how do you achieve this?
Satisfy their intrinsic need to know you value them. Let them know their work means something. More than anything, show them that they matter to you.
They will look back fondly on this time, and the feeling will fuel their loyalty and attract others to the organization.
The strategic benefit of efficient onboarding
One thing is worth reiterating. Removing inefficiency from the onboarding process accrues a strategic benefit.The average U.S. employer spends 24 days onboarding a new employee. Decreasing this length of time will lessen the chance of new hires being off-put by all the mechanics involved in hiring them legally. What’s more, smooth onboarding positively influences new hires’ all-important initial opinions of your organization.
Make a lasting impression
An enduring positive onboarding experience will result from a simplified onboarding workflow. Make becoming a new employee at your company an experience that leaves a lasting impression.
While hiring internationally poses its own challenges, making use of EOR services and unified global payrolls helps reduce friction from the get-go.
Not only will your new hires reach full productivity sooner, but by onboarding them faster, you can make space for greater business growth.
If you’d like to know more, speak to an expert at Multiplier today!
