How to Measure the Success of Your Onboarding Program
- Claire Baker
- Jun 20, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 22, 2023
How you onboard new members onto your team affects their long-term engagement, productivity, and retention.
A strong onboarding programs helps new employees spin up more quickly, reduces the need for corrective action, optimizes communication to improve overall productivity, and can even affect how long they stay with the company.
If your your team is struggling to manage their work, producing suboptimal results, or leaving for other opportunities, the problem may go back to Day 1.
Though the effects of an inadequate onboarding program are profound, they are also indirect, making them difficult to identify and quantify.
So how do you measure the success of your onboarding program, and improve in the ways that will have the greatest impact?
Here are some key metrics to look at:
🥇 Onboarding Best Practices: Use onboarding best practices as your point of reference for measuring and evaluating the success of your onboarding program. Set key performance indicators (KPIs) for each, and use them as the basis for your feedback surveys. Also use onboarding best practices as a benchmark to compare the new hire’s performance in the first year to make sure that you’re setting your team up for success. Onboarding best practices include…
☑️ checklists to ensure no step is overlooked, so that new team members aren’t missing key pieces of information that would help their performance and learning.
🔭 providing a complete overview of the company and position, so they understand where their work fits into the overall picture, and what is expected of them.
📖 self-service resources for independent learning. Some questions take longer to answer when you have to ask a colleague than if someone has the resources to find the answer themself. Learning is also “stickier” when someone has gone through the thought process of figuring it out themselves.
🥳 creating a warm welcome. Welcoming a new team member seeds relationships with their new colleagues and kicks off engagement right away. Conversely, not creating a warm welcome practically guarantees that the employee will feel less engaged in the long run.
👨🏿🤝👨🏽 assigning a buddy. Designating a single person to answer questions and provide guidance makes it easier to overcome shyness, and further reinforces connection as a new team member finds their place in the organization.
🙊 removing communication barriers. When it’s easy for new hires to ask questions and absorb information from their colleagues, they will spin up more quickly and feel less overwhelmed.
🏁 providing clear expectations ensures that new team members are working toward the right goals, and making quick wins to encourage them along the way.
👍 ongoing support and feedback helps maintain momentum.
🤝 Employee Engagement: Use regular survey responses, supervisor feedback, and other feedback tools to gauge your team’s engagement. If you see a rapid drop-off in engagement among your newest team members, it’s probably a sign that your onboarding program is to blame. This is especially true if new hires’ survey results are below average compared to their peers who have been with the company longer. The employee’s areas of growth or dissatisfaction can provide insight into what aspects of your onboarding program to improve. If your training tools don’t clearly communicate the why behind your policies and procedures, you may get feedback that your ways of working are arbitrary, bureaucratic, or restrictive. If the practical training in your onboarding program is weak, your team members will be less productive or may interpret well-intentioned coaching as unfair reprimands. Thus, feedback about overbearing processes, undue criticism, or poor productivity can point you toward what needs improvement.
🔁 New Hire Retention: If your new employees leave shortly after joining, that’s a sure sign that your onboarding program needs improvement. Identify areas of improvement by conducting exit surveys and talking to the manager, spin-up buddy, and any close colleagues of anyone who doesn’t stick around.
📈 Time-to-Productivity: Time-to-productivity is a metric that measures how long it takes new hires to become fully productive in their roles. Productivity can be measured in units of work per time, sales quotas, customer feedback surveys, frequency of mistakes, or ability to operate autonomously. If you’re using onboarding map like the one described here (see section 7), then you already have a standard for measuring progress. Incorporate the milestones set at onboarding into regular progress meetings, and use specific, measurable feedback to gauge success. Don’t forget that if an employee is falling short, your onboarding program is probably at least partially to blame.
🚀 Employee Development: If your team isn’t getting promoted or taking on additional responsibility over time, it can be an indication that your onboarding program is to blame. If you find yourself filling each mid- and senior-level position externally rather than promoting from within, then that’s probably another hint that both your onboarding and ongoing learning & development programs need improvement. Track each team member’s development over time. If you notice their growth has stagnated after the first year, then it’s possible that they never learned how your company measured success while they were onboarding. It may also indicate that they’re not sure how to prioritize tasks or where to seek guidance, and are burning themselves out. 💡 Bonus: You can reengage some underperforming team members by recruiting them to help improve your onboarding process.
👨👩👧👦 New Employee Integration: Finally, measure the success of your onboarding program by assessing how quickly and fully your new employees integrate into your team. Successful integration looks like:
spin-up buddy relationships developing into ongoing mentorship.
new hires volunteering constructive feedback from their own onboarding journey and offering to participate in future onboarding.
participating in team to social activities like eating lunch with coworkers, joining after-hours events, and developing strong friendships at work.
engaging with coworkers during unstructured downtime like before a meeting begins or in the hallways and break room.
By monitoring adherence to best practices, engagement, retention, productivity, development, and integration, you can measure the success of your onboarding program, identify areas for improvement.
Approaching onboarding with the same intentionality that you bring to recruiting and project planning will set your new hires up for long-term success. The quick wins from faster time-to-productivity will improve their self-efficacy and morale, leading to better engagement. When employees are more engaged, they will be more productive, produce better results, and invest “sweat equity” back in the company. When they see their efforts paying off in the team’s overall success, they will want to grow with the company long-term, leading to better retention and helping you recruit more top performers. And it all starts with a thoughtful onboarding program.
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