Onboarding is so much more than filling out forms. It’s the welcome wagon, the mentor, the office tour, the team. It’s what to wear, where to go, and what to do when you get there. Strategic onboarding takes things to the next level. It’s the experience you expect your talent to have and the extra push needed to speed talent’s time to value.

Strategic onboarding matters, not in a small way but in a very BIG way, to the business.

So, HR – let’s get strategic. The onboarding process is made up of four parts:

• Timing. When does it start?
• Delivery. Paper or no paper?
• Tactical. What are the must-haves?
• Fluff. How do you engage, and is it necessary?

TIMING. For new hires, onboarding officially starts the moment the candidate signs the offer letter or passes their background check, continues through cross-boarding, internal transfers and promotions, and then ends when the employee offboards and exits the organization.

Some employers choose to hold off on the process initially, then hit new hires with a stack of onboarding forms on the first day of their new role. Best-in-class employers with a strategic process, start sending materials and engaging new hires right at offer acceptance. This allows your just-hired to get a feel for expectations, culture, and the company itself before their first day – shortening time to productivity, reducing anxiety, and creating a better employee experience overall.

It’s a new world of work. Employees move from project to project, employer to employer, and contract to contract. If you want to attract, retain, develop, rehire, and obtain referrals from your ranks of talent, then you need to provide the experience that they expect – when they expect it.

That brings us to DELIVERY.

Do you FedEx your new hire a massive – and slightly terrifying – stack of papers to complete before their first day? Or do you invest in an automated onboarding solution that’s mobile-optimized, self-guided, and easy? That’s like asking if you want to get directions using your smartphone or using a janky old folding map. Moving to a paperless process reduces overhead costs and increases data accuracy for the company while allowing hires to interact with your organization whenever, wherever, and however works best for them.

Now that you’re providing hires with a modern, mobile experience right after they accept the offer – what forms do you actually include in a strategic process? Unfortunately, there’s no super-secret mix of forms that’ll lead to instantaneous success. The tactical content required for onboarding changes for each organization depending on location, size, industry, and stakeholder needs.

TACTICAL content is the nitty-gritty, must-have requirements of employment. Think I-9, W-4, and other standard government or organizational forms hires need to complete to be considered “employed.”

So how do you find the balance of content that meets compliance requirements without bloating the process? We recommend you start with an inventory of forms you think are “required” for the organization and break it down from there. Get together with Legal: Which forms need to be created or updated to be compliant? Can you remove any forms? Then take a look at your other organizational forms. Which ones provide value to the hire? Can you condense or remove any forms to streamline your process without taking relevant information away?

The goal here is to remove the legal and organizational bloat to streamline the experience for hires and free up time and resources for other – more engaging – activities.

Side note: If you’re using Click Boarding, your standard government forms are already covered. We’ve streamlined and simplified the Form I-9 and W-4 to increase speed of completion and accuracy. It’s already included in your package – just drag and drop the form into your process, set a due date, and add email reminders for the hire and HR. You can even create different process flows for different roles or locations – which will help streamline further.

Once you’ve got tactical ironed out, it’s time to layer in the “FLUFF“. Fluff is any action – automated or otherwise – that helps build relationships, entrench the hire in company culture, and foster early and continued engagement. This is where you confirm the dress code, provide directions to the office, make introductions to the team, assign a mentor, and so on.

Here’s the deal: while most people think of it as “fluff” this is not just “warm and fuzzy feel-good” content that can easily be ignored. If the powers at be in your organization are know to say things like “Happy hires are great, but is it really necessary in a strategic process?” the answer is: ABSOLUTELY.

“Great talent starts with great onboarding. It is the head-start that puts someone in a position to add value to the business in the shortest period of time. The knock-on effect of smart onboarding is that it shortens the time before they can be eligible for development, where new skills can be added and they can position themselves for promotion.” – James Ellis

Consider Hot Topic. Their recent case study in HROS (HR Open Source) connects engagement and experience to productivity, attrition and referrals.

“If we can focus on engaging and ramping up our employees more effectively, we can possibly extend the productivity value and longevity/tenure of our people. The more productive and engaged our people are, the stronger the connection to positive revenue impact.” – Hot Topic

And they proved it. You can read about the full process and strategy they implemented here, but just take a look at their results.

• 50% decrease in new hire attrition
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) among new hires increased from 38% to 68%
• 22% increase in qualified referrals and 35% increase in referrals hired
• Employee Lifetime Value
  • 39% more high producers, 50% fewer low producers

Improved retention, deeper connection to employer brand, more qualified referrals, productive employees – talk about direct impact on your bottom line. In fact, it makes the case: a lacking onboarding process is bad for the business.

Now that we’ve made it to the end of the list, let’s review our high-level strategy.

• Timing. When does it start?
  • NOW. That’s when they expect it, and that’s where you’ll see the highest return.
• Delivery. Paper or no paper?
  • AUTOMATED AND MOBILE. It’s not 1997, Karen. Get hires the information they need in the way they expect it to be delivered.
• Tactical. What are the must haves?
  • That depends on the company. But whatever they are, COVER THEM. And only them. If an onboarding step doesn’t add value to business or the new hire, leave it out.
• Fluff. How do you engage, and is it necessary?
  • The best HR solutions allow HR to focus on people. Tips 1-3 are meant to free up your time for relationships, so build them. “Fluff” isn’t fluff: it’s the EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE you expect your talent to have, and it pays dividends.

Onboarding is the start of a new hire’s journey with your company. The experience they have before Day One and beyond directly impacts productivity, engagement, and brand loyalty. If you provide just the slightest upward tilt to their trajectory, you’ll see fantastic returns throughout the talent lifecycle. The best news? Strategic, modern onboarding is a win-win that’s easier than you think.

Starting a new role is stressful, whether an employee is changing roles, jobs, departments, or locations — or joining an organization for the first time. Learning new processes and adjusting to different expectations can be challenging and uncomfortable at any point in an employee’s career.

As an employer, what can you do to make employees feel at ease, show them you care about their success, and shorten their runway to full productivity? Onboarding as part of an ongoing talent strategy addresses these concerns, and has a huge impact on employee happiness. When done right, onboarding:

• Increases employee retention and company loyalty by 50 percent, which matters even more so because:
  • 51 percent of U.S. employees say they’re actively looking for a new job or watching for openings
  • More than half of employees who left jobs last year did so in their first 12 months
  • Replacing one quitter costs $3,000 to $18,000
• Improves new-hire productivity and performance by 18 percent
• Enables 77 percent of new hires to hit their first performance milestone

What Does Successful Onboarding Look Like?

A systematic and comprehensive approach to onboarding improves employee experiences by:

• Building trust and providing an avenue for open communication
• Fostering employee engagement and connectivity
• Enhancing job satisfaction and retention
• Increasing efficiency and productivity to accelerate business growth

But successfully onboarding employees to a company, department, or role involves more than one method, one person, or one day. You need to connect employees to relevant people as soon as possible and make sure they understand the defined expectations of the job. Give them an overview of the company’s history, culture, and values, as well as the processes and procedures that impact their work to help them connect quickly, and on a more meaningful level.

This is all possible with a repeatable, strategic plan in place that provides:

• A central location for important documents
  • Easy form completion to help employees feel supported
  • At-a-click information about company culture, job expectations, and critical processes and procedures
• The ability for both employer and employee to track progress
• An engaging and personalized experience to make employees feel welcome and comfortable

The ideal onboarding experience bridges the gap between talent acquisition and talent management — in other words, it’s relevant from pre-hire to retire. It gets employees engaged (and keeps them engaged), relieves their stress, makes them feel comfortable, and assures them that they’ve made the right career move.

Want to learn more? Download our free e-book for practical tips on creating the ideal onboarding experience.

Transitions are tough! Whether employees are starting fresh at a new company, moving into a new role, changing locations or leaving the organization, there are a million things that they need to prep for. It’s exciting, it’s terrifying, and they’re asking for some guidance. We’ve found that having good onboarding can help make these transitions easier on the employee, easier on HR, and more enjoyable overall. So, let’s show all of our employees some onboarding love. Take a look at our top 3 suggestions for internal mobility.

Be present and proactive.

Whether you have new employees excited to start their first day, or older employees ready to retire, they need to know that you’re there to support them through the upcoming change. Reach out ahead of time. Give them some encouragement and context as to what they can expect in the coming days.

If you use an automated onboarding system, be sure that you don’t lose the human touch. Add notifications and tasks prompting hiring managers and team members to call, email, text, schedule meetings, or plan lunches, coffee dates, dinners, or happy hours. Introduce new employees, and existing employees to their mentors, and thank exiting employees for their service.

Arm them with information.

Employees need to know the who, what, when, where, why and how of their transition to feel confident about moving forward. Your onboarding should answer all of these questions and then some. Start the process a few weeks before your employee is slated to come on board or change roles, and a few months ahead of time if they’re changing locations.

One Click Boarding client makes sure to connect employees transferring to new locations with a realtor, daycare centers, and more. That information can help make the move easier for employees, reduce the amount of down time when the employee gets to the new location, improve productivity, and most importantly, it shows employees that the company truly does care about their wellbeing.

Make it an enjoyable experience with compliance in mind.

Nothing quite sucks the fun out of a new job, promotion, or life change like stacks of required government forms. They’re a necessary evil, but that doesn’t mean that they have to be painful. For example, Click Boarding designed a quick and streamlined version of the Form I-9 that’s compliant, easy to decipher, and mobile friendly. Employees can quickly enter in the data, verify accuracy, and move on to the engaging pieces of the onboarding process. 

If you don’t use Click Boarding for your onboarding system, and you know that there are a number of heavy legal forms that need to be completed, then try to break them up by adding in more engaging content. For example, if an employee’s being moved to a new role in a new department, introduce them to their team. We like to collect 3 fun facts about each of our employees to share. That way, they can put faces to names and have talking points ready for their first day in the new department. It also changes the pace and helps bring the excitement back, so employees feel energized enough to continue through the legalese.

We know that internal mobility is a more complex monster, but if you keep these 3 things in mind, your employees will feel confident enough to rock their new roles. For more information on onboarding throughout the employee lifecycle, reach out to one of our onboarding gurus today!