Are you following these new 2022 onboarding trends?

Following the latest onboarding trends is a great way to gain a reputation as a great place to work and maximise your employee retention levels.

Here is what you might have missed about the way onboarding has changed and grown in 2022:

What is onboarding?

Employee onboarding is the process of integrating a new hire into your company. The onboarding process can take anywhere from a single week to an entire year, bringing together managers, mentors, and co-workers in a coordinated effort.

At the end of a good onboarding process, a new employee will understand their role in your business, how it intersects with others, and even how the company fits within the larger industry and market.

Onboarding should go well beyond a classroom setting to provide support as a new hire gets to grip with their role, helping them understand who they report to and other lines of communications. Onboarding:

1. Builds trust, connections, and engagement
2. Shows how to provide feedback or offer innovation
3. Grows the performance of individuals and your business

The top 2022 onboarding trends to follow

1) Remote/ hybrid onboarding

Remote and hybrid working are here to stay. Any business that doesn’t offer remote or hybrid options to its team – especially a company with IT jobs it needs to fill – is going to start losing the best talent to those that do.

But remote and hybrid working brings additional challenges to the onboarding process. Building those key internal connections is much more difficult – as is enfolding them in your company culture.

Things like Slack channels, internal blogs, and other places where new team members can share their experiences, get informal suggestions, and ask questions are smart ways to improve communications.

2) Preboarding

Sending messages, tips, and information before your new hire’s first day lets them start mentally adjusting to the way you work. It also builds the excitement you want them to feel as they prepare for their first day.

Some companies send physical gifts or merchandise. Others go the digital route. Either way, the important thing is to start building a relationship to ensure they actually turn up when you expect them to.

First-day no-shows are a problem increasing numbers of businesses are dealing with. Preboarding is a good solution.

3) A personalised approach

The days of generic and impersonal “welcome packs” are long gone. If you want to maximise your new hire’s engagement with your company and their productivity when they get started, you need to get personal.

A new person in your IT support department is going to need to interact with different people and have different lines of communication from someone you’ve just recruited for a web developer job, for instance.

Each individual onboarding process should do things like:

• Explain their particular role and why it’s important
• Provide details of how you like to communicate at work
• Create workflows that show them how a day of work will happen

4) Socialisation

The growing trend in remote onboarding has only highlighted the importance of socialisation in the overall process.

A team that has good internal relationships and gets along will almost always mean better work quality, greater employee retention, and a better workspace to be in generally. You might try:

• Social activities like shared lunches as well as “virtual lunches” and “digital water coolers”
• Buddy programs and mentorships
• More 1-to-1s, especially with managers and leaders, earlier in the process

5) Reboarding

Just when you thought you’d heard it all, reboarding is a process you might want to look into if the way the IT jobs market has changed in the past few years has meant you’re suddenly struggling to retain employees.

As you might guess, reboarding is essentially onboarding for existing team members. It helps them – through an adapted version of your standard onboarding process – get a better grip on your organisation and their role in it. As a result, they become more engaged and productive team members.

As with all of these 2022 onboarding trends, given the cost of training new team members, mastering this process will always prove worthwhile.

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