The video for this blog post can be found on YouTube, and audio can be found on Spotify!
Welcome to episode 4 of Claire Shares. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m going to be sharing with you high energy, bite size videos, about all things talent attraction, talent acquisition and talent retention. On previous episodes, we talked about workplace communication processes and employee surveys and feedback gathering. Be sure to check it out if you missed it.
Today’s talent topic is onboarding and orientation process mapping and improvement. Before we get started with that, I want to share with you my recommendation of the week!
Recommendation of the Week
I highly recommend checking out SHRM membership if you haven’t already. January was national mentoring month, and SHRM offers an amazing mentoring program as a member benefit. The program runs in 3-month cohorts, and I’ve been a mentor for about 4 years now. If you’re interested in giving back to the HR community as a mentor, or gain some more HR knowledge, guidance and skills as a mentee, check out shrm.org/mentor for more information. Feel free to send me a message and I’d be happy to share my experience being involved as a mentor. Be sure to check out our #LiveWithLighthouse episode as well where our Manager of Marketing and Experience Joe Ray and I had a great discussion on mentorship within organizations as a driver for talent retention. I love to curate resources and share recommendations, so please reach out to me if there’s something you’re looking for!
Background on Today’s Topic
Back to our talent topic of the day, onboarding and orientation process mapping and improvement! What does the onboarding and orientation process entail? Onboarding typically starts when the offer letter is signed, and you start the process of setting up your new team member as an employee and getting them acclimated with your culture so they’re ready for success on day 1. Some organizations call the period between offer acceptance and start date pre-boarding, and onboarding then starts on day 1. And onboarding can be anywhere from 30-90 days depending on the role. Maybe longer.
Orientation is usually the new hire’s first 1-3 days, where they are getting all the basics they need to be successful at the company. This could include a tour of the building, building or parking access, a badge and getting all necessary basic company information such as safety protocols, high level structure, products or services. This should also include meet and greets, or at least initial intros to key people in the company they’ll be working with.
It’s important to think about some of these foundational aspects such as definitions and timelines, so that your leadership, department managers and HR are on the same page. Then you can start building out and documenting your onboarding and orientation plans. Remember what we talked about in Episode 1, and consider your organization’s mission, vision, values and value proposition when designing processes, so it can be special to your organization.
Here’s why this is worth investing in. You just spent so much time, effort, and probably money to find the person you want for this role and they signed their offer. Yay! Don’t stop here. The process from offer acceptance through to day 30 or 90 depending on the onboarding process is critical for talent retention. When onboarding new employees, it’s important to recognize that you have just 44 days on average to influence their decision to stay with the company long-term. This is according to a 2023 survey conducted by BambooHR. During this critical period, it is essential to provide them with the tools, resources, and support they need to feel confident and competent in their new roles.
When starting to work with new organizations as an HR Pro, I love to look at employee experience processes and see what is mapped out and documented if anything!
Tactical Tips and Tricks
Let’s get more tactical on this topic of onboarding and orientation process mapping and improvement. And, you already know me, we’ll be weaving in people, process and technology tips throughout.
People and Process: Mapping out current state is a great place to start. I think about all the tasks that have to get done in onboarding such as running a background check, scheduling an employee physical or finger printing, getting back signed paperwork, assigning system access and all those types of things. Then look at where the touch points with your new hire take place and what the communication is around that. We likely don’t want to email the new hire with each step individually, as certain emails could get buried or skipped. Some folks may also prefer to be called or texted in addition to email. We also want to lay out expectations so nothing in the process is a surprise. If the new hire is going to be hearing directly from vendors or other employees throughout the process, outline that for them so they know to be on the lookout. Remember our goal here is to provide a welcoming and smooth experience, and get the new hire acclimated with our culture and set up for success on day 1. By being thoughtful throughout this onboarding and orientation process, we are improving our odds of this new hire being successful and staying with our company. We want them to feel that connection to our company and feel confident they made a great decision to join us.
Next, you’ll also want to look at where touch points with the hiring manager take place. They are likely involved in the equipment ordering, reaching out before day 1 with a welcome message, and organizing a team lunch on their first day for example. Define their involvement in the process. Defining and documenting their involvement helps managers be consistent and understand the important role they play. Let’s do a quick recap so far: map out the steps that have to take place, consider the people, process and technology involved, and make sure those new hire communications are clear and on point!
Let’s look at the employee experience starting from their start date. What does that orientation period look like? Are they getting all the necessary company information to get started? Are we answering all frequently asked questions? What does the handoff look like from HR to the hiring manager or department? Remember job training is a big piece of onboarding as well, and we’ll dig into more details on training in a future episode!
I mentioned it already, but now is really the time to communicate your company mission, vision, and values and engrain your company story into the new hire’s experience. Talking up your company’s history, client and employee success stories and the value of the benefits package can be key pieces to cover during onboarding. Think of it this way, a task on your onboarding or orientation check list may be to review the benefits offerings with your new hire so they can make their selections, and then sending them the enrollment paperwork. Remember, every company does this. I challenge you to take it a step further and think about how to make this piece special and communicate that. What is unique to your company? How can employees take advantage of the offerings you provide? And this isn’t just medical, dental and vision benefits. Every organization has their own combination of health benefits, vacation time or PTO, professional development opportunities and more. Going back to mission, vision and values, the best way to drive the message home is to share examples of how the values have guided business decisions in the past and influence day-to-day operations today. It’s important to emphasize and demonstrate how everyone is accountable to the values, especially leadership. You may have heard the saying that people need to hear a piece of information 7 times before they really comprehend it. Be sure to keep this in mind with your new hires. There are likely key benefits, company information or role information you want to reiterate many times throughout those first 30 to 90 days.
Technology: We’ve mainly talked about people and process, so now I want to touch on some fun technology elements for you! HR, if you haven’t lately, go and talk to someone in your IT department. There may be some tools or functionality available to you that can help you gather employee information in a more user friendly and efficient way. If you must send PDFs, which we all do, make sure they are fillable or sent through a system such as Docusign. If you have an employee database or HRIS system, there may be functionality in there to house or send documents, as well as an employee self-service portal that could be turned on. Through turning on employee self-service over the past couple years here at Lighthouse, our employees can go in and enter or change their tax withholdings or direct deposit information. In the past, they’d have to send it to us in HR, and then we would manually enter it for them. There could be a few changes like that, that could be easily made and improve your experience as well as the new hire’s experience! There are also some awesome onboarding technology tools out there such as Enboarder, where you can build custom onboarding processes per role, and once onboarding is launched, the system will text and email new hires and managers for all the steps in the process. Pretty cool to think about all the changes and improvements to HR tech in recent years! Remember to include your company logo, branding, or slogans on any documents made in house.
This week, think about your onboarding and orientation processes, through the lens of employee retention, and then the people, process and technology involved to make that happen successfully. Thank you for being here with me and joining me for these bite size videos all about all things talent attraction, talent acquisition and talent retention. These areas of HR and People Ops are my favorite and specialty, and I’m so excited to dive in with you. This work is what I do. If you need help with the tools, technology and process around how you attract, acquire and retain talent, reach out to me and let’s talk!
Claire is Coaching 