The Essential Elements of a Successful Onboarding Program
- Claire Baker
- Jun 20, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 22, 2023
A thoughtful new hire onboarding program is critical for a team member’s engagement and productivity throughout their lifecycle at your company.
A successful onboarding program can lead to higher quality work, better talent management, and improved retention. We’ve already discussed the steps for creating an engaging onboarding process and how to measure the success of your onbording program, but what aspects of your onboarding program have the highest impact?
Are you looking for the must-haves for a lightweight onboarding process that you can build on over time?
Do you want to know what high-leverage changes you can make quickly for maximal impact?
Here are some key components to consider when developing your onboarding program:
1. 🧭 Nail the mission, values, and strategic goals: Your company’s mission, values, and high-level strategic goals provide the framework for all of the information that a new team member must absorb as they spin up.
Make sure that new employees fully understand the mission –and how your company values relate to that mission– so that they understand the logic behind strategic decisions.
Values provide the priorities that team members will apply to make big and small decisions, regardless of their position in the organization.
Likewise, the company’s high-level strategic goals will give new employees a goal to aim for when they make tactical decisions. With mission, values, and strategy providing a three-dimensional framework, new information will be more “sticky” and the new employee will know how to apply the information as they begin to operate independently.
Further reading: Connecting your benefits to your strategic goals, Using policies to operationalize your values.
2. 🗺️ Provide a map: Providing a map of the employee’s first year will help them understand expectations at various stages in their spin-up journey, how success is measured, and the directions for growth over time. For maximum impact, make sure that the onboarding map is specific to the role and current roadmap.
Having a clear picture of expectations and their journey to get there can mitigate a new team member’s overwhelm in the beginning, and provide motivation to continue growing as they become more confident in the role.
3. 💬 Give and receive feedback: Give frequent and specific feedback in the early days about what the new hire is doing well and where they missed the mark. Feedback on how they approached a problem can be just as useful as tactical feedback on the steps they should follow or how to use tools. Strategic feedback will help them generalize and apply the guidance to future situations. Don’t forget to catch the new hire doing something right, and give them positive feedback on what they should continue doing.
Remember that the employee’s performance (positive and negative) may also be a result of how they were taught. Create a survey to collect feedback after the first week, and another after they’ve completed the onboarding program. Also include a method for collecting ad hoc feedback and suggestions, and encourage spin-up buddies and managers to submit suggestions as well.
Further reading: Measuring the success of your onboarding program
4. 🧑🏾🏫 Use your existing team for learning & development: Each member in your organization has job-specific knowledge about the company, and a unique set of skills and experiences that you can use to develop the entire team. In addition to spin-up buddies to deliver 1:1 attention, consider creating a curriculum of sessions delivered by team members throughout the organization. If these specialized sessions are a prescribed aspect of the onboarding curriculum, they can help new employees build connections and relationships in other parts of the organization.
These in-house education sessions aren’t necessarily limited to onboarding. They can be delivered regularly as part of an ongoing learning and development program to showcase your team’s knowledge to anyone in the organization interested in learning more about the topic. Even if these specialized sessions were created with new hires in mind, they can be helpful to team members from other departments who want to learn about other aspects of the company. In turn, learning alongside tenured employees from other areas of the company can help the new hire feel more connected to the whole team. Therefore, it benefits new hires and “old-timers” alike to publicize these sessions and make them available to everybody.
5. 🧲 Always be engaging: Engagement begins as soon as someone signs an offer, and continues until an employee walks out the door on their last day. The more thought and effort you invest into engaging your employees throughout their onboarding journey, the more self-reinforcing that engagement will be over time, paying off in better productivity and retention.
Whenever you work on your onboarding process –whether you’re communicating directly with the new hire, creating onboarding assets, or developing policies and procedures– consider the employee’s experience and how you can bake in support and a feeling of being “seen.”
Further reading: Keeping people engaged before their first day.
6. 👀 Pay attention to integration: New team members not integrating with their coworkers is an indication that your onboarding program needs improvement, and can be an early warning sign of long-term culture problems. When a new hire isn’t comfortable asking questions, they won’t form bonds with their coworkers as quickly, and they won’t volunteer to help as often.
If you notice that your new hires keep to themselves, or they’re making avoidable mistakes, they might be afraid to ask questions. If so, the engagement portion of your onboarding may be to blame. They may also be afraid to make mistakes, and avoid drawing attention to their work with questions or collaboration. Pay attention to how well your new hires are integrating into the team, and address the root issues in your onboarding program before they expand into broader cultural issues.
Further reading: 9 steps for creating an onboarding program.
7. 💻 Virtual onboarding is not just live onboarding in a box: With more and more companies shifting to a hybrid or fully-remote working model, a large number of new hires are onboarding remotely. Virtual onboarding is more than just providing digital copies of your onboarding materials and delivering face-to-face training sessions via Zoom. Virtual onboarding requires an entirely different strategy for delivering the same core content.
When onboarding remotely, you must put even more thought into new employee engagement and deliberately creating opportunities for new team members to build relationships at work. Your virtual onboarding curriculum puts extra emphasis on written materials, so make sure that they are visually attractive, easy to search and scan, and that their content is engaging.
If your virtual onboarding program is successful, the diversity, recruiting, and retention benefits of remote work make it well worth the investment. But you’ll never enjoy those benefits if your new hires don’t learn quickly or feel like they’re part of a team. When developing or adapting your onboarding program for remote workers, make sure to double down on the community and connection aspects of your training program so that your remote team members stay engaged, feel comfortable asking questions, and feel like an integral member of the team.
By putting thought into both the content and delivery of your onboarding materials, you can foster a culture of ongoing learning that will keep your new hires engaged and growing; Even if you can’t deliver all the must-have information on Day 1. When new team members feel prepared, supported, and engaged, it builds a positive cultural feedback loop where your team wants to grow, contribute, and stay with your company for the long term.
Summary
Company mission, values, and strategic goals create a framework that is the foundation for learning.
A spin-up map communicates expectations and provides concrete goals for new hires.
Give specific feedback on what the new hire is doing well, not just critical feedback.
Leverage your team’s knowledge to foster relationships, learning, and development.
Engagement during onboarding pays off long term.
New hire integration is an early warning sign of ongoing cultural problems.
Be intentional about virtual onboarding.
If implementing any of these strategies made a difference in your organization, I’d love to celebrate your success with you. Contact me to share your success stories, or if you’d like help developing and improving your onboarding program.
Want to read more about how to improve your onboarding workflows and experience? Check out these related articles:
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