What should be included in an onboarding program?

Published by Lisa Zibamanzar on January 31, 2022January 31, 2022

What should be included in an onboarding program?

An effective onboarding program is paramount for employee engagement.

Research conducted by The Harvard Business Review has shown the link between effective onboarding and employee engagement.

Having a standardised onboarding process results in companies experiencing 62% greater new hire productivity, along with 50% greater new hire retention. Companies who invest in developing onboarding programs that meet employees’ learning, technical, and social needs reap the benefits from a culture and cost perspective.

Onboarding has three main goals: to inform, welcome, and guide new hires. But the best onboarding solutions go much further, introducing your company culture, your customers, your products and even educating them about the rules and regulations that they need to follow.

It’s important to ensure your workers are given the training to best prepare and enable them to succeed, and improve performance. Get them excited about joining the company, and explain the culture and where they fit in.

Create pain-point resources

Your new hires are going to have a lot of questions and concerns during their first few months with the company. They need to have a one-stop-shop to get answers to questions. A great rule of thumb is, if one new hire asks you, you can assume that all of them have the same question but not all of them are direct enough to ask.

A repository of ‘pain point resources’ is the answer. Tools like Atlassian’s Confluence can help here because they offer a sort of corporate intranet where your best practices and processes can be safely stored.

However, the questions your new hires have should also inform your training approach. If most of your new hires are asking the same question, then the training wasn’t good enough or engaging enough.

You should understand that your new starters don’t want to be inundated with generic induction content. Instead, focus on giving them information that they can use to understand your company and their roles within it.

Be creative with your digital resources, create engaging ‘how-to’ tips, and produce instructional videos. Adapt your content to address as much of your company’s priorities and context as possible in an enjoyable, easy-to-digest way.

Share company culture

Your company’s culture is unique, and understanding your way of working and how things are done is invaluable to new starters. From practices, policies, and values, your culture is what will give your new starters a sense of belonging to the company.

Focus on connecting new starters within the company, and using technology to answer questions about the company.

By aligning your company’s values and culture into the onboarding program, your employees are more likely to commit to your company.

Your employee onboarding training should go beyond what you expect from them, and also focus on what you stand for and how they fit into that.

Think long-term

Remember that the journey from a new starter to a happy team member takes more than just a few days. Many companies fail to continue supporting new starters after their first week, which can lead to workers feeling lost.

Your onboarding should translate a clear sense of direction and structure that also focuses on the long-term goals of your employees.

Use feedback to continuously improve your training, and find out what your employees need to really succeed within your company. Make sure your digital resources align with both the company’s goals and the employers’ expectations.

Digital experiences

To transform your organisation’s new employee experience, your onboarding should include a technology stack that can optimise different parts of the onboarding program. Digital experiences leverage the availability of digital tools and technologies to make the onboard process more efficient and effective.

Digital experiences are particularly well suited to training because they guide the user through the content. They ensure employees absorb the information they need to succeed in their new role, in an immersive way.

At BAD, we help companies onboard their teams through custom digital experiences. Contact us today to talk about your onboarding program.