The Competitive Advantage of Effective Onboarding and Orientation

A positive onboarding experience can increase retention by 82% and improve productivity by 72%, so why are only 12% of organizations great at it? The rapidly evolving work environment creates an obligation for employers to develop self-paced onboarding and orientation programs that engage employees early, often before the first day on the job, with access to tools and support well beyond the first week.

Great employee onboarding can improve retention by 82%.

According to research by Glassdoor, a positive onboarding experience can improve new hire retention by 82 percent and increase productivity by over 70 percent. Creating a repeatable, structured, and informative onboarding program can help your organization to improve loyalty and retention. It creates a powerful first impression and infuses your cultural brand with the new hire. Early training improves rapid advancement to productivity. If the onboarding experience engages the new employee with experienced employees for cross-training, it will also develop trusted relationships within the organization, and the process provides recognition for experienced members of the team.

According to Glassdoor, it costs an average of $4,000 and 24 days to hire a new employee. Wouldn’t you want to retain more than 82% of that investment of time and money? What if you could double your odds by mitigating the risks associated with reasons that new employees leave?

New Hires are 2 times as likely to leave due to a negative onboarding experience.

According to a study by Digitate, employees are twice as likely to leave if the organization creates a negative first impression due to a poor or disorganized onboarding experience. If the employee leaves, then the cost and time to find a replacement may start all over again. In addition to the cost to obtain and train the new hire, there can be substantial business revenue generation or production delays.

In the same study by Digitate, 20% of new hires are unlikely to refer a friend or former colleague due to a poor onboarding experience. On the contrary, having a robust and well-organized onboarding process can increase referrals by top performers, improving the ability to find matching quality candidates and enhancing productive teams.

Retention, productivity, referrals and cost avoidance are all important benefits of a good onboarding experience. Is there a competitive advantage to it as well?

88% of Organizations do not do onboarding well.

If you feel that there is room for improvement with onboarding in your organization then you are not alone. According to Gallup, only 12 percent of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees. That does not mean that 88 percent are bad at onboarding, but it does mean that nearly nine out of ten have room to improve. Being in the top ten percent is competitive advantage. Having an informative, structured and engaging onboarding experience can set your company apart from the competition.

How difficult is it to move from the bottom thirty percent toward the top ten percent of organizations when it comes to onboarding?

58% of organizations focus only on processes and paperwork.

According to HCI, more than half of organizations treat onboarding as a process for pushing paperwork, and one third of organizations have inconsistent, reactive, informal or unstructured onboarding. It is common and necessary for onboarding to include human resources training, information on company policies, insurance and benefits. These items are important, but often are not sufficient to enable a new employee to be productive, confident and performing. An onboarding plan or schedule should include a broad range of training about the company, culture, ethics, and about how the specific job responsibilities integrate with other roles in the company, as well as training for the job itself.

How does an organization effectively train a new hire on the integration of job responsibilities? Allowing experienced employees to participate in the onboarding experience can boost teamwork and collaboration as well as knowledge. According to HCI, 87 percent of organizations that leverage experienced employees in the onboarding experience have confirmed more rapid performance and knowledge among new hires. In addition to this initial boost and rapid ramp up in performance, developing this integration can lead to long term cross-training and collaboration.

Onboarding is the first step in an educational process that should pave the way for continuous development and collaboration. With these things in mind, it is good to have a schedule to check up after the first week, second week, one month, and before the end of the third month. Put the invitations in your calendar from the first day to set mutual milestones for feedback. Give feedback on employee performance and ask for feedback to continuously improve your onboarding program.

Top performing organizations begin onboarding before the first day on the job.

Many of the top performing organizations maximize efficiency and effectiveness by engaging new employees before the first day on the job. Some jobs require advance security clearance, Controlled Goods Clearance, background checks, or equipment, and this time can also be used to provide some online training and orientation. Advance onboarding and training may include non-proprietary information on facility directions, health and safety, workplace hazardous materials training and certifications, benefits and forms that the employee can complete at home and bring to work on the first day. Providing information and forms to engage the new hire before the first day is a way to improve efficiency in the first week and demonstrate a company culture of organized discipline. This also allows the employee to review the materials, forms and training at his or her own pace and convenience, mitigating the pressure of the first day on the job. This practice also increases loyalty and reduces the risk of losing top talent to a competitor in that critical time between selection and the first day on the job by engaging with the individual as a team member early.

Top performing supplier partners have onboarding programs that incorporate elements of both the supplier required training and customer training in the onboarding orientation.

A common misconception is that supplier partners and staffing agencies do not have onboarding programs similar those of corporate clients. On the contrary, in addition to onboarding requirements to satisfy employment standards and regulatory compliance, many staffing companies develop robust onboarding processes to engage employees and educate new hires about the customer with the goal to achieve rapid ramp up and high productivity. This practice also mitigates risk of losing candidates, enhances loyalty and retention rates, and improves quality referrals. Corporate clients are encouraged to solicit this information from potential supplier partners and to participate in the review and development of onboarding and employment development programs to enhance results.

Many case studies have demonstrated highly effective onboarding programs that fuse culture with information, further augmented with either a “buddy system” colleague or an assigned mentor during the initial training period. This commitment to the success of the new hire yields tremendous returns early in the career and creates a level of expectation that raises performance and objectives in subsequent years.

The evolving work environment raises the importance and the obligation of employers to develop robust onboarding programs.

Circumstances have created opportunity for remote work / work at home and a distributed workforce, but this also creates enormous challenges for effective onboarding. Even before the pandemic created a rush to increase remote work, according to Glassdoor, the top five things that job seekers consider before taking a new job are 1) Salary / compensation, 2) career growth opportunities, 3) work-life balance, 4) location / commute, and 5) company culture and values.

Ability to work at home, work remotely, maintain work-life balance and mitigate commute with flexible schedules can enhance the perspective of company culture and values. However, the flexibility and social distancing in work environments can complicate many legacy orientation practices. Onboarding and orientation need to embrace many elements of self-paced learning, developing skills and relationships in a virtual environment, and the ability to effectively monitor early performance with mutual described metrics. New hire employees need the tools, direction, and guidance to succeed and become effective members of the team. Unfortunately, this means that many organizations need to take a fresh look at legacy onboarding practices and engage experienced members from all areas of the organization to contribute ideas and materials to modernize the onboarding experience. Creating a cross-functional team to collaborate on developing a self-paced onboarding experience will help to strengthen the core culture of the organization, illustrate the company commitment to the people, and create a pathway for new employees to become effective contributors much faster and longer.

Words of Wisdom

“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” – Andrew Carnegie

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” ― Michael Jordan

“Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.” – Plato

About the Author: John Mehrmann is President of Belcan Canada Inc., an IT and Engineering staffing and recruiting company that is dedicated to augmenting and empowering the internal teams at client businesses. John is author of The Trusted Advocate: Accelerate Success with Authenticity and Integrity, and contributed to 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life Vol 3, and Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion.

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