It takes an average of eight months for a new hire to attain peak productivity, and over a third of them will start looking for a new job within that time span. It is also no secret that the price of employee turnover can quickly kill a business, especially since replacing an employee can cost anything between one half and two times their yearly salary.
Much of this comes down to the poor experience new hires have when getting up to speed in a company. This is the process known as employee onboarding, where new employees are integrated into the organisation with an optimal blend of orientation, training, and development. For simpler roles, this process can take days or weeks, right up to months or years for more complex roles.
Onboarding is itself a costly process, but it is also essential. Employee morale and productivity depend on it, yet according to a Gallup poll, only 12% of employees claim that their companies do a great job with onboarding. There are many reasons for this deficit, but some of the most common include a lack of a standardised orientation process, suitable training materials, and the fact that HR managers are often too busy to carry out effective onboarding processes.
Most HR managers understand what constitutes a robust onboarding process, yet they often lack the tools needed to manage it in a way that it ensures a consistent employee experience. When that happens, the unavoidable red tape involved in orientation and onboarding becomes an enormous burden, with HR managers waiting on feedback from other departments, such as payroll and staff training. These issues often manifest at the very beginning of the process, leading to difficult and stressful first-day experiences that are difficult to rectify later on.
The onboarding process comprises many moving parts, requiring a smooth interdepartmental collaboration. Yet all too often do organizations, particularly larger enterprises, find themselves operating in siloed environments that lack the agility to scale with demand. When this happens, HR managers quickly end up being overburdened, and employee experience suffers from the very beginning of the onboarding process.
Integrated business management facilitates the collaboration of people, assets, finances, and time, all of which play a central role throughout the employment lifecycle. Onboarding is where it all begins, which is why every business needs a customisable HR platform that integrates seamlessly with all the other mission-critical platforms in the enterprise – from finance to asset management to information governance.
Integrated business management supports the entire onboarding process from orientation to ongoing development. Here is how:
1. Preparation
With a truly integrated environment, the recruitment cycle should merge seamlessly into pre-onboarding. This begins as soon as an applicant accepts an offer. As such, there needs to be a straightforward process for transferring the information you have already collected from the hire into the onboarding management system.
The pre-onboarding stage is when documents are signed, schedules planned, and new hires are introduced to the company. For new hires, this process can be stressful, especially if they are still working out the notice from their previous employer. Some may even be relocating as well, so it is important to make this initial stage as smooth as possible.
An integrated system should ideally facilitate a paper-free process for submitting and signing documents, sending out introductory emails, and assigning initial onboarding tasks to the right people.
2. Orientation
Orientation occurs on the first day of an employee’s tenure in your company. This stage must be clearly structured and introduce new hires to the layout of the organisation and its core policies. It is also an important opportunity to introduce the new hire to the team, especially in the case of remote work where it is often harder to get orientated.
During this phase, there will be multiple concurrent workflows, which will be addressed much more effectively with an integrated environment. These workflows include payroll and benefits enrolment and issuing equipment, hence the need for seamless collaboration between teams. For example, issuing IT equipment and setting up user accounts requires the involvement of the IT department, while the finance department will be responsible for setting up payroll. An integrated environment ensures that key documents and other information can be transferred quickly and securely to ensure a smooth process.
3. Training
Employee training is a multifaceted process which, depending on the complexity of the role, can take months or even years. While organisations should certainly not take any shortcuts when it comes to training, a consolidated, role-centric process will go a long way towards ensuring that new hires reach maximum productivity as soon as possible.
Depending on the job role, training may itself happen over multiple phases, with performance milestones being established in advance at, for example, 30-day intervals. The process should begin with a thorough skills assessment to identify any existing skills gaps in order to build a customised training program tailored to the individual needs of the new hire. Engagement is also vital throughout this stage, hence the need to deliver measurable results.
An integrated business management system can help improve the training process by keeping all relevant materials in one place, tracking performance, and sending push notifications and email reminders.
4. Development
Once a new hire has passed their first major milestone, which typically occurs around the 90-day mark, they will enter the ongoing development stage. This lasts for the remaining duration of their tenure in the organization, since it concerns continuous learning and improvement. By this point, the employee should already be deeply integrated into the business, but that does not mean onboarding is over. Rather, onboarding should merge seamlessly into development.
While this stage might not be as structured as previous ones, an integrated environment does make it easier to manage ongoing training and development tasks and track performance by conducting onboarding surveys, progress reports, and organising regular social and training activities. With an integrated business management software, you can keep all informational resources in one place, making them readily accessible to those who need them. With an organised operational structure, you can reduce risk, reduce time to productivity, and promote continuous improvement.
C-PEOPLE is the HR management software of integrated business management system ContinuSys. Our platform facilitates seamless engagement throughout the entire employment lifecycle from hiring to onboarding to exit. Get started with your free 30-day trial to see how it works.
