The drastic drawbacks of an ineffective onboarding process

Ever wondered what is the main cause of employee dissatisfaction? Job, work conditions, salary are not only the main parameters. It starts from the day when you onboard new employees – Lack of effective new employee onboarding.

The employee onboarding process is the first step to enter into any organization. As is commonly said, “First Impression is the Last Impression”, poor onboarding experience causes dissatisfaction on the part of the employee as they are not able to understand the company’s culture, connect with the coworkers, and their workplace environment.

According to a survey conducted by job site CareerBuilder “According to HRs the lack of a structured onboarding process has had one of the following negative impact on their company, including lower productivity (16 per cent), greater inefficiencies (14 per cent), higher employee turnover (12 per cent), lower employee morale (11 per cent), lower level of employee engagement (10 per cent), lower confidence among employees (10 per cent), lack of trust within the organization (7 per cent) and missed revenue targets (6 per cent).”

Organizations are now embracing technologies to make their employee’s onboarding experience more smooth and effective. It directly affects the perception of the organization in the mind of the employees. A good onboarding process makes an employee more satisfied with the organization as it helps them learn the company’s objective and their responsibility towards the organization.

Why Improve Employee Onboarding Experience

According to a report by Brandon Hall Group “Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. Companies with weak onboarding programs lose the confidence of their candidates and are more likely to lose these individuals in the first year.”

The significance of onboarding goes beyond just simply acquainting new employees with the organization and its strategies. Almost 33% of representatives have left a place of employment in their initial half-year. This is a loss of time, money, and effort on the part of an organization that now has to find a substitute for the person.

Onboarding is a vital aspect of recruitment and retaining of talent. Robust onboarding systems are built to allow your personnel to thrive and flourish. New hires who are part of a well-structured on-board induction process are more likely to stay for up to 3 years at an organization.

It was found that the organizational costs of staff turnover are estimated to range between 100% and 300% of the replaced employee’s salary.

People are often nervous when they join any organization as they are new and unfamiliar with the rules of the organization. Effective onboarding programs allows to communicate unspoken rules to the employees, engage them so they feel completely integrated and give them a sense of belonging towards the organisation which affects their performance.

How to Improve Employee Onboarding Experience

Transforming onboarding procedures can save time and energy so you can concentrate on progressively creative activities.

1. Automate what you can in your onboarding process

Automating your onboarding process can save a lot of time not only to the HR but also to the new hires. Automate the collection of employee data in mobile forms. No one likes it when entering into a new job sitting at a desk and filling out forms at one place and then submitting them at another.

Automating this process allows the company to maintain an employee database. Also, automation leaves no room for human errors by eliminating the manual paperwork. Employees can fill or update the information on their own and can send a notification to the HR.

Automatically create and assign categories to employees according to their departments. Create new user accounts and grant access by using filters and categories. In this way, HR doesn’t have to manually grant them access. By just adjusting the filters, access could be provided. New employees can start working as soon as HR software adds a tag to an employee as hired.

Benefits of automated employee onboarding:

Saves money to the organization.
Saves money by eliminating paperwork forms from day to day routine and shifting to online methods to collect and manage information.
Saves Time to the organization.
HR usually spends too much time to collect the data and do the paperwork for onboarding employees. Automation of administrative roles can save a lot of time for them which they could utilize for making development programs for employees like soft skills or effective training schedules.
Effective collection of employee’s data.
Automation improves the data collection process. Store the data collected from the new hires in a secure database and disseminate the data to other platforms of the organizations wherever required thus reducing redundancy across the database.
Reduces error.
Automation reduces human errors by reducing the manual dependencies to the data collection process. It brings precision to the process of collecting the onboarding information of employees.

2. Engage with your employees

Maintain effective communication with your employees. Even when you have selected new hires and they have not onboarded yet. Keep a communication link open to them. Send them greetings as it reminds them that the organization is excited for them.

Communicate with your employees over an app, email, or phone. Give them access to the employee self-service portal. Maintain proper communication channels. Reply to queries on time so that the employee does not feel frustrated.

Share the industry best practices, update them about any change in processes, and solve their onboarding issues creates a positive environment and boosts productivity. With effective communication, employees tend to develop a sense of belonging toward the organization.

3. Help them to prepare for the job

When a new employee joins an organization it is quite difficult to learn the new systems and procedures which affect productivity. Sharing the resources to help them learn work will not only boost productivity but also help them to get a clear picture of their roles and responsibilities.

Give weekly updates to your employees regarding best practices followed in the industry and assess their performance. Remove any kind of ambiguities regarding their roles and responsibilities. Introduce new employees to team members and provide them with autonomy as much as possible so that the best comes out of them.

Impart proper training to new employees so that they could use the company’s system and software. Virtual assessment centers could be set by the organizations that help their employees to learn virtually at their own pace.

How no-code platform DronaHQ can transform the employee onboarding experience?

DronaHQ – No code platform empowers organizations to transform their employee onboarding process to a new reality. Automating every step starting from accepting applications for new recruitment to actual onboarding of employees, Onboarding with the help of an app not only helps HR but also has a significant impact on employee experience.

Personalize the employee onboarding experience. Digitize all onboarding related paperwork to capture employee information in mobile forms. Get complete visibility over every task to quickly spot bottlenecks and make changes in real-time to what needs attention for an optimized experience.

Select from ready to use apps or build an app from scratch to personalize your employee onboarding experience. Integrate with your favourite apps and other platforms of the business using APIs and Zapier.

Fasten and automate your employee onboarding process. Get Started Now.

Author – Kushagra Pal

Kushagra is a digital marketer and content creator. His dream is to help SMB’s understand and leverage technology for brand awareness, growth, and profit.

Originally published at https://www.medium.com on June 3, 2020.