Hiring isn’t easy. It can take a long time and many rounds of interviews to find the perfect fit for your business. So why do so many companies fall at the first hurdle when it comes to creating a great first impression?
Employee onboarding is the first chance you get to show your new hires what it’s like to work at your company – that means everything from your culture to your people and even the tools and systems you use.
Here’s what our CEO Philip Huthwaite has to say about why employee onboarding is so crucial to the success of your business:
If you’re not seizing the onboarding opportunity with both hands, you’re missing out on securing yourself a fully engaged, motivated and excited new employee. So, if your onboarding process is a little lacklustre, check out our 7 employee onboarding best practices that will help every new starter hit the ground running.
Employee onboarding doesn’t have to start on a new hire’s official first day! In fact, many new starters will be keen to get going as soon as they’ve signed their contract, which is a great opportunity for you to strike while the iron’s hot and get them engaged long before day one.
Once your new hire has a work email address, you can get them set up on your LMS right away. You can give them access to your onboarding resources so they can read up on things like your company background, your mission and your values ahead of time, meaning they have a good base level of knowledge ahead of their first day.
Preboarding helps you set your new hires up for success, as they can start building the foundations from the very moment they join you.
Thomas Thor uses 5app to deliver preboarding resources to new hires. This is delivered via a dedicated playlist filled with onboarding resources, which can be accessed before the employee’s official start date, capitalising on this initial period of enthusiasm to give new starters everything they need for their first days and weeks at Thomas Thor.
Too often, new hires are left to fend for themselves from day one. They’ll get the obligatory building tour, or get introduced to their new team on Slack or Microsoft Teams, and then… crickets. They’ll be left for hours or days to click around on the company website or to explore the folder system, keen to stay busy and fill their time semi-productively.
A structured employee onboarding plan helps eliminate the anxiety-inducing uncertainty in the early days. This should clearly set out everything a new hire needs to do in their first days, weeks and months, how they complete each task, and when it needs to be done by. This could include:
At the end of every week, the new employee should know exactly what they should have done, and exactly what’s next on their list. This will give them some much-needed structure and direction in their early days, helping them onboard smoothly without having to go hunting for their next task.
Following on from the last point, an onboarding playlist is a simple way to keep new hires on track with their onboarding.
With an LMS like 5app, you can build an ordered list to walk new starters through all their required content. For smaller teams, you may want a single employee onboarding playlist for everyone, or for larger teams, you could duplicate your playlist and tailor it for different departments, locations or roles. A salesperson in New York will have very different onboarding needs to a graphic designer in London, so think about how your onboarding playlist can encompass each new starter’s unique needs.
One way to help new hires feel connected to your business is to record a series of videos from key team members to welcome them to the team. This will help new employees put names to faces so they know who to go to for key questions, which is especially important for onboarding remote employees who won’t meet people organically in the workplace!
Greystar created a dedicated Onboarding Academy on its 5app-powered Greystar Business School, which acts as a one-stop shop for every new Greystar employee to explore everything they could possibly need when they join the company. This onboarding content is all available within the flow of work, making it quick and seamless for everyone to stay on top of their onboarding activities.
Everyone was new to your company at some point, and inevitably there will be some common themes in the early questions people ask.
Whether it’s ‘How do I book emergency leave?’ or ‘Can I request equipment for my home office?’ or ‘What’s the office dress code?’, your HR team can compile a list of FAQs with handy links to the right resources.
You could even go one step further and ask recent new starters to submit their own top tips. These might cover topics you wouldn’t think to include in your formal onboarding materials, such as the best pods for the office coffee machine, where to go for the best lunch or clever shortcuts for getting set up on new systems. This is knowledge sharing at its finest, and allows you to organically build a bank of resources from real employees!
The first week or two at any new job comes with a lot of questions. From the practical, such as where to find a resource, to the more social, such as who on the team has a pet, it’s hugely helpful for every new employee to have a go-to ‘onboarding buddy’ who can answer everything, or at least signpost them to the right platform or person.
Ideally, this should be someone who:
This buddy can also help with the social side of onboarding, such as making introductions to colleagues with similar interests or sharing information about social groups within the company.
Building a sense of belonging is vital for any successful employee onboarding. While it’s important to get the new hire up and running on all the right systems and with your standard processes and policies, it’s equally as crucial to get employees feeling like part of your team.
Announcing your new starters via a new post on your employee intranet is a nice way to welcome them to the business – especially if current employees are encouraged to add their own comments to introduce themselves.
But it goes beyond that first-day introduction. Make cultural integration part of your ongoing employee onboarding process by doing things like inviting new employees to social channels on Slack or Microsoft Teams, introducing new employees in all-company meetings and internal newsletters and even little things like adding their birthday to the company calendar. This will help them slot into the business faster and accelerate the transition from ‘the new person’ to ‘one of the team’.
Managers should never underestimate the role they play in employee onboarding. A common complaint for new hires is that they have an intro meeting with their manager on day one, then don’t hear from them again until their probation review. This obviously leaves the new hire feeling lost, confused and unsupported.
Part of the standard employee onboarding template should involve setting up regular check-ins between the new employee and their manager. This could be daily for the first week, dropping down to weekly as the employee gets more settled. This helps keep communication consistent in the early days, providing much-needed direction, feedback and the opportunity for both people to get to know each other.
The manager should set up these recurring check-ins on (or before) the new employee’s first day, making it crystal clear straight off the bat that this is a relationship that matters, and the new employee won’t be left to navigate the onboarding process alone.
At 5app, we're strong believers in practising what we preach. That's why we use 5app to host our own onboarding content! Find out what our CEO, Philip Huthwaite, has to say about using our own LMS for employee onboarding:
As our most recent joiner, Philip had hands-on experience with our onboarding playlist, which includes key HR resources, videos and links to important 5app processes... and it's safe to say that Philip found it very useful, saying: "Even on day one, I could hit the ground running!"