New employee onboarding is one of the most important components to ensuring your new hourly worker is set up to succeed in their role. The term encompasses the entire process by which employees are hired and integrated into your team. Onboarding starts even before new-hire orientation; it also includes education and training about the business, its mission and vision, and workplace culture and values. Each company’s new employee onboarding plan is different depending on size, setup, and what type of work the organization does. Some businesses do this in a day or two of conference-style seminars, individual online classes, or months’ worth of activities with other colleagues.
Every single new hourly worker is onboarded, whether or not you have a structured new employee onboarding plan. When an hourly worker gets the “lay of the land,” they’re being onboarded. However, many companies take this to mean only completing paperwork and being shown around their new job. New employee onboarding best practices should include much deeper attention and intention so that employees feel welcomed into the folds of the company. They should understand from the start that they are valued and supported —their role is important, and they will have the assistance they need to succeed.
Onboarding shouldn’t be confused with orientation, although orientation is often one of
the first steps in new employee onboarding best practices. During orientation, the employee completes paperwork and other necessary tasks. Still, new employee onboarding is more comprehensive and concerns overall training and culture immersion versus only collecting social security numbers and HR-pertinent information.
The following are phases of successful new employee onboarding. (Note that orientation might not even be first!) Your company can and should take these as a starting point and individualize them to work for your particular needs.
Successful new employee onboarding (and continued “reboarding” for returning employees) has each of the previous steps, but each of those steps is filled with particular qualities that ensure success.
The leadership and HR team, as well as the rest of the company, can set an organization up for success in new employee onboarding. Preparing ahead of time with focused attention on a few specific areas can mean that your new employees feel welcomed and supported and that the entire team has a positive attitude toward new talent coming on board.
If asked, most employees would probably say that new employee onboarding is the job of the boss and the HR department. However, a successful company knows that everyone is a part of the workplace culture, and thus, everyone is a part of teaching new employees how things flow and what the team culture is. An employee onboarding checklist can be crucial so that everyone has the same routine and nothing gets lost in translation when onboarding employees.
Although new employee onboarding best practices are key, that doesn’t mean that everyone should have the same experience. Think critically about the role each new employee will have at the company and what their particular needs are. Work with the HR department to create more individualized onboarding practices for particular groups of people or hand-select mentors that show experience in these areas.
Onboarding should be a dynamic process. You want to know if your onboarding practices are effective and if people feel supported and engaged from the get-go. Utilize a few of these strategies to get a full, accurate picture of what people experience when coming on board with your company.
New employee onboarding doesn’t have to be difficult. Taking time to prepare your company’s particular new employee onboarding process and regularly assessing its efficacy means you’ll be setting your employees (and your business) up for success.
Want to streamline the paper part of onboarding so you have more time to focus on preparing your new hire to succeed in their role? Workstream automates and digitizes onboarding tasks, helping you get new hire paperwork done in as little as 10 minutes.