Entrepreneurship can be so demanding that you don’t have time to attend to basic things in your company. From closing deals to product development, you need to be everywhere so your business doesn’t die.
However, one of the important aspects of business that founders leave out is the onboarding process. Business owners lose 17% of their new employees in the first 90 days due to ineffective onboarding. An effective onboarding process consists of regular check-ins, hands-on support, extensive training, and feedback. In this article, we will explain all you need to know about optimizing your onboarding.
Begin Onboarding While Hiring
The onboarding process goes beyond just spending a few weeks to show the new hires around. It spans all your talent management processes. These include sourcing, selecting, orienting, and retaining new employees. So as you begin the recruitment process, ensure that it contains the company’s culture.
When you have a well-laid out process, it exposes prospective hires to what they should expect when they join in eventually. You can use resume optimization tools to select the best skill match for the role to ease your selection process.
After the selection process, the next step will be to give an orientation to the new employees. The orientation program can be a week-long event to expose them to the new environment. Then, the onboarding process will follow, which will integrate the new hires into their roles with support and training.
Introduce Them To Your Work Environment
Another way to optimize your onboarding as an entrepreneur is to introduce new employees to their work environment. You can assign a seasoned employee that will show them around the workplace in their first week.
Also, assign the employee as their go-to person whenever they need clarification on anything. Most new hires are unfamiliar with the ins and outs of business in their first few weeks of joining a new company. However, the warm reception from other employees will help them collaborate and communicate effectively with other team members.
Most people will make appropriate work friendships and bonds quite naturally. This is a boost for your business because people work best when they’re functioning as a part of a wider team and can rely on the experience of others.
Set Onboarding Expectations Early
According to Harvard Business Review, it takes employees 8 months to hit their peak productivity in a new company. However, the average onboarding program lasts for only 3 months.
Three months is a short time to learn what you need to know about the new role. As an entrepreneur who wants to get the best out of new hires, you must make sure the employee understands the role, its requirements, and expectations.
Additionally, it is important to state what milestone the employee is expected to reach early on. Besides stating the milestone, the company needs to support the employees on how to achieve it. Companies that do this, see new employees exceeding expectations and find them to be more motivated and driven in comparison to others.
Eliminate Stress with an Onboarding Checklist
Companies that value their employees ensure they provide the best working environment for them. Creating a structured environment reduces the stress of settling in for new employees.
So, as a founder, create an onboarding checklist that will make new employees transition into the business fast. Creating a checklist will save you time, stress, and increase the company’s productivity.
Everybody likes a sense of certainty, and when you offer a thorough structure that’s what you’re giving folks. New hires who are unsure of something can then simply refer to the checklist provided to find the correct answers.
Emphasize the Human Element
People can be very nervous about starting a new job, so it can really get things moving well when you demonstrate your company’s emphasis on caring for its workers. Typically, this will be done on the human resource (HR) side of things.
It may seem counterintuitive, but a lot of the difficulties surrounding onboarding arise from new employees trying desperately to do everything right. If you bring people on board with as soft a landing as possible, you can speed things up
Mistakes will be made, that’s just how it is. However, when you soften things it can lead to far quicker progress, because your new employee will be far more likely to openly discuss difficulties, thereby making them much easier to overcome.
The Verdict
You can save time as an entrepreneur by optimizing your onboarding process. The first way is to begin onboarding prospective employees during the recruitment process.
Secondly, you need to introduce new employees to the work environment. They need to be up to speed with the company’s culture, processes, and structure. Another way to save yourself stress is communicating the company’s expectations early enough to the new employees.
By following these, you should find a higher success rate in the onboarded employees and ease of flow from the start of recruitment up until they’re stable and familiar with their role and the company.
