First Impressions Matter: Onboarding Experience That Helps Your Employees Feel Cared For and Supported

A candidate's first impression starts off with the first time they interact with your organization. This means every correspondence matters. You can ensure your candidate's experience stands out by starting off with an exceptional recruiting process and solid communication with an employee app. However, once a candidate accepts an offer, the onboarding experience can be the difference between having a happy and motivated new hire or one that feels disengaged. Read on to discover how your HR Team can create a robust onboarding experience that helps your employees feel cared about, supported, and set up for success.

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Prevent Confusion During Onboarding 

New hires may find onboarding to be a time-consuming and tedious process. From filling out countless forms correctly to compiling personal documents, and understanding who to contact for support can frustrate new talent quickly. Instead, take the time to streamline the onboarding process to prevent confusion. Utilize HR tools by creating personalized portals for each of your new hires. This helps to organize everything for both you and your employee in a convenient and straightforward way. This way, an employee can see all of their personal information, and file and sign all of the necessary forms from one centralized hub. Not only that, but employees will appreciate the custom onboarding workflows and pointers along the way to help them complete everything that is necessary. No more need to worry about remembering when things are due. With a streamlined onboarding process, employees will have one less thing to worry about and can focus their attention on craft development instead. 

Empower New Hires to Utilize Employee Assistance Programs & Resources

Starting a new job is both stressful and exciting. New hires may have a lot of questions, concerns, and even self-doubt throughout the onboarding process and beyond. Therefore, help your new hires be in the know about what resources they can take advantage of, and highlight the unique programs HR provides or has partnerships with. It’s important to do so because sometimes highlighting these programs becomes lost or quickly glossed over. For instance, according to a Mental Health America survey, less than half of the employees surveyed knew about their company’s mental health services. Therefore, it would be helpful to have a centralized resource page that employees can easily navigate so they are aware of the programs offered. For instance, your resource hub can include things like online therapy support, self-help tools, work stress-reducing tips and strategy guides, information on PTO benefits, sick time, family leave, and mental wellness policies for example. In addition, ensure that your new hires know about other opportunities they may have like continued learning, self-service tools, and who may be their HR trusted point of contact. To round out your employee assistance and resources programs, you can foster employee wellness by using your intranet as well.

“As soon as we saw HR Cloud’s Onboard demo, we knew this was the perfect solution for us. We loved that it was extremely simple and powerful out of the box, but that we could customize it with advanced capabilities to make it work in our company setting.”

Elisa Garn Vice President, HR and Talent Christopherson Business Travel

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Provide Mentorship

Getting accustomed to a new role, organization, and workflows can be a big adjustment and be very stressful. To ensure your new hires have a thorough introduction to their roles and responsibilities, HR can have a mentorship program in place that can help employees feel supported rather than floundering and figuring things out on their own through trial and error. Having a mentor allows a new employee to have someone to trust and turn to for feedback, reassurance, and a go-to contact to ask questions and receive individualized training and support. Simply attending training workshops is typically not as engaging as a mentorship program. A mentorship program allows onboarding to be more personalized and tailored to the needs of each employee's learning style and skill set focus. Taking the time to have a mentorship program will be well worth the investment. It can help with time to proficiency, morale, and job satisfaction. In fact, research conducted by MentorcliQ, found that of participants, “83% of mentors and mentees said that their mentoring experience positively influenced their desire to stay at their organization.” Boosting retention is huge for organizations. This allows HR teams to focus on retention initiatives rather than constantly having to focus on candidate sourcing and hiring. Having a mentor can be the difference between your new hire becoming tenured talent at your organization or leaving due to a lack of job satisfaction. 

Personalized Introductions and Team Building

With existing team members having already established relationships and being accustomed to working together, joining a team can be intimidating at first for a new hire. Therefore, instead of simply informing the team that a new member will be joining, it's time to make introductions more personal. Ideally, your new hire’s mentor will already be a member of the team and can lend a hand in the transition period. But take things a step further. HR can have new hires provide fun information to be shared in an announcement. A memo to the team with fun facts about new hires such as experience, favorite foods, vacations, special talents, and hobbies can be shared with the company via the communications board. This will help members to start to make connections and have some interesting talking points from the get-go. Other great HR introduction programs could include new hire lunches, whether in-person or virtual, and happy hours. This helps new hires to ease into the work environment, meet colleagues, and just have some light-hearted conversations rather than diving into work-heavy related meetings. 

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Celebrate Your New Hires

Celebrating your new hires can make a big impact on their experience early on. Recognizing employees will give them the confidence and reassurance they need that they are performing well. New hires can get into their head by questioning if their work is meeting expectations or if the team is happy with their contributions. Therefore, letting your new hires know just how well they are doing can help to propel their career forward. Try having teams that can work in tandem with HR departments to create a set of guidelines for rewards and recognition. Different categories such as being a role model, meeting or exceeding production, or just for effort can be established. Managers can then use these guidelines to acknowledge new hires for achieving goals and for an overall job well done. Recognition can come in the form of team or department announcements or perks and awards. Whether it is reassurance through team praise or a gift card for a cup of coffee, even a small gesture goes a long way. 

Show You Care

It is important for HR Teams to have regular retrospectives and reflect on current onboarding programs. An excellent way to do so is by leveraging new hire feedback. Invite new hires to take a survey to better understand if your onboarding experience is holding up. This can help you to see areas that are especially helpful or opportunities for improvement. Consider even having a survey just for the mentoring program. Soliciting feedback not only allows you to take a look at the health and success of your onboarding program, but also helps to demonstrate to new hires that you care about their input and experience.

If you are looking to make not only a great first impression but a lasting impression, onboarding is key. Having a personalized, streamlined, and thorough onboarding experience can impress your employees and set the tone for workplace culture and help launch successful careers.

About Author:
This article is written by our marketing team at HR Cloud. HR Cloud is dedicated to providing powerful solutions for your HR teams and creating an exceptional employee experience. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, onboarding, and to save you valuable time!

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