In the past we’ve discussed how to connect with more potential employees in order to grow your team and ensure your business is prepared for the upcoming season. Once you have your team ready, the next step is the onboarding process for your new employees. Onboarding is an essential process for your business as it will lead to high retention rates, and can increase employee performance by 11.5%. Onboarding your new hires is vital, it gives a first impression of your company and sets the tone for what type of relationship your new hire will have with your business. This is also important because new hires will determine whether or not they will continue to stay with your business within the first week.
Onboarding your new hires correctly will also help avoid any unanswered questions, a lack of understanding or overall lack of information. It will also help speed up the process to get them started as soon as possible, especially if your next project is time sensitive. Once your onboarding process is set up, you can easily repeat the same process for future new hires as well. Below are 5 tips to help you ensure your onboarding process is successful:
1. Be Prepared
Ensuring your new hire is ready to go is important, and one of the first tasks that should be taken care of is having any paperwork completed before the first day. Having paperwork completed allows you to move forward with your new hire and properly continue the onboarding process. This can consist of tax documents, contacts or agreements, or any document that needs to be signed should be prepared for your new hire.
Also, anything your new hire could need access to should be prepared. You don’t want your new hire to begin work only to find out they don’t have access to certain software, files, tools, points of contact, or any resources they need to get the job done. Preparing this early on will save you time from gathering all the information your new hire may need last minute in the future.
2. Introduction
Introduce the new hire to the rest of your team. Your new hire will have enough on their mind during the first day, and encouraging your team to welcome your new hire will help them with familiarity early on with your business. This can be done by letting your team know through e-mail about the new hire, along with a bit of their background, or assigning someone from your team to show them around and introduce them to people.
Ensuring your new hire has a sense of belonging and is welcomed is an important part of the onboarding process as they’re more likely to stay with your company.
3. Shadowing
As we mentioned previously, partnering your new hire with a team member is also beneficial for learning the process of their position in your business. It allows them the opportunity to know what’s expected day-in and day-out. This can be done within the first week your new hire begins by partnering them with an experienced team member and shadowing them in the field or job-site.
Shadowing an experienced team member or working with them will essentially be training for your new hire. This will help answer any questions they may have in mind, and prepare them to continue working on a project smoothly in the future when they begin to tackle their part of the project.
4. Engagement
Once your new hire has had some time shadowing a team member and has learned some of the basics, it’s important to engage with your new employee to show your investment in their success. After a week or two, have consistent follow-ups to ask how everything is going so far and to see if everything is going smoothly. If they’re coming across challenges, this gives you an opportunity to help them solve any issues they’re coming across to help them succeed. Take into consideration what your new hire has to say about their onboarding experience so far, and share their successes with the rest of the team to help boost confidence in their ability.
Simply investing time in your new hires will lead to them investing time in your business.
5. Continue To Evolve
Onboarding is a process of discovery and learning for all business owners and employees. In our industry, it’s important to consider the hard work your new hires, and current employees do and should be valued for it. Consider asking feedback on what went well, what could be improved, and their overall experience working with you. This will allow you to make any necessary changes to your onboarding process in the future. It’s vital for your business to continue to evolve and analyze how you can improve in order to have a successful onboarding process for your future employees and move forward by taking your business to the next level of success.
Onboarding your new employees can be a challenge. Remember the onboarding process is also a learning process, analyze what part of your process is successful and what is not.
Finally, rely on Central to help, whether it’s questions about hiring, business planning, or marketing strategy—we’re here to help. Central is the right partner for your business. We stay at the leading edge of the industry and we’re ready to help you grow!