Join America Back to Work, a weekly podcast, video, and blog series that covers timely and relevant topics affecting the labor market and workforce with industry experts. The series includes recruiting, hiring, retention, employee satisfaction, customer service, background screenings, and more.
Quality Onboarding: Engage and Retain Employees Earlier
Talent scarcity and high turnover have been the two central themes in hiring in 2022. Those challenges will likely remain front and center at the start of the new year. Find out how quality onboarding can help.
The U.S. labor market continues to run “stubbornly hot” despite those notorious mass layoffs in the technology sector (i.e. Twitter, Meta, Amazon) you’ve probably heard about.
The modern worker’s tastes, attitudes, and behaviors have changed for good in this post-pandemic, pre-recession world (see: The Great Rethink). With more choice than ever before and an altered view of how work fits into their lives, the right employees are harder to hire–and harder to keep.
In fact, Employ Inc. predicts that 71% of employed workers are open to taking other jobs right now.
Recognizing that the possibility of turnover is high and the cost of turnover is even higher (due to talent scarcity), employers are centering retention in everything they do–including hiring.
The Extended Employee Lifecycle
Earlier in this series, we covered how, in the current labor landscape, hiring is retention and retention is hiring–and we shared our top tips for retention-friendly hiring.
ICYMI: candidates are evaluating whether they want to stick with your organization (or not) earlier than ever before, making it critical to move hiring along quickly and to represent your organization in the best light at every step of the process.
The candidate experience sets the tone for future employee engagement, motivation, and feelings toward your company, meaning retention should be top of mind from the very start.
That means the employee lifecycle has changed–it’s been extended.
The unofficial “start” to an employee’s journey with your organization is the second they make contact with your hiring team. It now includes recruiting, interviewing, and screening–and continues seamlessly into a quality onboarding experience.
Why Does Quality Onboarding Matter?
Research from Brandon Hall Group, a leading Human Capital Management research and analyst firm serving talent and hiring professionals, found that great employee onboarding can improve retention by 82%!
What’s more? A negative onboarding experience makes employees 2x more likely to look for other opportunities, according to a study by NorthPass.
Gone are the days of “new employee orientation” or simple, standardized job training. Onboarding is now about so much more.
It’s about personalization and connection. It’s about making sure the employee’s organizational, technical, and social needs are well met. It’s about culture-building, community-building, and comprehensive training–all the things that make an employee more likely to stay.
The goal of quality onboarding is to start off on the right foot with the employee so they’re engaged from day one. (Not-so-fun fact: disengaged employees cost employers $450 to $500 billion each year due to low productivity and turnover.) Onboarding is incredibly valuable real estate in the employee lifecycle for doing just that.
Quality Onboarding Kickstarts Employee Engagement and Retention
Onboarding represents a (rare) time in which you have the employee’s complete attention–without the distraction of work and the bias of feelings they may develop over time towards your organization.
In fact, during onboarding, you have more influence over those feelings: you can make new employees feel good about your leadership team, your team culture, and the way things are done. During this time, you can get employees excited about their role, and you can truly affect their impression of your organization.
And that goes a long way. A quality onboarding process can:
- Increase new hire productivity
- Decrease time-to-productivity (aka how long it takes for a new employee to become productive)
- Improve revenue year-over-year
- Integrate new employees into your culture more effectively
- Increase overall job satisfaction
- Expand brand awareness
- And more!
Ultimately, quality onboarding can help you solve short-term engagement in the early stages of the employee lifecycle on your way to improving long-term engagement/retention over the course of the complete employee lifecycle.
Next week, we’ll break down all the technical, social, and organizational components of a high-quality onboarding process–and show you how effective onboarding services and technology can help you deliver on those goals.