Onboarding is nothing new for organisations to master but surprisingly, a Gallup survey found that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organisation does a great job of onboarding new employees. So what are the other 88% of companies doing so wrong?
Effective onboarding has a positive effect not only on employee engagement but on the bottom line - research by Glassdoor found that organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent.
With a huge shift to remote working over the last few months, organisations need to work even harder to reshape their onboarding processes to engage and retain employees who they have only met virtually over Team or Zoom.
There are some useful tips in this article to help reframe your onboarding process. If you strip it right back, it's still all about connections and interactivity so people feel part of the team, listened to and supported, even if it's through online platforms rather than face-to-face for the forseeable future.
Top tips for successful (virtual!) onboarding 01 May 2020 - Starting a new job can be scary and stressful - but usually, meeting smiling colleagues puts minds at ease. How can we translate these meaningful interactions to be wholly online? The onboarding process is different in every business, but its goals are the same: integrate new starters into the business. This means making them feel at home at work, giving them the necessary points of contact and information, and settling them in. Doing this online naturally presents a unique challenge. Body language is harder to read via a screen; internet speeds can cause delays in communication over your chosen software. Someone who is usually chatty and conversational may struggle to be so in a virtual hangout, just as someone who is assertive can come across as rude or blunt.
https://www.managers.org.uk/insights/news/2020/may/top-tips-for-successful-virtual-onboarding
