New-hire onboarding is not something you can do with one tool or program. No one manager can successfully onboard and welcome new employees by him or herself. It takes a team effort and aligning messages and goals from the top of your organization down to the new hires. While new employees might have caught a glimpse of your corporate culture during the hiring process, onboarding is their formal introduction to that culture in practice as well as their introduction to leadership and management styles for you and all the managers and supervisors in the office.
Onboarding is about getting more than just pertinent information to your new hires. It’s about giving them a good first impression of your organization. What are the best ways to make that happen?
Ease of Access
The first priority of any new-hire-onboarding effort should be to ensure that new employees feel comfortable and able to do their jobs. When new hires join your company, they’re enthusiastic and ready to help—that’s why you hired them, right? Don’t waste that energy by blocking their path to the tools they need to hit the ground running.
Technology can help employees who are uncertain how or where to get started. With a video-communications system in place, you can create standardized orientation videos that new hires can access as soon as they settle at their desks—wherever those desks may be. The key is creating an on-demand video and resource portal so you can control the messaging, prioritize information for new hires, and pack all the resources they’ll need into one easy-to-understand and easy-to-access package.
No matter what you want your employee-orientation video to look like, no matter what reasons you have for using video for new-hire onboarding, you have to make it accessible and useable first.
New-Hire-Onboarding Priorities
Scripted videos embedded in local intranets and portals can work wonders for your onboarding strategy, but there’s more to welcoming employees and setting them up for success.
What’s convenient for employees and what’s convenient for employers are sometimes the same, but sometimes they’re different. Sometimes what makes things easiest for employees to fully integrate with a new workspace makes it harder on employers and HR departments. Take ease of access. If the new-hire-onboarding portal is easily accessible by employees through flexible access points but data generated (for instance, data showing which resources are used most often) isn’t readily available to employers, it makes it harder for them to continue improving those onboarding efforts.
Ease of access has a lot to do with which devices are used to onboard new hires. Many employees want the ability to complete their onboarding and training programs right on their smartphones. This, of course, makes it easier for employees to complete vital onboarding tasks like filling out forms from home where they have the materials they might need to reference, but creating such cross-functionality can turn into a headache for employers. Unless you have an integrated new-hire-onboarding system designed for both mobile and desktop devices, you’ll have trouble with employees accessing and engaging with those initiatives. Flimp’s onboarding packages and tools allow you to design initiatives that work for both mobile and desktops, allowing new hires to become productive employees with relative ease.
Welcoming new employees takes more than fancy technology and useful apps. On the employer’s side, it takes a willingness to think on one’s feet and answer questions as they come up and some good, old-fashioned hospitality. Putting a human face on swirling information and a new environment makes employees feel more welcome than packing them into an auditorium or your conference room for a “welcome” meeting. Those orientation events have their place, too, and they’re far from worthless, but most employees feel more comfortable if they have some one-on-one time with their new supervisors to get their questions answered and concerns addressed.
Onboarding Success
No two onboarding journeys are the same. Each new employee has different experiences no matter how well you integrate your onboarding and HR functions. Work closely with your employees and make it as easy as possible for them to hit the ground running.
