The first paycheck is crucial to employee engagement and can make or break employee onboarding for new hires.
Processing the first paycheck begins before a new employee’s first day at work, and much of it involves gathering the necessary information.
With the right payroll system, you can cut down time spent on approving timesheets and payroll processing by 95%.
Many things can make or break a new hire’s experience, and one of them is how they receive their first paycheck. Get it right, and you set the tone for a smooth, professional experience. Get it wrong, and you risk confusion, frustration, and a shaky start.
So, what’s the big deal with payroll? Isn’t it just a routine process? In theory, yes. But in practice, it’s anything but simple and can be time-consuming, especially for hourly teams. First runs are where small mistakes can snowball: missing information, misclassified roles, and incorrect tax setup.
Successful payroll starts long before day one. It’s about having the right systems in place, from collecting forms to tracking hours, so that everything flows naturally from onboarding to payday.
That’s where Workforce.com can help. It connects onboarding, scheduling, timesheets, and payroll in a single system. It keeps everything in sync so you never have to chase information, avoid duplicate data entry, eliminate costly errors, and dodge any surprises come payday.
It provides a simple workflow that makes payroll easy for payroll teams and stress-free for new hires.
Let’s take a closer look at how it works:
Get crucial payroll information before the first day
Smooth payroll management starts with onboarding, which begins before your new hire even clocks in.
While onboarding often focuses on culture, policies, and setting expectations, the administrative side is just as important, especially when it comes to payroll. This is where you gather key details such as tax documents, bank account info, and employee data and set job classifications and pay rates. If you go about this manually, you’re opening the door to delays, data entry mistakes, and miscalculations when processing payroll. Something as small as a missing form can derail a first paycheck.
Workforce.com makes onboarding fully digital. New hires enter their own employee information directly into the system. No double-entry or unnecessary paperwork. Tax forms, direct deposit details, and personal data all sync instantly with payroll.
If details are missing, managers are alerted and ensure that the required information is lodged before payday or even a new hire’s first day.
Pro tip: Start onboarding as soon as the offer’s signed, not the first day on the job.
Misclassification is a significant cause of payroll errors. For new hires, it’s essential that employers set this up correctly the first time.
With Workforce.com, everything lives in one place. You can assign pay rates, overtime rules, and employee classifications in a single system. You can also customize payroll data if needed, especially for more complicated work structures, such as employees taking up shifts at different sites or working two different roles with varying pay rates.
Need to make a change down the line? Update the info in one place, and it’s reflected instantly across schedules and payroll.
In addition, business owners get proactive tools that help catch issues before they become problems and minimize the administrative burden. Workforce.com shows how much each shift will cost as schedules are built, so there are no surprises during payroll processing. If an employee is about to be scheduled overtime, the system flags it immediately, giving you a chance to review it. It also alerts you if a rest break hasn’t been scheduled, helping you avoid compliance issues, additional payouts or violations.
Track accurate employee hours
Payroll mistakes often come from incorrect or incomplete timesheets. It can be tricky, especially if the employee joined in the middle of a pay period.
Workforce.com streamlines time tracking. Employees clock in and out through a mobile app (either on their phones or a device set up in the workplace), and their hours are instantly captured and fed into digital timesheets; no manual data entry is required. Both managers and employees can view and verify timesheets at any time, making it easy to catch and correct discrepancies early.
Missed a clock-in? The system alerts managers in real-time, so they can check in with staff and make quick corrections well before payroll is due. You’ll also get notifications for potential overtime or missed breaks, helping you stay compliant and avoid unplanned costs.
You’ll never have to ask, “Did we get their hours in correctly?” because you know you do. You can spot issues mid-cycle, not the eleventh hour, so payroll runs smoothly.
Automate deductions and tax withholdings with payroll software
Accurate payroll and clear pay breakdowns build trust from day one. But without the right system, deductions can be easily miscalculated, especially with an hourly team.
Workforce.com’s payroll solution provides automation and takes the guesswork out of managing every type of deduction. Mandatory payroll taxes and withholdings, like federal, state, and local taxes, are automatically applied based on W-4 data collected during onboarding. Pre-tax and post-tax deductions are just as easy to configure. Employees receive automatically generated pay stubs with a clear breakdown of their gross pay, deductions, and take-home pay.
Payroll becomes stressful when pay information is inaccurate or when it’s verified too late in the process. Workforce.com helps you stay ahead by reviewing and approving data as it comes in. As shifts wrap up, you can instantly verify timesheets, check for missing logs, and receive alerts for anything that needs your attention so that nothing slips through the cracks.
You’ll also get a clear, intuitive payroll preview that highlights exactly what’s ready to go and what still needs fixing. Because everything—scheduling, timesheets, pay rates, and deductions—lives in one system, resolving discrepancies is fast and straightforward. No switching between platforms. No chasing down spreadsheets.
Get payroll processing right from day one
The first paycheck isn’t just about getting paid. It’s a crucial moment in the new hire experience. It shows whether your business is organized or not. New employees notice and payroll is one of the clearest indicators of whether you’ve got your systems together.
That’s why an all-in-one platform matters. Shipley Do-Nuts learned this firsthand when they switched to Workforce.com. Before, they were juggling four separate systems: one for onboarding, another for clock-ins, a third for scheduling, and a fourth for running payroll.
“Integrating all of those together has saved us so much time. It takes me about 95% less time than before, Shelly Archer, Human Resources Manager at Shipley Do-Nuts, shares.
Employee onboarding significantly impacts productivity and retention. Given the nuances of hourly workforce operations, this process is more complex.
Technology can help streamline onboarding, but communication and human touch are crucial to successful onboarding.
Onboarding processes and materials should be regularly assessed to ensure they remain aligned with and relevant to what happens on the frontlines.
If recruitment is about attracting employees, onboarding is about keeping them. The goal for any new hire is to make them productive members of the team as soon as possible—the onboarding process is key here. And no, we’re not just talking about giving them the company handbook and calling it a day.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to an effective onboarding process. It greatly varies by industry, role, and whether you are managing an hourly workforce. If you are, this guide is for you.
If you are just looking for the basics, check out our free onboarding checklist template below:
If you want more insight into onboarding best practices, read on. But before we dive into how to optimize employee onboarding for hourly staff, let’s take a look at the reasons why you should prioritize this stage of the employee lifecycle.
Why a well-structured employee onboarding process matters
Onboarding sets the tone for the rest of a new hire’s employment. Getting it right can massively impact a number of things, including:
Productivity
Focus on detailed onboarding protocols if you want a new team member to hit the ground running as soon as possible. New hires get productive quickly when they have a clear roadmap to follow. When employees are provided with all the necessary information and tools, they learn the ropes faster. However, note that crucial information goes beyond the handbook and training materials. Some details are best understood when they have an assigned mentor or partner while on the job.
Bottom line
Poor onboarding can hurt your organization financially. The average cost of hiring a new employee is $4700, according to SHRM – and this only covers posting job ads, doing background checks, and interviewing. Training cost is another story altogether. It ranges from $481 to $1240 per trainee, spending on company size and industry, one study shows.
So, how do you prevent all that money from going down the drain? Improve the employee onboarding experience. The costs associated with onboarding and training will all be for nothing if new hires decide to leave shortly after their first day.
Employee Retention
According to the 2023 Training Industry Report, excellent onboarding can improve retention by 82%. New hires will most likely stick around when engaged from day one. Good onboarding ensures they are not just stuck in the back room in front of the computer, glossing over training and being overloaded with information that they wouldn’t likely remember by the end of the week. It’s about having a curated program that covers all the necessary training yet still allows room for hands-on learning and peer-to-peer interactions.
How to Improve Onboarding for Hourly Employees
The nature of onboarding for hourly employees differs greatly from onboarding in a corporate environment. “It’s more challenging to nail down for hourly-based industries or those employing shift-based workers because of all the nuances around it,” says Laura Timbrook, a national board-certified health and wellness coach, international speaker, and well-being strategist for manufacturing and other shift-working industries.
Standardizing onboarding is a good place to start, but there are many considerations for integrating new hires into an hourly workforce. Here are some ways to work around challenges and improve how you integrate new hires into your team:
1. Determine how long onboarding is going to take
Typically, an onboarding program takes at least three months. However, it might not always be the case for hourly employees.
First, consider whether the position is a seasonal role or a more permanent one. If it’s the former, you wouldn’t have three months to onboard them because the season may be over in three months’ time. How, then, can you ensure that onboarding is still effective within this timeframe?
It’s all about clarity. Having a list of tasks can help, but there’s still a learning curve. This is where having them work alongside a more experienced employee is essential. “If we can buddy seasonal workers with somebody who can show them the ropes quickly, that would be key. Our systems can often provide a checklist, but it can be too much if they also need to learn the system,” says Laura.
Streamlining the process is crucial, especially during a short onboarding period. It should involve having the right systems so seasonal employees can quickly understand workflows and having somebody working with them who can easily address questions they may have along the way.
Meanwhile, you’d have more room to work with if you’re onboarding a new hire for a permanent position. Even so, the whole process must be curated to cover the administrative, compliance, and practical aspects of the role. Prioritization is key here, which brings us to the next tip.
2. Set priorities and milestones.
One thing to avoid when onboarding new hires is to overwhelm them with information and admin work.
“A lot of times, we get these employees in and get the legal paperwork out of the way, and then we just throw them on the floor. It’s a sink-or-swim scenario. As an employee, that won’t make you feel good about your job. It’s not going to make you feel good about yourself. And it won’t make you feel good about the organization,” shares Laura.
It’s crucial that you set priorities and determine what a new employee must accomplish and by when. Space out tasks so that onboarding is more dynamic instead of spending a lot of their early weeks on paperwork.
In some roles, mandatory compliance training must be completed before an employee can perform the job. If an employee needs to go through lengthy training material, check in with them. Otherwise, you can streamline the process by dividing a new hire’s hours between theoretical training and practical learning on the floor.
“We really need to look at what they need by day one. Are we going through compliance training because, say, there’s a cardboard crusher they need to know from OSHA how to operate safely, yet they’re working the cash register? So do they really need that training on day one?” says Laura.
The goal of onboarding is to complete the most important tasks that are prerequisites for new hires to get up and running. So, look into the training needed, see if you can space it out, and optimize the onboarding process around it.
A good place to start is to outline what you expect to happen before an employee’s first day, first week, first 30 days, and so on. Having a schedule keeps things organized and expectations clear.
Here’s an example of an onboarding timeline that lasts for 3 months and what typically happens in each period:
Before the first day or preboarding
Documentation and paperwork – Send job offer letters and lodge paperwork contracts, tax forms, and IDs into your HR system.
System profiles—Once their information is entered for payroll, copy all of it into any operations systems new hires might need to use daily. This could mean setting them up in your scheduling and time clock system, project management tool, POS platform, and much more.
Workspace and materials – Set up workstations or prepare work materials such as uniforms, IDs, lockers, and access to company systems.
Answering FAQs – It’s normal for new employees to feel anxious during preboarding because stepping into a new role involves many firsts. Sending them a message that covers vital information can help them with the first-day jitters. Doing a quick call to address any initial questions they may have can also help.
Prepare a welcome email or note for the new hire. It’s advisable that this note not be system-generated but personalized by the team they will be joining.
The first day
New hire welcome – Greet the first hire upon their arrival. Introduce them to other team members and give them a quick workplace tour. This is also the time to hand them a welcome token or a note from their manager or teammates.
Employee orientation—Limit the first-day orientation to the essentials. A brief discussion about the organization and its policies should suffice. This information is also in the employee handbook, which your staff should have access to anytime.
Getting settled: Show the new hire their work area or station. On the first day, provide access to learning resources and e-learning platforms. You can also set some time for the new team member to get acquainted with other staff. An all-hands meeting or going on a team lunch are great ideas.
The first week
Training
Job-specific training: During the first week, it’s time to start discussing what happens day-to-day on the job. Start with the basics and gradually ease into the more complicated parts of the role.
Mentorship: Assigning a mentor to a new hire helps with coaching and makes feedback more fluid. Mentors aren’t necessarily managers or team leaders; they could simply be more experienced coworkers.
“A buddy system can take the load off managers who are already dealing with a lot. Having an onboarding buddy could answer nuanced questions that seem minute to everybody else but big for the new employee,” says Laura. For instance, this could be questions around seemingly simple things like filing leaves, how to operate the time clocks, or when the next pay run will be.
Sometimes, the buddy doesn’t even have to be tenured. They can be someone who was onboarded maybe two or three months prior, depending on their performance. It helps because they just went through the same process and probably had the same questions any new hire would have.
Goal-setting: Lay the groundwork during the first week. Discuss how the rest of the onboarding process will go and what is expected of them. The last thing any new hire wants to feel is lost, so set the tone, provide direction, and discuss metrics at this stage. New hires will likely perform better if it’s clear what they need to accomplish. In addition, include regular check-ins in your onboarding schedule.
The first month
More Training: This is fairly obvious, but the training doesn’t just cease after the first week. After new hires learn the basics of their job function, it is important to evaluate their improvement over several weeks and make adjustments accordingly.
Performance check-in: Discuss with the new hire how they are faring with goals and expectations. This is also a good time to ask their feedback about the onboarding process and the job so far. If they cite anything that needs improvement, look into it and make changes as necessary.
The first 90 days
Within the first three months, there should be 30, 60, and 90-day check-ins or performance reviews where you discuss progress, achievements, and areas for improvement.
At this point, you can also start probing into long-term career goals since the new hire will most likely have a grasp of the work and culture, and you, as their manager, will have figured out the type of development you see for them. Discuss their aspirations and see how their performance and current role will tie into that.
A feedback loop should also be established at this point. It’s important to note that feedback should not be limited to formal check-ins or sit-down meetings. Try to implement feedback into daily routines, such as right after a shift.
3. Streamline onboarding with technology.
While everyone loves to theorize about strategy and engagement, realistically, the biggest lift of employee onboarding is on the administrative side of things. However, this shouldn’t be the case. The right technology should reduce the time you spend on admin work, giving you more time to focus on engagement and training.
Capture new hire details and send them straight to HRIS, scheduling, and payroll. Ideally, onboarding should be the same system you use for applicant tracking and hiring; this way, you won’t need to waste time manually re-entering applicant information once you hire them.
Complete new hire paperwork forms such as I-9 and W4, collect e-signatures, and get acknowledgment of company policies. A good onboarding platform allows you to go paperless.
Track onboarding progress and send follow-up reminders to new employees to accomplish specific tasks.
Let staff update their details. Adding a new bank account or changing an address should not require lengthy paperwork or email exchanges. An efficient onboarding tech allows employees to update their personal information through a self-service portal. It’s best if they can do so via a mobile app.
Allow staff easy online access to resources like employee handbooks, HR policies, and training guides. Sometimes, new hires grapple for information not because it’s unavailable but simply because they can’t find it.
“HR spends a ton of time and money writing these safety protocols and putting this all together. They need to know where that is because half of the questions a new employee might have asked or need to ask are in the employee handbook. They just don’t know where it is,” shares Laura.
Aside from the employee handbook, staff must have a single place to find training materials and other details crucial to their day-to-day work, such as their shifts, leave balances, payslips, and timesheets.
Keep in mind that onboarding is not a siloed process and should integrate well with other areas of workforce management. Ensure your onboarding syncs with time and attendance, scheduling, payroll, and HRIS.
“Technology is about 60% of onboarding. It has an amazing power to streamline things,” says Laura. However, as much as technology plays an important role, the human touch is still crucial. Your onboarding platform may have all the bells and whistles, but that will be for nothing if the employers fail to engage and communicate well with new staff. The key is to automate and simplify what you can with technology so that you can focus on the overall employee experience.
Onboarding templates, materials, and processes should keep pace with operational changes. Every company policy change should also be reflected in onboarding. However, this is easier said than done.
Managers and HR must be transparent about these things. A common pain point is that onboarding processes sometimes don’t align with what’s happening on the floor.
“Often, the people that design the onboarding are in the corporate office. Hourly wage employees, whether they’re in plant production, retail, or transportation, have a much different experience on the ground. We’re often not making those connections,” shares Laura.
So, the key to bridging that gap is ensuring that frontline managers and HR collaborate to design onboarding plans. Managers can provide more context about what actually happens during operations, and HR can help adapt the program according to that insight. That way, the process is much easier to implement and makes the most sense for new hires.
Another key area is revisiting the review and feedback process during onboarding. Take, for instance, the 30-—to 60-—to 90-day reviews. Typically, these sync-ups are conducted by the direct manager. However, some organizations mix it up and allow the new hire to talk to different people within the company during these check-ins.
“I saw an organization where for the first 30 days, new hires deal with the direct managers. And then at 90 days, a general manager or a director comes in,” shares Laura. Such practice provides an opportunity for more open communication across different levels. Also, it can be especially helpful if the new hire staff has concerns with their direct manager.
5. Understand the role of everyone involved in onboarding.
New hires will have different touch points within the organization, which can influence their decision to stay or leave.
At first glance, it seems like HR is the only team that interacts with new hires during recruitment and onboarding. But they’re not the only key players here. Managers also have a significant role in training, so it is crucial to ensure communication is aligned across the board between HR and management.
Part of designing an onboarding process is understanding the role of everyone involved. Aside from HR and hiring managers, identify if you need to involve other staff in the process, such as onboarding buddies or mentors. Set expectations and provide coaching on how they can balance their tasks while guiding new staff.
Simplify employee onboarding with Workforce.com
While all of the tips we’ve given are a good start, the secret to better onboarding really comes down to connecting it with your Applicant Tracking System.
Too many HR departments struggle with needless manual reentry. Ideally, all of an applicant’s information should transfer seamlessly to the rest of your software systems.
As an all-in-one platform for hourly teams, Workforce.com automates admin work throughout the employee lifecycle. Staff have one profile with one login starting from when they apply for the first time. All of their data flows from onboarding to scheduling, HRIS, and payroll without data re-entry.
Effective employee onboarding is vital for retention. It should be an experiential process as much as an administrative one that makes a good impression on new hires.
50% of hourly workers leave a job within the first 120 days, wasting recruitment and training costs.
You’ve been recruiting for a vacant position, and a candidate finally accepted a job offer. That’s great! But now comes the more crucial part — onboarding. Believe it or not, onboarding new hires involves more than a welcome email and signing an employment contract.
Employee onboarding sets the tone for new hires; employers must show competency, inspire trust, and reduce friction. It is also where new hires get their first impression of company culture and see if the work aligns with what was discussed during the recruitment stage.
Half of hourly workers leave a job within the first four months or 120 days, according toSHRM. Turnover like this can be mitigated with proper onboarding techniques.
While primarily an administrative process, onboarding is also an experiential process – this cannot be overlooked.
The most surface-level way to fulfill the experiential part of onboarding is to make it feel good. You also need to make it easy. Consider whatever system you use for onboarding; does the user interface (UI) delight the user? Is the user experience (UX) easy to navigate?
The experiential aspect of onboarding does not end after a pleasant-looking checklist is completed. You also need to integrate new hires successfully into the team and provide them with a sense of belonging. Typically, this takes at least 90 days.
Attracting candidates is only half the battle. The other half is retaining them, and that starts with onboarding.
How to improve your employee onboarding process
Employee onboarding can be daunting, especially considering its administrative and experiential aspects. A new hire checklist goes beyond gathering direct deposit information and signing tax forms. Here are some best practices to help you navigate this stage and ensure better employee retention.
Use employee onboarding software
If you find paperwork tedious, so does your new hire.
An effectiveonboarding platform significantly reduces the admin burden for the human resources team, hiring managers, and incoming employees. It streamlines the necessary paperwork and ensures data integrity by taking out manual processes.
Ideally, most onboarding-related admin tasks should be accomplished before the first day. For instance, with the Workforce.com onboarding system, new hires can upload the necessary pre-employment documents before they begin work. That means that contracts, W-4s, bank details, and employee personal information are all lodged into the system well before their start date. When these are done, you can focus on making a new hire’s first day more meaningful and productive.
Prepare equipment and tools ahead of time
Aside from lengthy paperwork, you also need to ensure that tools and equipment related to the job are ready before a new employee’s start date. This includes uniforms, access to company systems and software, office equipment, or even vehicles if they are working on-site.
The last thing a new hire should face on the first day is incomplete equipment or confusing guidelines. Welcome merch is all fun and good, but having the necessary work items and equipment ready can help your new hire settle in faster.
Answer potential workplace questions before day one
Taking on a new role is exciting, but it’s normal for new hires to feel anxious about a new job. Much of this anxiety comes from the anticipation of meeting new teammates, acclimating to a different work environment, and easing into the organization’s culture.
Aside from discussing new hire paperwork and eligibility for benefits, it also helps to review smaller things like dress code, shift swap policies, unavailability, and day-to-day tasks.
Give managers support
Employee onboarding is a tall order, and the onus is on the team leaders and managers to ensure its success.
Ensure managers have the support and tools to help them successfully onboard new team members. One way to do this is to let new hires fill out their own onboarding information rather than HR. When this kind of admin burden is taken from managers and placed on the employee, managers can focus on creating a better and more personalized onboarding experience for their new hires.
Integrate onboarding with recruitment
Recruitment is how you attract top talent. Onboarding is how you keep it.
Recruitment is not just about selling the role to potential candidates and finding the best fit. It’s about setting expectations and painting a picture of what the position entails and what working for the organization is like. While the goal is to attract top talent, it’s detrimental to over-promise in terms of benefits, work environment, and growth opportunities.
Onboarding is the stage where the organization must meet the expectations set during the hiring process. This is the stage to follow through a good first impression. If employees find that the work is far from what was described during recruitment, they tend to quit even before they are fully onboarded.
Recruitment and onboarding must go hand in hand. You must integrate them to avoid unnecessary recruitment costs, staffing issues, and high turnover rates.
Set onboarding milestones
Tracking new hire onboarding success is best done with a roadmap that includes a set of milestones.
What do you want new hires to learn or achieve within specific timeframes? Typically, onboarding programs last at least 90 days. If that’s the case, you can set milestones for 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days. Goal setting is crucial for successful onboarding. A roadmap provides new hires structure and specific objectives to focus on and helps managers track and measure a new employee’s progress.
Give and gather feedback
Giving andgathering employee feedback is a massive part of onboarding. While feedback is typically given during milestones or scheduled check-ins, it should be more fluid and quick and can be part of daily job training and interactions. Feedback doesn’t always need to be a sit-down meeting. It’s also helpful when it’s quick and more spontaneous.
Constant feedback is essential for developing new hires, but managers also need it to improve the onboarding process or operations. When new hires feel that their feedback matters to the team, employee satisfaction matters. When they feel heard and valued, they are more likely to see themselves in the organization for a long time.
You would likely onboard new employees for certain positions more than once, especially when you run an hourly workforce. You’d probably do a lot of onboarding during peak seasons, especially when hiring seasonal or contractual staff. Using templates means that you don’t need to spend as much time curating an onboarding plan each time.
Templates in the form of checklists, training materials, and video guides are helpful. However, remember to update them to reflect any procedural or policy changes.
Make sure that such materials are accessible to new hires, mainly since they would most likely refer to them in the course of the onboarding period. A sound self-service system is vital to this, as it enables new hires to find answers to FAQs, and managers can focus more on clarifying more complex questions or matters.
Incorporate fun elements
The onboarding process is crucial but doesn’t have to be boring.
You can insert some fun elements to help new hires feel at ease as they integrate into the team. For instance, teammates can record a short video message that describes what the team or department does in a fun and informal way or tidbits of non-work related information such as the best place to go for meal breaks or coffee. Short and informal all-hands sessions also help familiarize a new hire with other team members. If your company provides a standard welcome kit or swag bag to new hires, consider adding a short welcome letter from the team for a personalized touch.
Fun elements for onboarding don’t have to be full of fanfare, but incorporating those helps enrich the early stages of onboarding.
New employee onboarding checklist template
The onboarding process takes place before the new employee’s first day. Here’s a checklist of key things you must remember during onboarding. Feel free to copy and paste for your own use or download a document here.
New hire documentation
Accepted and signed job offer/job description
Tax forms
Insurance paperwork
Employment contract
Compensation and benefits package
Guides and policies
Employee handbook
Job description
Safety procedures/manuals
Security rules and policies
Accounts, devices, and equipment
Setup company email
Provide time clock access
Secure work uniforms
Setup credentials or access to necessary software tools such as HCM systems and project management software
Add new hires to relevant work chats or email distribution lists
Issue work phone, tablet, or computer
Assign workstation/workspace
First day
Team introduction
Workplace tour
Give welcome kit/company swag bag
Finalize other administrative paperwork, if any.
Orientation
Run through paperwork and make sure they’re complete
Briefly go through job roles, benefits, and insurance plans
Go over essential points in the handbook. Inform them where they can find a copy.
Discuss important company policies briefly.
Assign a mentor or onboarding buddy.
Development plans
Create 30-day development plan
Create 60-day development plan
Create 90-day development plan
Milestones and follow-through
Check-in after the first week
Check-in after 30 days
Check-in after 60 days
Check-in after 90 days
As you follow through and provide feedback, optimize if your development plan needs tweaking.
Simplify your employee onboarding
The template provided above is just to get you started. For more on how to optimize your onboarding process, check out our free webinar below featuring NBC-HWC certified coach Laura Timbrook:
Are you eager to streamline your onboarding right now? Discover how to reduce onboarding tasks to just 3 minutes with Workforce.com’s self-service employee onboarding by booking a call today.
Employee engagement reflects how connected each employee is to your business and their work.
When employees feel connected to their company, they perform better and stay with the organization longer.
The three most common ways to improve employee engagement are onboarding, communications, and flexibility.
Employee engagement refers to how connected each employee is to your business and their work. In many cases, engagement can have a significant impact on a company’s bottom line. A disengaged workforce can lead to reduced productivity and high turnover, resulting in increased hiring costs for the employer as well as lost opportunities and poor customer satisfaction.
On the other hand,engaged employees are generally more optimistic and dedicated to their work. They contribute to higher profitability, retention, and better customer service.
High employee engagement won’t come naturally to every company, though. It takes commitment and work from leaders to show employees you care about their well-being and that they have a place in your company.
When employees feel connected to their company, they’re more likely to perform well and stay with the organization for longer periods of time.
Who is responsible for employee engagement?
Direct managers are usually responsible for monitoring and increasing employee engagement. They’re tasked with creating an environment that fosters engaged employees. Managers conduct regular meetings (both team-wide and with individual employees) and help establish a culture where employees can thrive.
Employees tend to be more engaged when they:
Feel valued and supported
Believe in and share the same values and goals as the company
Have an involved manager
Participate in ongoing conversations about their career trajectory and development
Are given recognition and feedback
Receive consistent communication
Human resource teams are involved in employee engagement initiatives, too. Often, human resources and leaders of the company will work together to evaluate where employee engagement is currently and what needs to be done to improve it.
Three benefits of employee engagement
As your employee engagement increases, you’ll also see higher retention, improved profits, and better customer service.
1. Higher employee retention
Engaged employees who feel like they have a purpose in your company are less likely to look elsewhere for a new job, resulting in less turnover. According to a study by Gallup, a workforce that’s more engaged sees between an 18% and 43% decrease in employee turnover.
Engaged workforces also tend to see an 81% decrease in absenteeism. The more engaged an employee is, the more excited they are about working for your company and doing their work.
Engaged employees are also often leaders and role models within the organization. They can help get other employees engaged and excited about your company. For example, a highly engaged senior employee will often mentor junior employees and recommend their coworkers for promotions. This kind of development can contribute to higher employee satisfaction and retention because employees form connections with other engaged employees.
2. Better customer service
An engaged employee is more optimistic about the future of the business, and they often believe in your product and its value to customers.
Being committed to your company makes employees a better fit for serving your customers. For example, a customer who talks to a pessimistic employee who doesn’t care about your product is going to have a much different experience than a customer who talks to an optimistic employee who believes in your brand.
3. Improved profitability
Engaged employees can also help you increase your profitability by improving productivity. Highly engaged teams have 23% higher profits than teams with disengaged workers, while lower engagement levels cost the global economy an astounding $7.8 trillion.
When employees are engaged, they tend to have less stress, anger, and health-related issues than employees who are disengaged. Disengaged employees also tend to put off important tasks and may engage in quiet quitting.
How to measure employee engagement
The best way to measure employee engagement is to ask employees directly. A simple check-in will give you more accurate insights than assuming what your team thinks or feels. It also gives everyone a chance to be heard.
Start your feedback collection with employee engagement surveys, pulse surveys, and shift feedback. With surveys, the goal is to gather as much information as you can about various components of engagement. Ask their opinion on employee satisfaction and overall happiness, career development, recognition, handling of personnel issues, and preparedness for their job. Give employees the option of anonymity, so they feel comfortable being honest and you get accurate feedback.
With shift feedback, employees can give and receive feedback about each shift they worked. A form or questionnaire can be served to them electronically (either via email or an employee app) when they clock out. If your company uses the latter, you can send automatic notifications to employees after they’ve completed their shift.
Shift feedback allows employees and managers to evaluate how each shift went. Ask employees questions like:
Were you able to take your designated breaks?
Did you understand what was expected of you for this shift?
Did you have the right tools and resources you needed for this shift?
Were there any challenges or issues during this shift?
By asking these questions you can gauge each employee’s general satisfaction and well-being after each shift and immediately bring up any issues.
You can also get employee feedback from one-on-one manager meetings. One-on-one meetings serve as check-ins to make sure employees who feel stressed or overwhelmed or have issues with coworkers get a chance to be heard — and maybe find solutions to their concerns.
Three ways to improve employee engagement
The three most common ways to get employees engaged with your company are onboarding, communication, and flexibility.
1. Effective employee onboarding
An effective onboarding program can engage employees right away and in the long term. Use onboarding to help your employees get integrated, connected, and committed to your company right off the bat.
During onboarding, new hires want clear guidelines about expectations and responsibilities, so they can feel confident moving forward in their roles.
Here are a few things that can engage employees during their onboarding period (and keep them engaged):
Keep paperwork simple and spread it out throughout their first week. No one wants to spend their entire first day filling out forms.
Get them excited about the work they’ll be doing. Give them small tasks or have them shadow another team member.
Introduce them to the company culture by talking about common values and policies, like an open-door policy.
Giving employees guidance and mentoring them during the onboarding process can help them feel more connected to their coworkers and your company.
2. Centralized communication
New employees want to know where to find information and how to reach out to someone if they have questions. In the shift trade, employees don’t always have ample opportunities to talk to managers or other employees about issues like scheduling, maintaining a work-life balance, or personnel issues. Centralized employee communication can keep them engaged in a fast-changing environment.
Use one main form of communication, like an employee app or a company wiki site. These kinds of platforms keep communication accessible to all employees and create a place where they can share knowledge with each other. Employees should be able to access the app or wiki to submit PTO requests, ask questions, find policies or other information, switch shifts, and more.
Encourage all employees to use the designated communication channels right away. During onboarding, help them sign into their account and become familiar with the platform, so they feel comfortable using it regularly.
3. Flexible scheduling
Flexible scheduling can reduce overtime and burnout for your employees and increase job satisfaction. It shows your employees that you’re taking their needs and preferences into consideration. Many shift workers are constantly on call and have little control over their schedules, which can lead to stress and anxiety about work. But with flexible scheduling, they feel more in control of their shifts.
Most companies don’t have the resources or technology to offer shift-based employees the schedules they need to stay engaged. Shift scheduling software can help with that.
These scheduling tools send you notifications when someone is approaching overtime, give you visibility into each team member’s availability, and show recommended shift plans and schedules.
Scheduling software helps companies with time management, too. You can use it to avoid the overallocation of meetings, responsibilities, or tasks, which can also cause employee burnout.
4. Consistently acting on feedback
We mentioned the importance of using surveys and shift feedback to measure employee engagement. Now you have to use that data to act on the feedback, which will in turn improve engagement.
Based on the feedback you receive from employees, work with management to look for quick wins or changes that you can implement immediately. For example, dress code changes to make employees feel more comfortable at work or adding an additional break for employees who work a certain number of hours.
Bigger changes take time to implement. For example, if you need to update a policy or workflow process, that could take weeks or months. In this case, let employees know that you’ve addressed their feedback and changes are in progress.
Set regular meetings where you all go over new or recurring feedback and discuss whether you’re going to implement it and how. For example, if you notice a lot of employees concerned with short staffing during evening shifts, take steps to immediately remedy this scheduling issue as it directly impacts employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
Focus on engagement to attract and retain high-quality candidates
Engaged employees contribute to a positive, thriving work environment — one that others will want to be a part of. Start by focusing on one thing you can revamp that will improve the work environment for current and potential employees. For example, you could implement flexible schedules or a better communication and scheduling system.
Ultimately, the right employee engagement strategy is unique to each business, but by working to address employees’ concerns and prioritizing their well-being, you’ll be on the right track.
For more on employee engagement, check out our free webinar below featuring Laur Timbrook, an NBC-HWC certified workforce wellness coach:
Health care organizations faced numerous challenges when the pandemic hit. Residents in care facilities faced a high risk of contracting the coronavirus as many are between the vulnerable ages of 80 and 90 years old with underlying conditions.
Beyond the physical stress, residents and staff alike experience mental health challenges. Employees are burdened with adapting to new ways of working, such as dealing with absences, implementing new health protocols, and the emotional toll of seeing patients affected by the virus. At the same time, residents can also pick up such cues and feel the burden themselves — restrictions such as limited visits from loved ones added to the toll too.
“Care organizations in particular have been under immense strain. We’ve never asked them to do more to protect the most vulnerable members of our society,” said Bryce Davies, general manager of Workforce.com UK. But there’s another story here, and that’s human ingenuity and creativity can be used to help us all adapt. It’s called resilience.”
The ability of organizations to bounce back from challenges and show resilience is what can help them thrive during a pandemic. Davies identified four core areas of resilience that can help businesses navigate through this time.
Keeping communication lines open
Communication is key for both staff and patients or customers. But with the pandemic, keeping communication lines open tends to become challenging given restrictions and volatile work patterns. This resulted in information getting diluted and not being communicated to the right person at the right time, which prevents teams from adapting quickly to circumstances.
“Identify your mission-critical communication channels and build redundancy into these,” Davies said. The speed of communication channels should also be considered and identify possible causes of delays.
Open and transparent communication lines are vital to empowering staff to step in and take over in case of a teammate’s absence or operational changes. Furthermore, it’s also critical to documenting processes, which lessens onboarding time and equips teams to stay agile.
Ensuring safety on shift
Fatigue is detrimental to the safety of patients and health workers alike. When care facility staff is exhausted, they are more prone to making errors, forgetting things, having difficulty processing information and reacting slowly.
Workforce managers can prevent their staff from experiencing fatigue through efficient scheduling and leave management. However, staff schedules can be difficult to plan and subjects staff to work in shift patterns, which fail to account for other factors such as demand, leave and time for training.
“Try planning your schedule out as far in advance as possible to lock in both the time for leave and training,” Davies explained. Monitoring annual leave balances throughout the year also helps allocate resources accordingly and make sure the staff gets enough time off to curb the effects of stress.
Technology such as Workforce.com provides managers oversight into all the essential factors with staff scheduling. Minus the paperwork, managers can use the platform to make better decisions when creating schedules and ensure that time off, training, and demand are accounted for.
Promoting financial security
Labor costs and demand are difficult to control and forecast. If not managed properly, it can drive up expenses, resulting in the organization becoming less financially agile. This can make team members feel insecure about the company and may cause them to leave.
“Build a mock schedule well in advance and cost it using employees’ base pay and overtime to help predict cost. Test different scenarios,” Davies advised. Identifying key demand trends and indicators can also help in forecasting costs.
It’s also crucial to pay close attention to the variance between schedules and actual timesheets. Investigate probable causes of overspending and optimize your operations to address them.
More importantly, health care organizations should have a way to proactively manage demand and cost rather than acting on issues after the fact. Having access to labor analytics is vital to do that. Workforce.com captures real-time costs and revenue throughout the day, allowing managers to react quickly and make cost-effective decisions on the fly.
Complying with labor laws is a must, but keeping up with changes can be tough.
“Promote compliance as a culture, not as one person’s job,” Davies said. Integrate compliance to every part of workforce management. Ensure that processes and systems are designed to stay at pace and adhere to labor laws.
Companies can start with digitizing their documents so that files can be remotely audited and monitored. Compliance can also be accounted for in creating employee schedules. Workforce.com’s employee scheduling platform factors in labor laws and alerts managers if a schedule is at risk of violating regulations. Legislation that affects payroll is also crucial for companies to pay close attention to as it impacts labor costs and treatment of overtime and holidays.
When systems are integrated for labor compliance, all activities are tracked and fixing potential noncompliance risk would be quicker.
“Resilience is something that we can build into all of our businesses, and it’s never too late to start,” Davies said. Recognizing the gaps is half of the battle. The other half is finding the right solution to address them.
Workforce.com has been partnering with businesses in different industries to help them engage their teams, safeguard their finances and stay compliant. See our solutions in action and book a demo with us today.
Since its founding in 2009,Hearing Care Solutions has become a leading health care company by understanding how hearing-loss technology vastly improves its patients’ lives.
Knowing that hearing loss left untreated hinders communication and ultimately affects social interaction and quality of life, HCS is advancing hearing care through a variety of fully digital instruments at varying levels of technology from nine leading manufacturers.
As Denver-based HCS continues to implement new technologies to grow its hearing-solutions business, they also have embraced Workforce.com’s workforce management platform to improve the lives of its employees.
HCS already is reaping the benefits since introducingWorkforce.comto its employees in August 2020. HCS is saving 30 minutes per employee every two weeks by using Workforce.com, said Nallely Yearwood,executive director, operations at HCS.
Yearwood also cited three advantages since implementing Workforce.com.
Saving time on payroll days.
Saving time during onboarding.
Accessibility for all staff for schedules and time off requests through the app, which makes it easier for management.
Simplify the scheduling process
Yearwood discovered Workforce.com through research of workforce management applications, including reviews.Since its rollout,building schedulesfor its 100 employees has become more efficient and strategic with Workforce.com, Yearwood said.
“Workforce.com relieves me of the handwritten schedules and saves me a lot of time pre-payroll as well,” said Yearwood, who has been with HCS for five years. “It has also helped our payroll department save a significant amount of time.”
Efficiently onboard new employees
As an essential service, HCS is bullish on its plans for growth over the next 12 to 18 months as it adds new employees to meet business demand. Since the pandemic swept across the business landscape in March, Yearwood said candidate interviews have been held virtually via video calls.
Since its implementation, “Hearing Care Solutions has been able to streamline the onboarding process in addition to giving us a more effective way of managing both remote and on-site employees,” Yearwood said.
There have been several lessons learned from operating a business during COVID-19, Yearwood said.
“While it is a new challenge to actually implement a full-blown pandemic policy, we welcome the challenges as it strengthens our internal community and our commitment to providing services to our clients,” she said.
Easy access for all employees
Everyone on the HCS staff uses Workforce.com, Yearwood added, both management and employees. “It gives us the opportunity to ensure staffing and scheduling follows our business needs and also allows our employees to easily manage their schedules and PTO requests,” she said.
With an efficient staff management system in place, Yearwood and her team want to continue improving their online platforms and seek ways to provide the best service to their customers as they expand. Employees have endorsed several Workforce.com features, she said.
“The(time clock) appis great, and it allows them to see their schedules ahead of time and to request time off,” Yearwood said.
Keeping employees healthy and productive will always be top of mind for HCS executives.
“Our priorities are always the safety and health of our staff and ensuring our policies and supporting processes are compliant and as staff-friendly as possible,” she said.
Hearing Care Solutions has made its workplace more efficient and productive.Book a demo and see how Workforce.com can help you.
Retail workforce management can be difficult for managers in a high turnover industry. Keeping hourly employees interested and engaged in the job can be an ongoing struggle.
But retaining hourly retail employees a little longer can make all the difference in the success of a retailer. And certain workforce management practices can go a long way in making these meaningful improvements.
Realize the customer isn’t always right, and act on that
Customer-facing jobs, especially retail, are difficult for employees when they’re expected to act like the customer is always right, said Robert Teachout, legal editor at HR compliance resource XpertHR. What can make a difference here is how managers act. One of the cardinal rules of management is, “Always have your employee’s back,” he added.
The key is to forget everything you ever heard about “The customer is always right,” he said. Customers can be stressed, wrong, rude or, at worst, inappropriate and abusive, and employees appreciate when their manager stands up for them.
“Managers need to step up — and in some cases are legally required to step up — if someone is being abusive to an employee. Like if the employee is a minority or LGBTQ and they’re being harassed, that is harassment and discrimination. it is illegal and the employer has a liability if they don’t stop it,” Teachout said.
“The customer is entitled to the best service you can provide within the policies and practices of your establishment. They’re not entitled to yell at your clerks, not entitled to abuse a coupon program [and] not entitled to throw stuff on the floor and make a scene,” he said. “When that happens, take the employee out [of the situation] and you step in.”
This is also where higher level management needs to have their back, he said. Managers feel safer standing up for the people they supervise when their own bosses are going to support their decision and protect them.
Make even the smallest change in turnover rates
The retail industry sees a 60.5 percent turnover rate, but it doesn’t need to stay that high. Even a small improvement in turnover will produce large dividends for a store and much larger competitive benefits compared to other retailers, Teachout said.
The reality in retail is that these hourly positions are many people’s first jobs, and the expectation shouldn’t be that these employees will stay around forever. But that doesn’t mean managers can mistreat them and act like they don’t want these workers to stay longer, Teachout said.
With seasonal positions, this can be especially helpful. “If you know you have 10 spots to fill every year, would you rather have to hire 10 different people or know that you’ve got two or three people that like working with you, want to come back and have already been trained? That right there is a huge advantage,” Teachout said.
Hourly retail jobs often have low pay, little opportunity for advancement and few if any benefits, and stocking shelves isn’t a personally fulfilling job for many people, he said. But if a manager knows this and considers how they can make the workplace a better place for employees, they may see better engagement and therefore better retention.
Fostering employee engagement in retail workforce management
Employees are more engaged when they can take ownership of their work, Teachout said. Managers can help here by allowing employees to do tasks that use their strengths. For example, an organized employee may excel in tasks like restocking shelves, and an extroverted employee may excel working at the customer service desk.
Similarly, hourly workers are more engaged when they feel supported by their coworkers and feel a sense of teamwork. From the moment a manager onboards a new hire, they should introduce and emphasize the concept that “you’re part of a team,” Teachout said. They can explain tardiness or absenteeism policies not in a way that focuses on business impact but in a way that focuses on the impact it has on coworkers.
He also said that managers can help employee engagement by building individual connections with employees. This doesn’t mean they have to form a friendship, but they should know each employee’s goals, priorities and strengths. This could be a part of a formal, scheduled review, but even more important is the casual conversations, Teachout said. Questions could be as simple as “How’s school going?”
Create consistent schedules
Inconsistent schedules are one of the major complaints of retail workers, and more stability in this area helps people balance the rest of their life and responsibilities while still getting enough hours, Teachout said. One of the main reasons recent predictive scheduling laws were passed was to reduce the impact of last-minute scheduling changes, he added.
Managers should make sure they’re being fair while scheduling their retail employees, he said. Make sure everyone has the same opportunities to work the best shifts and the same obligations to work the less desirable shifts or do the less desirable tasks. This ultimately comes down to respect, Teachout said. Employees will feel more respected if they’re treated the same as their coworkers.
While retail workforce management practices like this may not stop or slow all turnover, they can help create meaningful business outcomes.
“Even keeping someone working another two or three months longer than they would have typically, and at that point they’re already trained, that’s all gravy,” Teachout said. “Even making a small improvement in your turnover rate will provide a bottom line benefit.”
Time was in the not so distant past an employee’s first day on the job was spent filling out a raft of paperwork. If they finished the daunting deluge of forms in front of them, there might be time to find their workstation only to stare at a blank screen, since IT had no clue that a new employee was joining the organization.
It’s a scenario that unfortunately still plays out. Most organizations have some type of orientation process for new hires. Too often though, those programs are neglected, poorly run and mismanaged.
That experience transforms an eager new recruit into an employee who is disengaged and disillusioned with their new company based on their first day at work. Rather than going home and effusively boasting about a great first day, your newest staff member is more apt to mumble, “Eh, I’m just glad today is over.”
Make onboarding memorable and easy
Onboarding — the process of providing new employees with the key information and training to be immediately successful in their new roles — should be simple, engaging and perhaps most importantly, repeatable.
Thanks to a continuous surge in innovative human resources technology, a simple, paperless online onboarding solutionhas organizations bidding farewell to the tedious stream of paperwork andenhancing their employee’s first days on the job.
The advantage of paperless onboarding
When an organization adopts a digital onboarding solution, everything becomes paperless. The new employee’s banking details, withholdings, important addresses, emergency contacts and immigration status are immediately integrated into payroll and admin without a single sheet of paper being passed along. Online onboarding allows new hires to examine health and retirement benefits options and other company perks at their leisure.
HR also gets a valuable early-alert solution to schedule IT and other stakeholders that a new employee will be joining the organization. This portion of online onboarding should become a seamless, well-structured experience that HR can use whenever a new hire joins the organization.
Getting social
In most cases a new hire knows no one in their new workplace. Other than some cursory interactions with the immediate hiring team prior to their first day, the new person is walked awkwardly through the workplace with basic introductions and small talk.
Digital onboarding software can launch a social interaction well before the new hire ever enters the workplace. Access to the onboarding software allows the new employee to begin learning about their future teammates, supervisors, key executives and responsibilities.
They can pre-enroll in company- and job-specific training courses, survey employee resource groups and open a dialog with future colleagues. From hobbies to food restrictions, managers can get to know their new employee.
One chance at a first impression
Given that the onboarding process is a new hire’s introduction to the organization and its workplace culture, onboarding plays an underrated role in employee retention.
Research has shown that a new hire will decide within the first year if they want to stay with the company. One survey revealed that nearly a third of new hires quit their jobs within the first 90 days while a separate report showed that organizations with a strong onboarding process improved new-hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent.
An effective and inviting onboarding process holds the key to improving employee morale, productivity and retention.Workforce.com’s employee onboarding platform keeps it simple.
An employee’s first day shouldn’t be all about arduous paperwork and trying to absorb an overwhelming information dump of company rules and policies. Instead, go paperless and online with your onboarding so your new hires can do it all ahead of time and immediately dig into the job at hand.
Life is good for an organization when shift scheduling is established and working well. Let scheduling get even a little sideways, however, and that tightly run ship can quickly become an all-hands-on-deck disaster.
Shared calendars, lost emails, hard-to-read spreadsheets, white boards and even Post-it notes are not how to schedule employees. Comprehensive scheduling software tools can prevent a Titanic-like calamity from disrupting your employment schedule.
Effective employee schedulinggives managers immediate insight into how many staff members to schedule at any given time and optimizes planning breaks, setting vacations, adding time for training and addressing unplanned absences. A streamlined scheduling plan also cuts the time associated withonboarding new staff members to full productivity.
Here are some ways that scheduling software can save time, streamline scheduling and control costs.
Employee scheduling software saves time and money.
The old Benjamin Franklin adage of “time is money” is as true today as it was in ol’ Ben’s era. It certainly applies to scheduling the right employee into the right slot.
Whether it’s a 12-hour on-floor hospital shift or a four-hour lunch rush slot, scheduling software is a time-saver when it comes to matching an employee’s skills and availability to the proper shift. Managers will have a real-time schedule that changes with the organization’s needs. Scheduling software also removes the labor-intensive task of constantly rebuilding a schedule to free up you and your staff for other opportunities. In other words, you are saving up Benjamins by freeing up time.
Employee scheduling software streamlines the process.
Saving time is important, andscheduling software helps you make better use of that time. All schedules can be created and distributed electronically, and employees can use their phone to clock in and out, eliminating the need for onerous back-and-forth emails or missed phone calls.
A 2017 Quickbooks survey found that 49 percent of employees admitted to time theft, which annually costs companies more than $11 billion.Scheduling software tools cut down on fraud that may be taking place in your company.
Overtime, while often unavoidable, is another opportunity to save money through scheduling software. You have enough people to get the job done, but not so many that you’re cutting into the bottom line. Scheduling software provides the tools to cut costs in the form of unnecessary overtime by showing which employees are eligible for overtime assignments and who already clocked too many overtime hours.
Don’t be a ship helplessly tossed about in the swirling seas of scheduling employees! Find out about the benefits of Workforce.com’scomprehensive scheduling software today. You’ll see how it can boost efficiency and control costs across your entire enterprise.
Creating an effective onboarding process is vital when it comes to employee engagement and retention. While it may seem tedious and time consuming, there are many ways to implement a successful onboarding program without breaking the bank.
The onboarding process should be well-thought-out and not done on a whim. Keeping in mind the new employee and the nerves that come with starting a new job goes a long way.
Cheryl Strizelka, director of human resources at technology company Design Interactive, Inc., said that it is essential to consider the little things. New hires should be equipped with all the tools and information they need to easily transition into their new position. This includes everything from the smallest details like providing pens and notepads to the bigger priorities like making sure they have a dedicated person to guide them through their transition.
Giving a facility tour early on in the process and providing the new hire with several points of contact in case they have questions also helps make them feel more at home as quickly as possible. “These intangible considerations don’t cost a penny, yet make a huge difference,” Strizelka said.
One of the most vital parts of onboarding is introducing the new employee to their team. It’s also common for managers to take their new employees to lunch or for the company to host a breakfast on their first day to get to know the new hire better. “Those things cost money, but you wouldn’t believe how much it changes somebody’s first day and their first week because they’ve met everybody,” Strizelka said. “You want to get them integrated as quickly as possible, creating some familiarity so they feel like they’re a part of the company, even if it’s early.”
There are also crucial conversations to have with new employees that give them a sense of what their role’s purpose is in the company, as well as what workplace culture is like.
“New employees should know almost immediately how their role directly impacts the company’s vision and mission,” Strizelka said. “It’s also important that they understand how they will interface with colleagues that aren’t in their immediate circle.”
One invaluable gift that Strizelka advises all organizations to take advantage of is employee feedback. Asking employees who have recently started their positions to look back at their onboarding experience and give input on what was good and what needed improvement can be helpful. “I see a lot of HR professionals who get offended by that. They take it personally,” Strizelka said. “But when it comes down to it, that’s a gift they’re giving you. They’re giving you your next hack for your next onboarding.”
An onboarding program is usually owned by both the operations and HR teams within an organization. Strizelka said. While it’s common for these teams to feel like they’re going head-to-head, it is important for both to continuously work hand-in-hand, since this process exceeds much longer than just an employee’s first day or week.
“Sometimes we find ourselves performing onboarding activities well into the first year of employment, and the [operations] team plays a huge role in this if executed successfully,” Strizelka said.
Churning people through the onboarding process just to check off all the boxes and get it over with quickly will only hurt the organization in the long run as high turnover rates are extremely costly, Strizelka said. It is essential to think about each person as an individual when going through this process and not just something to check off of a list.“The most expensive part of onboarding is doing it wrong,” she said.
An effective onboarding program will protect the company’s investment in new employees and help create engaged and motivated team members, ultimately boosting employee retention, she said.
“The onboarding experience for an employee sets the tone for an entire employment experience,” she said. “It may be cliche, but it’s true — you never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
