Employee onboarding refers to the process of integrating your new team member with your company and its culture. Successful onboarding should set up your new start with all the tools and information that they require to become a productive member of the team.

Onboarding new employees at your organisation should be a strategic process that lasts at least one year. It is recognised by HR experts that how employers handle the first few days and months of a new employee’s experience is crucial to ensuring high retention.

Supporting this, recent research reveals that 90% of people who decide to leave a new job, make that decision in their first month. This startling statistic highlights the importance of making a great first, and hopefully lasting impression, on your new employee.

A great onboarding experience sets your employee up for success – to be productive, to feel valued and ultimately to become a loyal team member within your company. Employee turnover can be expensive, with Glassdoor estimating that the average company spends £3,000 recruiting each new hire. Your onboarding experience is the first step to helping improve your staff turnover and avoiding costly mistakes.

Onboarding has always been high up the HR agenda, but as we have seen the shift to wide-spread working from home in the last year, onboarding has become even more important. HR experts are working hard to ensure that they come up with innovative ways to co-ordinate and deliver their onboarding process, so it remains as successful when completed remotely.

The infographic below details our Top Tips for Employee Onboarding, continue reading to understand how we adopt these at Allsop and how we have adapted these to onboarding entirely remotely. We were in the fortunate position to still be able to hire during the pandemic and have now successfully onboarded ten new team members remotely.

Pre-Onboarding

Pre-Onboarding refers to the period of time between an employee accepting a job offer and their first official day.

It’s an exciting time for your new team member getting ready to join your company. This is the time to make a great first impression, relieve some new starter nerves, and introduce other team members before their first official workday.

Here at Allsop we use this time to communicate regularly with our new start. We have several email touchpoints from both HR and their line manager. Emails from HR introduce our culture and allow new starts to ask any company-related questions. Line managers welcome the new employee to their team and send them their first day agenda a week before they start. We also where appropriate invite employees to social occasions prior to their start date, albeit these have all been virtual in the past year.

In the background we also use this time to order the relevant equipment and ensure all teams members are informed of the new arrival.  Regular contact during this time with your new employee sets to reassure them that they have made the right decision and helps them to build a rapport with their colleagues before they have even started.

Using a Roadmap

Having a well-equipped staff who have a visible onboarding roadmap to follow and automated reminders; helps the journey to run smoothly when welcoming new team members. Line management and coaching alongside your project tasks aren’t overwhelming when using automation within your onboarding.

Our approach to seamless onboarding obviously involves the use of technology. Onboarding a new team member involves a lot of different people and departments, so by setting up the onboarding workflow in a central solution, everyone has access and gets automated reminders for the tasks that they are required to complete. This has been especially important as we have adapted to working remotely, as being held in the cloud, everyone can access the software from anywhere and collaborate effectively.

Getting to Know You

Introduce the newest employee to your HR platform, to complete some simple tasks, why not ask some fun questions to break the ice before their first day? As a Line Manager to the new employee get in touch the week before for a friendly chat.

As we have already mentioned we have several points of communication before an employee joins us, this also includes an introduction to our HR software. Which means some of the first day paperwork can be completed before they start.

Another part of ‘Getting to Know You’ are some ice-breaker questions for our new team member to complete. The answers to these are automatically emailed company-wide on their first day. This allows other members of the teams to reach out and perhaps engage in a conversation on a mutual interest that they may have picked up on.

To overcome the lack of office introductions, new employees are encouraged to set up Microsoft Teams calls with people within Allsop on their first week. This ensures that they meet people outside of their immediate team and get to know the different people and personalities throughout the business.

Empowering your New Team Members

With energies high as well as nerves for your newest team member, make sure you have provided them with their next steps for the next few weeks, what to learn, whom to meet etc. and outline expectations. No one wants to have to ask what do I do? give the power back to your employee with a helpful guide.

Again, a lot of this is managed with our HR software, line managers outline plans for new employees, automated reminders are scheduled to ensure that one to one check-ins happen regularly as our new team member settles in and new starts have access to all HR documentation on demand via our intranet.

As onboarding continues learning goals and training requirements are discussed leading up to their first performance review around the ninety-day mark. Keeping on top of all the onboarding tasks is straightforward as reminders are constantly sent throughout the workflow as the employee progresses through the onboarding journey.

In conclusion, we have found that remote onboarding can be just as successful. Using automation has ensured that we are all able to collaborate effectively to ensure the best possible start for our new employees.

These are just some of the key areas we focus on here at Allsop, you can learn more about onboarding by watching our recent webinar with our HR partner HeadsTogther.

Or if you would like to find out more about the onboarding software, we use drop us a message or call us on 028 9018 3250.