A Structured and Well-planned Onboarding Process Boosts New Hires Retention Rate
A statistic has recently revealed that the unemployment rate in Hong Kong fell to the 20-year record low figure at 2.8% in February-April period. While low unemployment rate equates economic growth, better job opportunities, and higher consumer buying power, it also means that employers have to increase employee retention rate in the time of low unemployment.
Therefore, it is crucial to develop an effective employee retention strategy to keep staff morale high, improve employer-employee relationship, and boost employee satisfaction. One of the areas that often overlooked is the onboarding and orientation of new hires. In fact, onboarding and orientation is not an isolated responsibility but a crucial step to help new hires to get comfortable with the new company.
Onboarding Strategies to Improve Staff Retention
1. Facilitation of a smoother transition
Many hiring managers tend to assign new tasks to their new hires straightaway without a proper walkthrough of his or her job scope, let alone get them oriented. New hires hardly have enough time to acclimate and be familiarised with their new jobs and the new working environment. As such, a structured onboarding process and orientation will help new hires to know their fellow team members and colleagues facilitate them to comprehend their roles in the organisation, and help them to ease in their position smoothly.
2. Optimise the performance of new hires
A structured and well-planned onboarding process will help new hires to learn about Company’s vision, mission, culture, and core values. This preliminary process of onboarding, which is very important in the first year of new hires, serves as the crucial step to prepare new hires with challenges and jobs ahead.
3. Lay out the goals and performance management plan
As the title implies, a good onboarding process will help new hires to understand the goals and milestones of the team/department. Hiring managers could work with new hires to outline their future career goals with the clearly defined expectations, guidelines for performance management, and steps to develop job-related skills. While a clearly defined goal and informed expectations will facilitate new hires to understand what has to be done to achieve the goals, this step will also integrate them into the organisation culture.
4. Create a sense of community
While you can certainly automate or leverage the technology to share most of the information with new hires, creating a sense of community is another essential part of onboarding process. It is because human interaction, relationships with colleagues and superiors can help new hires to feel motivated.
Lastly, a structured onboarding process/programme will enable an organization to retain their top talents, keep their employees motivated, and, eventually, bring down the attrition rate. The onboarding process is always effective because it has direct influence on staff morale, performance and the impact of the company’s business goals.
