Effective Onboarding To Increase Employee Retention And Confidence

New Hire Training To Increase Retention

It’s no secret that an effective onboarding process increases employee retention, and it’s an important priority for L&D leaders. Truly effective onboarding improves the likelihood that employees will stay and be successful in their jobs over the long term. It also builds strong teams who know how to work together—and know how to do it well.

Unfortunately, many employees don’t see their onboarding experience as effective. In a recent Gallup study, only 12% of employees strongly agreed that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees. As a result, new hires may fail to form an emotional bond with the company early on—a connection that can be critical to retaining top talent.

The onboarding process can be challenging, to be sure. Some organizations may not be prepared to welcome new employees and start onboarding right away. Or they may have an established program in place but unclear communication on what’s expected and when.

In addition, many leaders can miss the mark on what exactly creates an effective onboarding experience. Due to time constraints and other job priorities, they may not be looking at opportunities to enhance or evolve their approach to better connect learners with the organization, its people, and the work they’ll actually do—while supporting their career growth.

They may also be missing out on opportunities to make employee connections earlier in the process, before day one, on the day the employment contract is signed.

Take a moment to think about your own onboarding program. What does it do well? What do you want to do differently? Keep these answers at the top of your mind and read on to uncover more insights about how you can improve your organization’s onboarding process and enrich the overall employee learning experience.

Start With A Vision

Most leaders have a vision of their “ideal” onboarding experience. This vision isn’t always possible to fully achieve, but it helps define areas of focus and investment moving forward. It also plays a vital role in creating a framework for employee retention.

Successful L&D leaders understand the importance of building employee confidence from the start and making sure every individual new hire is ready and able to build social connections within the organization. In doing so, the employee will feel more like they belong, which can improve their overall job satisfaction and performance.

Although HR can often take care of the basic employee orientation, it may be up to you to bridge the onboarding to ensure the new hire is prepared for the job. To accomplish this, look more broadly at the employee experience (EX) and overcome potential problems or hesitations that may be unique from department to department. Establish strategies to ensure your onboarding addresses common challenges, such as remote/hybrid work or creating a welcoming and motivational atmosphere for a new generation of team members.

View Onboarding Through Four Lenses

To target retention through improved employee satisfaction and confidence, it’s helpful to consider the onboarding EX and learner experience (LX) through four lenses:

1. How employees relate to the organization and envision their place/work within it
2. How employees feel about social aspects with other people and can communicate in a way that’s comfortable and effective
3. How they connect with the work itself and their ability to do a good job in their role
4. And how it meets them at their point of need as an individual

If you dive deeper into how well your current onboarding is (or isn’t) effective with respect to each of these lenses, you can better understand what to keep and what to improve as you make modifications moving forward.

Align Your Vision With What’s Actually Possible

What feels meaningful and impactful to you may be different from what another department leader thinks is necessary, and that’s okay. Or your available resources, timeline, and budget may make implementing your full vision right away difficult, if not impossible. But there are areas in which you can compromise to still meet learner and organizational needs without giving up what’s important to your vision.

For example, sometimes you may be able to focus on strengthening the program you already have rather than starting over from scratch. Then, your program can evolve as cross-team needs change and workforce demographics shift over time. If you incorporate measurement strategies as part of your onboarding approach, you can also create benchmarks to analyze learner engagement, readiness, and performance to see what’s working and what needs to change as more resources become available.

With any compromise, try to consider it through the four lenses, as well as thinking about the following key factors:

• Improving engagement. Help employees feel welcome as they learn more about the company, as well as their team, their responsibilities, and the skills they’ll need to succeed. The more they feel like their growth matters, the more likely they are to stay.
• Providing a strong foundation for culture and collaboration. Then, expand the foundation over the next three months, six months, and one year to define skill development and a career path based on each individual’s unique needs and goals. Encourage learners to envision a future where they’re directly contributing to the organization.
• Creating clear and transparent expectations. Employees should know what their responsibilities are and who they can go to for questions. If they know what’s expected of them, they’re more likely to have confidence that they’re on the right track. On the other hand, employees who are left uncertain may worry about wasting time on the wrong task or making a good impression.
• Accelerating speed to proficiency. Ideally, employees should become more confident earlier in the process and even eventually want to own their learning experience and take accountability for taking each next step on their developmental path.

While Instructional Designers and other members of an L&D team can all contribute to employing these strategies, L&D leaders specifically have a unique stake in onboarding results. To be sure, it’s not easy to juggle the expectations of stakeholders and other teams while also managing resources. But when done well, it can provide tangible value to your leadership role and set you apart as an expert in your field.

Use Practical Tips To Improve Onboarding Effectiveness

With employee retention as the ultimate goal, here are some suggestions on how to go about strengthening the onboarding process:

• Meet with other teams to define the audience and the business impact.
• Consider how the current onboarding process targets the four lenses now and how it should be evolved to better target each one in the future.
• Determine benchmarks to capture performance before, during, and after the program.
• Review or redesign the onboarding program to include high-impact activities through web-based training, Instructor-Led Training, performance support resources, and coaching opportunities.
• Provide on-the-job feedback with manager observations, following a rubric-based check-in guide or matrix to help assess a learner’s proficiency.
• Train managers to provide effective feedback.
• Help learners set goals for their future professional development, or establish expectations for self-evaluations that enable learners to gauge their confidence and competency in completing tasks the right way.
• Create a communication plan, if applicable, to guide the rollout of new initiatives or changes to the onboarding program across departments.

Meet The Onboarding Challenge

To truly be effective, onboard training must be clear, transparent, relevant, and personalized. New hires must be able to see personal value and envision their future with the organization, enjoy the social aspects of working with others, and also find meaning in the work itself or build confidence in being able to do the work well.

Onboarding itself can be an evolutionary process—not necessarily scrapping an existing program but instead introducing new activities and learning experiences incrementally to build culture and connection over time. As you continue to align your vision with what’s possible for the future of your own onboarding, commit to an ultimate goal to foster an environment where employees feel welcomed, included, and supported in their personal and professional growth as they contribute to shared organizational success.