Overcoming the Challenges of an Ineffective Onboarding Process
An excellent onboarding process plays a vital role in employee development and retention. It also contributes to the overall growth and productivity of an organisation.
According to a PR released by Career Builder, more than 93% of employers agree that onboarding influences an employee’s decision. In fact, this decision often determines whether they stay or leave the company. Furthermore, a Glassdoor report states that, if conducted properly, onboarding increases a company’s retention rate by 82%.
These reports reinforce that poor onboarding practices can cost small and medium businesses significant time and money. Additionally, they cost valuable resources that businesses can ill afford to lose. This article will discuss the major challenges brought by an ineffective onboarding process. Additionally, it explores what businesses can do to overcome these hurdles.
Major Challenges of an Ineffective Onboarding Process
Have you ever had a seemingly perfect new hire suddenly quit not long after joining your team? If so, you are not alone. Good talent want to be inspired but quickly become unsettled if first impressions send alarm signals. This often happens during the onboarding process.
Indeed, for most new employees, onboarding is the first real glimpse into a new company. Getting this wrong can cost businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in additional recruitment fees, time, and lost efficiency.
Below are some of the major onboarding challenges that often lead to employee disengagement.
1. Information overload
Some organisations bombard their new hires with a huge amount of information about the company. This often covers policies, operations, processes, and more. They even squeeze all this in only one, two, or three days, which can easily overwhelm or confuse the employee. Many companies focus on the quantity of information they pass along. However, they should instead focus on the quality of content they share with new hires.
2. Not enough guidance and training
You can’t expect a new hire to know everything about their role right away. This means, hiring managers and their immediate supervisors should provide enough time for training and room for learning. However, another challenge among organisations is they don’t offer sufficient training opportunities to new hires. As a result, employees can easily feel lost or unprepared for their daily responsibilities.
3. Ineffective communication
Importantly, onboarding shouldn’t be a one-way street. However, organisations often take this opportunity to continuously feed new hires with information. In doing so, they fail to take time to listen, answer questions, and receive feedback. Poor communication during onboarding typically leads to misunderstandings and feelings of frustration and overwhelm.
Overcoming the Challenges: What Makes a Successful Onboarding?
As leaders, we want new employees to be able to hit the ground running. Additionally, we want them to make meaningful contributions as early as possible. Ideally, they will stay and help support the business as it grows. This next section digs deeper into the common challenges facing small and medium businesses. It also explores what you can do to create an effective onboarding journey for your next new hires.
1. Prepare an onboarding checklist.
For each type of new role you hire for, your HR department should have a routine checklist. This checklist should cover all the steps or procedures required to complete the onboarding process. Specifically, you should ensure your checklist includes pre-onboarding, day one, and post-onboarding tasks.
2. Eliminate time-consuming paperwork.
Giving new hires a huge stack of documents and files to fill out on day one is a mistake. As a result, they can quickly lose interest in your company’s onboarding process. Instead, find a way to automate data collection and signing processes. If you can do all these in less than 10 minutes, you can use more time for training, guidance, and doing real work.
3. Encourage two-way communication.
4. Follow a comfortable pace.
5. Practice the 6 C’s of onboarding.
Developed by Talya Bauer, Ph.D., Endowed Cameron Professor of Management at Portland State University, the 6 C’s of employee onboarding is a framework commonly used by HR professionals or organisation leaders in creating an effective employee onboarding process. Serving as the building blocks for a positive onboarding experience, the 6 C’s include Compliance, Clarification, and Confidence. They also include Connection, Culture, and Checkback.
Once you’ve checked and incorporated all these C’s in your onboarding process, you can feel confident. You will have hired and prepared the right talent for your team.
Streamline Your Onboarding Process Now!
Admittedly, onboarding can be slow and tedious. It is easy to understand why impatient leaders can fall into a trap. This trap often means shortcutting the onboarding process to move on to the next thing.
Doing it the “right” way can even add more to the stress and the challenge. The good news is you don’t have to do it the traditional way. This means no more paperwork, contracts, files and folders, or manual reports.
With the right tool and automation procedures, you can simplify your employee onboarding process. This approach also saves precious time and resources. AgendisHR is a Microsoft 365-based application that replaces spreadsheets and automates the entire end-to-end onboarding process. It handles everything from the initial request for information to automatically completing your offer letters. Additionally, it manages your checklist and sorts all your documents in SharePoint. Better still, it integrates with your payroll system!
Who says onboarding comes with stress? Cohesis’s AgendisHR app allows you to scale your organisation quickly and easily. Shift to automation. Shift to AgendisHR.
Simon Cohen
Written by Simon Cohen, Founder, Cohesis. Simon has over two decades of experience working with Australian SMEs and local government organisations on technology strategy, governance, and implementation.
