TeamFirst impressions make a lasting perception. A new employee will make up their mind within the first few months to leave or stay in your organization. After hiring a new candidate, you want them to jell in quickly and become productive. However, you need first to find ways of making them comfortable on their new workstation. Skimping on your new employee onboarding process can be a costly mistake. Remember, even if they are experienced, they have never been to your organization; and thus it could take a practical orientation to get them started. This article will look at some onboarding tips that can make the process flawless and successful for the employer and new employees.
Test Your New Employees
Did you know that new employees consume more than they give the company the first few months of their hiring? However, you can change this by testing your new employees to find out their strengths and weaknesses. Understanding their strong or weak areas will give you a clue on what to teach them first. If you can skip the parts they already understand. Additionally, you should not entirely brush off the areas that they understand; thus, for such areas, you can give them a refresher course to remind them of some things that they might have forgotten.
Develop a Customized Plan 
Coming up with specific plans for different employees may seem like a strenuous and time-wasting thing to do. However, it will save time in the long run since it will result in a training schedule that works for every employee. Having a blanket training plan will leave out some employees since people have different interests.
To come up with such customized plans, you can inquire from each new employee what they would like to learn or rather what they are interested in. Moreover, you can place them in small groups based on their interest and assign specific courses. For example, you can form a ‘human resource onboarding group’. Assign Microsoft Excel and team leadership courses learners belonging to that group.
Apply a self-paced learning
It is pretty challenging to use one-on-one learning for new employees, especially if they have been hired in large numbers. Therefore to hack this onboarding process, you can develop training materials and give them to go through it at their own time.
Our learning pace is different; therefore, allowing them to learn at their own pace will save time and relieve the new employees of the pressure of having to grasp everything at once, especially the slow ones. To test if they have been going through the given materials, you can have quizzes. Holding self–paced learning helps them blend in with the older employees as they learn the ropes of the organization in their free time, maybe when they get home after work.
Assign Mentors
During training and the onboarding process, new employees may feel shy to ask burning questions for fear that they may be obvious and silly. Such gaps make it hard for employees to get up to speed. Therefore adopting a mentorship program will help employees get the lay of the land and ask questions that they cannot ask their managers.
Selected mentors should form a personal relationship with the new employees to make it easier for them to confide in the mentor in case of any challenges. The selected mentors should have at least worked in the company for a long time to pass down the knowledge they have learned during their time in the organization.
You can even select a bunch of employees who are approaching retirement to mentor the young ones. Employees can job shadow the mentor to learn the necessary skills firsthand. Job shadowing enables the employee to get a gradual transition into the new workspace without much pressure. Some of the benefits of assigning mentors include;
- They provide information about the company policies
- Give guidance on some job duties
- Evaluating the new employee’s performance
Receive and Give Feedback
keep track of the employees’ training process and provide a way to give their feedback; and what needs to be improved after every step. You can also give them your feedback by ranking them and telling them where you are impressed and what they should work on.
Being transparent makes the onboarding process flawless since you will not be operating through assumptions of how they feel about the orientation. Knowing what works for them or does not work earlier during the training enables you to make the necessary adjustments before proceeding to the next training level.
Final take
The onboarding process can be complicated and lengthy as well as short, and flawless, depending on your approach. New employees can also form an attitude about their new workplace right from the training stage. Therefore to ensure all employees are initiated successfully into the organization, you have to make the onboarding process enjoyable and informative. Also, remember to come up with objectives and themes for the onboarding process.
