Posted by Ty Hall
“The time required to onboard new sales hires has increased 32 percent in the last 10 years. This means that if you could count on a rep to [return your investment] in 9 months, it now takes a full extra quarter for that to happen,” according to an executiveboard.com article. Why are these statistics so high? Most likely it is because the employee onboarding process is broken. Here are four tips to better onboard your employees, according to careerbuilder.com:
1. Focus on Goals
Goals should be set and in place before beginning any employee onboarding endeavor. If your employees know what you expect from them, they are more likely to accomplish your mission, and catch up faster with the rest of the company. Focus on how their daily workflow affects the large-picture organizational goals, so they can better understand how their contributions matter.
2. Write Clear Job Descriptions
In order to make your employee onboarding efforts more efficient, reevaluate your recruiting efforts. This ties into focusing on goals; with a focus on goals, your recruiting team can write smarter, more action-based job descriptions. The more detail-oriented your recruiting ads are, the more likely you are to attract the most suitable job-fit for the position you’re trying to fill. This will make your recruiting efforts more efficient, and improve your employee onboarding process because new-hires will already have an understanding of what will be expected of them.
3. Set Clear Milestones and Benchmarks
If employees have clear milestones and goals to reach, it will almost inevitably improve performance. By setting benchmarks, “employees know how they’ll be judged and how they’re doing in the organization, while employers will be able to more concretely judge performance.” Besides, empowering employees to track their own development gives ownership to the process, and management will be able to see how everyone is contributing. Giving a tangible goal to work toward greatly expedites the employee onboarding experience.
4. Make Training a Priority
The likelihood of turnover diminishes greatly when employees feel that they are learning and growing within your organization as they work. Companies need to train, mentor, and coach their employees from day one, and offer the possibility of professional development. This in turn will engender loyalty and retention.
Employee onboarding begins with setting goals, and keeping those goals in mind while upping the challenge in employees’ day-to-day work-lives. In doing so, you can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to onboard an employee, so that they can work at their fullest potential, and become a long-term asset for your organization.
