5 Steps to an exceptional onboarding and offboarding process

At every stage of their employment journey, your employees deserve exceptional HR experiences. But delivering onboarding and offboarding excellence can be a challenge for HR leaders who are also tasked with managing staff retention and recruitment challenges, workforce productivity and complex HR technology landscapes.

In this blog, we reveal how you can deliver consumer-grade employee experiences at every milestone of your employees’ lifecycle, whilst overcoming these challenges, in 5 simple steps.

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Step 1: Create Unified Onboarding Experiences

“32% of global executives rate the onboarding they experienced as poor. Replacing each failed executive can cost a business up to 213% of his or her salary.”

Start your onboarding strategy from the day your new hire signs their job acceptance contract. By sending them a personalized, branded message welcoming them to your organization before their first day, you’ll have created a strong first impression - reducing ambivalence and demonstrating your company’s values.

The pandemic changed the world of work forever, and now virtual onboarding is just as common (if not more so) than its face-to-face counterpart. Take a look at the webinar below, where we help you make virtual onboarding a meaningful transition that gets your new recruits up to speed fast, and feeling like a member of the team.

To reduce the overwhelming nature of onboarding for new recruits and unburden HR from administrative tasks, we recommend creating an onboarding checklist that includes the below HR strategies and tools to streamline processes.

1. Make their first day personal by setting up their desk with everything they’ll need, including employee handbooks, equipment, seating plans and a checklist/roadmap for their onboarding journey. Help them integrate with the team and your company culture with a welcome lunch also.
2. Implement solutions like Employee Experience Platforms to eradicate cross-system complexity for employees who will use multiple HR solutions, and AI-powered digital assistants that can answer FAQs for new recruits.
3. Use dynamic forms, online calendars and internal instant messaging channels to reduce manual paperwork and ease communication for new employees.

Step 2: Enhance Employee Training

“Manager satisfaction rose by 20% when their employees were provided formal onboarding training.”

Showing your employees that you care about their development not only improves staff onboarding, but it encourages retention and boosts brand competitiveness. It’s crucial to put in place employee development plans and mentorship schemes early to ensure that employees can evolve their skills to meet new work demands, whilst feeling supported.

Alongside this, we recommend using technology providers to deliver interactive training curriculums alongside performance management software to engage employees with their development. Don’t forget to show your employees gratitude and rewards for hitting their milestones – these experiences go a long way in staff retention.

Source: https://www.afterhire.com/5-onboarding-statistics-that-will-change-the-way-you-think/

Step 3: Streamline Cross-System Onboarding

“Only 6% of professionals believe they are excellent at moving people from role to role.”

Whether you’re internally onboarding an existing employee into a new role, or transferring them to a new location, it’s important to treat this cross-boarding process the same as you would a new hire. They’re likely to be just as nervous about their new role as they were on their first day, so check-ins and support from leadership teams are crucial!

To streamline these transitions, we recommend using automated HR solutions that not only identify roles that are open for internal talent but include tools that allow employee information to be accessed across departments for cross-system onboarding.

Source: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/human-capital-trends/2019/internal-talent-mobility.html

Step 4: Simplify Lifecycle Events

“80% of HR employees surveyed found that using HR technologies improved employee attitude toward the company.”

Making the management of lifecycle events, such as submitting leave requests, as simple as possible for employees not only reduces friction but shows your employees that their experiences matter to your organization. Alongside face-to-face support, you should implement solutions that include employee and manager self-service features, as well as automated tasks & approvals systems. This allows you to automate and personalize these events for employees, as well as reduce the amount of resources that HR are using for managing these processes.

Source: https://research.g2.com/insights/2019-trends/human-resources-hr-trends-2019

Step 5: Secure Offboarding Programs

“70% of job candidates look to company reviews before they make career decisions.”

When an employee leaves the company, creating a positive offboarding experience is as important, if not more so, as setting a good first impression – especially for organizations that rely on referral programs and Alumni networks for recruitment.

Taking the time to facilitate exit interviews and surveys with HR are critical in understanding how your organization can improve. No matter why they are leaving, it’s important to celebrate what the employee has achieved and ensure management remain positive during this process.

To help better protect your company’s assets, sensitive information and data from ex-employees, it’s useful to have a HR solution in place which has integrated security access controls.

Source: https://www.saplinghr.com/blog/managing-employee-offboarding-experience

Delivering Consumer-Grade Employee Experiences

When developing your onboarding strategies, it’s crucial to put your employees front and center - they deserve consumer-grade experiences and technology at every stage of their employment lifecycle. And with strong onboarding processes improving new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%, there’s no better time to start reviewing your current strategies and HR technology landscape than now.

Source: https://financesonline.com/onboarding-statistics/#employeeonboarding

See how Applaud can help you deliver seamless employee transitions for your organization through our Employee Experience Platform.

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