Biggest mistakes with onboarding employees
Making a great first impression matters. Yet many companies struggle to create a smooth onboarding process that converts happy hires into productive ambassadors. If you want to create or rework your company’s onboarding, here are some common mistakes - and more importantly, how to avoid them. Because making these mistakes will make your life as a HR manager a lot harder than it should be.
Every HR managers has been through it, you hire a new employee and the questions start coming:
What should we teach them? How can I make them feel comfortable and welcome? How will they know their exact role in the company?
Employee onboarding is something that we have a ton of experience in and we know what mistakes you simply can not make.
Below, we will explain the 6 biggest mistakes we see when it comes to onboarding newly hired employees and why you should do everything in your power to avoid them!
1. Obvious - not onboarding at all
This one is obvious, right?
Sadly enough we see a lot of companies that have no onboarding process whatsoever…
This really saddens us because we know for sure that it will cost the company a lot of time and money as their employee turnover is likely higher than it could be.
Recent studies have shown that not onboarding your newly hired employees can increase the likelihood of them leaving the company in the first 12 months by almost 70%!
This is something that you want to avoid as a HR manager or business owner.
If you’re not onboarding your employees because you simply don’t know the do’s & don’ts, click here to read our in-depth article with how you should onboard your new employees.
2. Only caring about “hard skills”
We know that you hired the specific employee because of his skills and knowledge but this should not be the main focus of your onboarding process.
During the onboarding it’s really important that your employees get training about your companies’ values and mission, not only about how they can use their skills to grow the company but more importantly, you should make them feel at home.
3. Making the onboarding process repeatable
What we mean by repeatable is not that your employees should do the onboarding multiple times. Of course, they can if they have to but that’s not the goal of the onboarding process.
It’s really important that whenever a new onboarding starts, the specific employee can get the same onboarding as the other employees by using automated systems.
For instance, we at Sunday have a 90 day email sequence that sends emails with specific training to newly hired employees to get them up to speed.
The first emails are more about our company values and mission but later on we focus on hard skills and general knowledge regarding our company.
Besides that we have a quarterly onboarding week where new hires must come to the HQ. This is a week of intense training to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
4. Make sure that the person that is responsible for the onboarding process, has time to take care of it
There’s nothing worse than having a good onboarding strategy but having a HR manager that lacks time to interact with the new hires…
It’s really important that the new hire has a specific person that they can go to, to ask their questions! Otherwise they will not get all the needed information and not feel at home because they’ll have the feeling that they are not important enough.
We can’t stress this enough, your employee onboarding may be the most important (but overlooked) part of business!
5. Giving them too little or too much skill based training
This is a tricky one. You’ll always hire different types of employees, some will have a lot of experience and some will have less experience.
This is something that you should have figured out during the job interview because this will determine the next phases of your onboarding process.
For example: your new hire is an expert in Advertising, should you give him skill based training to increase his advertising skills or should you spend more time indoctrinating the hire with your company values and mission?
Everyone would choose the second option, duh!
But sadly enough this is not what’s happening in the real world. We see it all the time with our clients: they treat all the hires the same way, which results in frustration from the employee’s part and an unnecessary loss of time and money for the company.
6. Not having a clear goal with your onboarding
We all know that setting goals is key in life and especially in business.
That’s why it’s obviously also important to set goals with your onboarding process!
What do you want to accomplish with your onboarding process?
This is not something that we can answer for you without having more specific information of course so you should take your time to think this through.
Take your onboarding to the next level
Creating an onboarding process is not an easy task, even for seasoned HR managers or business owners.
That's where we come in. We have a ton of experience with creating structural onboarding plans for your organization.
Because we know how much people need help with onboarding, we created a massive blog post where we show you step-by-step how to onboard your employees in a successful manner!
Click here to read the complete onboarding blog post (you’ll be mind blown!
In the main blog post we will also be giving you a lot of free stuff:
- A 30 day onboarding calendar that shows you exactly what to do each day
- A onboarding canvas template that includes what questions you should ask before you start hiring employees
- The secret triangle of onboarding that we use in Sunday to ensure a successful onboarding
All these downloads are available here for you. Discover our ultimate guide to employee onboarding where our commercial manager explains step-by-step how to onboard your new hires like a pro!
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