After several weeks and months of searching and interviewing people, you finally found a bunch of professionals who fit the job role in your organization perfectly. Once they join the company, it’s your responsibility to devote time to the new hires to get used to the company’s culture and work principles.

This is the reason why it’s very important to provide a great onboarding experience. An onboarding experience doesn’t simply mean that you take care of your new hires on the first day and get the paperwork done. It’s much more than that. The onboarding process is a great way to show the new hires a glimpse of how their next few months are going to be and what they should look forward to. To help you better with this, we have listed down a few ways through which you can provide an amazing onboarding experience to your learners.

1) Connect your new hires with their peers:

On the first day of office, your new hires are likely to feel anxious and nervous and it’s a very common phenomenon. To let them break the ice, set up a lunch with all the other peers and managers or you can even just set up a formal meeting. Provide mentoring support with the help of some senior managers so that your new hires do not face any difficulty. A mentor or peer buddy can help to improve their productivity.

2) Leverage technology:

You should automate whichever onboarding process you can. Policy education, paperwork, and other onboarding formalities should be automated by using onboarding software solutions. These tools can also help in task management, guiding the employees with welcome portals and they can also integrate with HR data tools which makes the job easier for the HR department.

3) Let your managers interact with new hires:

A new employee’s manager is probably the most important person to provide a great onboarding experience. Through their supportive and obstructive behaviors, managers can supervise the new hires. Ask your managers to share key performance indicators and department goals so the new hires can know what is expected of them. Tracking the individual's progress and productivity is a key way to improve the progress of the new hires which should be done by their reporting managers.

4) Make training exciting:

You most probably put your new hires into training so that they will be well equipped to handle a project. This training process should be engaging and exciting. To ensure that, you need to include interactive videos, animations, and graphic content to make learning exciting. You can even use gamification features in an LMS which consists of points, rewards, leaderboards, etc.

5) Ask for feedback:

With the feedback data, there is no way you can measure the impact and success of your onboarding program. Conduct regular surveys and use that to make changes in the onboarding programs. This feedback data would be helpful when you welcome the next batch of new hires to your organization.

6) Set the expectations clear:

Be very clear and upfront about what their induction period is going to look like so that they can prepare themselves in advance. With a formal meeting, if you can set up things clearly, then it can reduce the confusion going forward and there would be no complaints citing that they didn’t know this before.

Conclusion:

With a good onboarding experience, you can create a great first impression on your new hires. HR managers and leaders should be aware that the onboarding process can have a major impact on employee productivity and retention and plan accordingly.