Bringing the Human Back to Human Resource Management: Onboarding

One of the most valuable aspects of joining an organization is making new connections and interactions.

The current times are about to witness, if not already, a great reshuffle of talent across industries. As organizations face a talent crunch, having the right plan to strategize the new talent joining the organization is half of the objective; the other half is how to achieve this.

Though organizations across the world are striving to fix those skill gaps, very few understand how to fix this. An often-overlooked strategy is onboarding—invariably the single-most efficient and complete training that covers most facets of an organization. The vitals of compliance, clarity, confidence, connection, and, most importantly, “culture” can be broadly discussed in an effective onboarding program.

At this time, because countless employees are working from home with irregular schedules, having a strategic, mature, and meaningful onboarding plan is inevitable. We recommend combating this responsibility with continuous connection, commitment, and culture, as described below:

Connection – To help new employees feel welcomed and excited, reconsider the onboarding program. While the mandated new joiner interaction can happen, it is important to assist the new-hire in understanding where their role fits in and how they will contribute to the vision of the organization. A recent report suggests that 69% of employees who experience positive onboarding are more likely to remain with their employer for at least three years.

Giving new-hires clear, simple, timely, and personalized information will equip them to make decisions at work. New-hires especially crave a personal touch. The “water-cooler moments” can now be replaced with a collaborative leaderboard-based game designed to reveal interesting, step-by-step insights, inclusively within a group of new-hires, their reporting managers, and colleagues.

Commitment – To create a strong bond and aid new-hires in dedicating themselves to an organization, a committed onboarding program that caters to their needs is required. Covering the why and how of their work promotes the greater mission of the organization and makes the newly hired highly involved to perform better and faster at work. We recommend not to overwhelm new employees with information but to make them aware of the resources available for their needs.

Learning strategies to suit the learner’s style, cognition, flexibility, and work–life balance, such as collaborative learning, customized content, adaptive learning, and simulation, will demonstrate the earnest effort being taken to fully integrate the new-hire into the organization. When an organization shows respect, communicates clearly, and promotes team bonding, employees respect their peers, and trust that their coworkers are committed to excellence, and, thereby, commitment improves.

Culture – Onboarding can provide a new employee with the confidence, clarity, and skills required to make them feel comfortable. A clear and transparent onboarding program expresses the company’s mission, vision, and values, and the time of onboarding is the best opportunity to communicate these elements to a new-hire. Every company has a unique culture, and, in 2022, it is more challenging to get the right onboarding process aligned to establish cultural expectations.

Onboarding can provide learning strategies that shed light on realistic job previews, cross-cultural awareness, assimilation, the matrix chart of the organization, knowledge-sharing sessions, etc. To ease the anxiety of new-hires, onboarding could consist of giving a guided tour of the office premises in virtual reality, using periodic chatbots to analyze the employee’s engagement level, creating a collaborative game-based learning module, and providing the employee with office jargon and how-to lists, help guides, and job-performance aids utilizing microlearning strategy.

Being the new-hire in an organization is much like being the new kid on the block. Human resource staff can empathize with the discomfort and stress of belonging to a new place where one barely knows anyone and, added to that challenge, the current situation of working remotely! Since onboarding is a series of events, tackle this discomfort with dedicated solutions strategized to suit your company culture.

The faster an employee embraces company culture, the faster they will participate.

If you are one of the stakeholders of managing the human capital for your organization, optimize your onboarding process with Ozemio.