Modern Onboarding Process

Being hired to a new position in today’s day and age doesn’t always mean that you know everything as soon as you step in the door. There are things, from tidbits of office information to entire educational courses, that employees will need to learn as they grow within a company. That’s what an onboarding process is for; to train employees on subjects and tools that they need to know to excel in their position. Looking at the employee onboarding definition, we can see that onboarding includes the lessons, training, and information to get a new employee performing at their position.

Even the most qualified job prospects aren’t going to know everything right out of the gate on their first day of work and while onboarding might seem like a wasted resource to some managers, the quicker that employees can get to their fighting best, the better. More and more companies are adopting onboarding processes to help find the best talent for their culture. By leaving space for employees to learn skills during onboarding processes, businesses can hire for intangible skills that make a certain person an amazing candidate rather than just one that will get the job done. Onboarding can be as simple or complex as necessary, but it must be done with the intent to really ensure that employees benefit from the information being presented.

Creating an Onboarding Process

Whether you’re teaching where to park and how the printer works, or you’re introducing the entire team and telling them how your bonus structure works, employee onboarding can be useful to a new face. Traditionally, training was confined to printed manuals and binders passed out to employees as they were walked through a slideshow by the HR manager. With such a large cost associated with printing manuals, setting aside time for trainers to come in, and the opportunity cost of employees taking the training, onboarding was usually pushed to the backburner. As companies have moved toward modern training workflows, onboarding became more feasible. Now, many teams that couldn’t set aside the time and resources needed for a proper employee onboarding process can now start helping their new hires get going quickly.

When starting with your onboarding, understand that employee onboarding steps are completely different from those taken during a client onboarding process. Some companies that deal with a variety of clients and projects find great value in bringing their clients through an onboarding process, but employee onboarding is a more singular effort. A good place to start would be working toward an employee onboarding template. This template can be as specific or broad as you need it to be, depending on the types of employees that you’ll be bringing in. If you only hire sales reps, then your onboarding can be pretty specific toward the sales route, but if you add in a marketing team, a client experience team, and some developers, then your onboarding process flow chart might have to scale to reflect that change. Once you have the scope laid out, just think what you would want a new employee reading in an onboarding document template. At Lessonly, we have a “First Day” course that introduces the company, why we’re here, and a few other small things like how to work the coffee machine.

We built our employee onboarding with Lessonly because it gives our team leaders the ability to see who has completed which assignments and allows for further training materials to be assigned after that and we get a pretty good discount. Emails arrive in the inboxes of our new employees whenever they have a new lesson that needs to be finished, and admins are notified whenever said lesson is completed. The entire process is helpful for new members to our team, and seamlessly transitions into employee development training down the road.

Don’t Forget the Onboarding Checklist

A good tool to ensure that new employee orientation is accomplished for every new employee is an onboarding checklist. Building an onboarding schedule with defined goals that are easy to hit is the key to making sure that onboarding doesn’t get pushed to the side. Here at Lessonly, we like to break down the new hire process flow chart into four separate sections:

Forming – Forming is what most people will think of when they hear the term onboarding. Employees tend to spend the first few days of their job in the forming stage where they fill out new employee forms and listen to the company pitch for how it is to work at this place. For most, this is all that is included in the employee onboarding process flow chart, but the learning phases continue on far beyond the first day or two.

Storming – Up next is when a new employee learns how they fit into your existing team. Storming usually lasts within the first week or two of an employee’s time at a company. Beyond the onboarding programs, this is where that person is going to start to meet their team members, learn the workflow, and learn how they fit into it. Lessons that reinforce how business is done according to your company ethics, values, and beliefs can be very helpful during this stage to ensure that new employees fit with your culture.

Norming – Norming is where the benefits of your onboarding checklist sample will start to come to fruition. This stage typically happens between the second and sixth weeks of someone’s employment. At this stage in your onboarding process checklist, they are starting to move beyond the beginner level tactics and really take the training wheels off. If your training and onboarding process template has been working up until this point, you should expect to see an employee who knows where they are and confidence in their work.

Performing – From here on out, onboarding is usually over. At this point, your new hire has become a fully-providing member of your business. Beyond this point, employees need ongoing training rather than onboarding programs. It’s important not to neglect ongoing training for your existing employees, but getting them started off right with a modern onboarding process is a good way to begin.

A Few Onboarding Best Practices

When onboarding new employees, maximizing success in their future roles at the company is the long-term priority. To help be as successful as possible in that respect, there are a few onboarding best practices that your company can incorporate into your process. To start, encourage managers and team leaders to be as transparent as possible when it comes to training and onboarding goals. Keeping as much information as allowed in the open between leaders and employees will help to quell any fears of not meeting expectations. Another tip is to take this focus on onboarding and use that to build ongoing training for your company as well. Much of the information, values, and skills that you incorporated into your onboarding will be great material to train on for existing employees. Lessonly allows its users to quiz and poll their learners through built-in questions that can be added to any lesson. Admins can easily make these questions graded or free-response, and it allows you to see where your company is at when it comes to the information they need to know to accomplish their job.