When you’re considering revamping your onboarding process, it might be helpful to think of your employees the same way you might think of your customers—both are valuable, and both have a lifecycle.
Ideally, your customers and your employees will have a high lifetime value, and the key to increasing the lifetime value of both is to focus on your onboarding and engagement processes.
Why you should focus on onboarding your new hires
Building out a successful onboarding process will help you retain the top talent that you spent your valuable resources trying to find, and it will prevent you from needing to spend more valuable resources on backfilling positions left open by unhappy employees.
When building your onboarding process, you should consider the factors that go into employee satisfaction. Relevant factors from a 2016 study by SHRM include:
- Trust between employees and senior management
- Benefits
- Communication between employees and senior management
- Relationship with immediate supervisor
- Relationships with coworkers
- Job specific training
So how do you use these factors to increase employee satisfaction?
Below are 6 ideas—tied back to each of the above factors—that you can implement into your onboarding process.
1. Increase trust between employees and senior management
This factor goes hand in hand with another—communication between employees and senior management. According to Mind Tools, one of the key factors that go into developing trust is open communication.
Increasing transparency and communications can take the form of 1-on-1s meetings or townhalls where employees are free to ask management any questions they might have.
2. Increase satisfaction with benefits
29% of participants from the 2016 SHRM study said that the benefits package would be a reason for leaving their current organization and 32% said it would be a reason for staying.
Ensuring that your employees are aware of their full benefits package is an essential part of the onboarding process. The first few days of a job can be a little overwhelming, so some employees may miss the free dry cleaning services you offer or the perks programs you have set up.
Make sure your employees are aware of their full benefits package by sending reminder emails about unique benefits once they’ve been there for some time.
3. Improve employee relationships with their immediate supervisor
7% of participants from the 2016 SHRM study said that their relationship with their immediate supervisor would be a reason for leaving their current organization and 12% said it would be a reason for staying.
Developing a process for establishing relationships, and also a process for ironing out any issues within these relationships can go a long way in improving your employee retention rates.
4. Encourage development of relationships with coworkers
You can’t force your employees to like each other and to hang out, but you can encourage relationship building.
It’s relatively easy to develop relationships with the people you sit next to and work with every day, but it can be harder to develop relationships with people from different departments or teams.
Consider ideas like random coffee date pairings for employees from different departments or bringing two teams together for a joint happy hour or a fun activity. Having a network of excellent relationships throughout the company could be something that keeps your employees satisfied.
5. Provide job-specific training
Providing job-specific training is an easy way to let your new hires know that you care about them and their success at the company very early on.
Whether the training comes from internal resources—their boss or coworkers—or external resources like an online class or conference, your employees will feel like you’re willing to invest in them and their success.
Bonus tip: track employee satisfaction
Track employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention just like you track your customers’. Something as simple as a company-wide survey each month or quarter can help you gauge how happy and engaged your employees feel.
If you’re looking for tools to help you track your employees’ success and satisfaction, look at reviews of Core HR Software on TrustRadius to help you determine which ones will best fit your needs.
Jordan McElwain is a digital marketer and writer. She is a regular contributor to TrustRadius, where she shares her knowledge of the latest trends in B2B news and software.