Employees decide to leave organizations for a myriad of reasons – better salary packages, horrible bosses, no foreseeable career growth, etc. Unfortunately, the cost of replacing a lost employee can set their employer back nearly 2X their annual salary. This cost involves the initial recruitment drive, tests, time spent on interviews with senior management, and loss of productivity while the position remains vacant.
Unbeknown to a number of managers, it’s an ineffective onboarding process that lights the ‘get me the hell out of here’ fuse inside a new hire’s brain. This, in turn, leads to their inevitable exit from the company in a few months at best.
If you want to retain your talent and get your money’s worth, make sure that your employee onboarding program doesn’t exhibit these three signs.
#1) Onboarding is Automated Only Up Till a New Hire’s First Day
Companies use a host of top-of-the-line tools during the recruitment stage. By tapping into the power of smartphones and high-speed public networks, organizations can cost-effectively attract new employees. On the other hand, candidates love the fact that they can tap on the jobs they want regardless of where they are. From uploading a resume to the company’s database to scanning, shortlisting, testing, interviewing and sending through the final offer, every technical detail can be handled via smartphone.
But come the first day of work, the employee is bombarded with piles of paper forms to fill. Personal details, taxes, health insurance, dental, criminal records – you name it. What makes this task more tedious is that the information required is usually complex and time-consuming in nature.
Red Flag!
Automating only the first half of the onboarding process shows your inability to maintain a fast, efficient and innovative culture across your organization. This results in lost productivity and early ‘new-hire resentment’, two issues which will dramatically impact the company’s employer brand.
#2) Communication is Ineffective Between the Involved Departments
Making sure a new employee is fully informed and fully equipped on the first day involves several technical and administrative departments working in tandem. Excluding the traditional barrage of paperwork, your organization must ensure the employee’s work space is ready for them to hit the ground running without delay.
Computers should be set up. Emails. Passwords. Security badges. Payroll account. Access to knowledge bases. All of this requires the interaction of the different departments involved in onboarding. In fact, a study involving 1,000 managers from the U.S and U.K uncovered that onboarding activities require the collaboration of 5 – 10 different departments.
However, the way traditional onboarding is carried out – hand signatures at every stage, long spreadsheets, and annoying paper forms – is excruciatingly cumbersome. It drains the excitement out of the employee for one simple reason: they spend a huge chunk of their time dealing with technicalities instead of having actual human interaction. This, ultimately, limits their chances of growing familiar with their environment and superiors.
#3) Maximum Productivity isn’t Properly Defined
A study estimates that it takes eight months on average for an employee to achieve optimum levels of productivity within an organization. This is due to differences in employee behavior and how each organization views productivity. However, your onboarding program may also be responsible for this increased time-to-productivity.
If inefficient, onboarding can create a persistent disconnect between an employee’s needs and the organization’s expectations. This leads to the loss of time, money, and, of course, a potential star employee.
Of the employees who leave companies during the first 6 months, The Society for Human Resource Management found that more than half of them quote clearer guidelines to responsibilities and “more effective training” as factors that could have made them stay. Moreover, new employees who attended a well-structured onboarding program were 69% more likely to remain at the company.
The Bottom Line
These three inefficiencies are integrated into a majority of today’s onboarding programs. Therefore, it may be time for you to drop it altogether and embrace automated onboarding instead. Mobile onboarding further takes onboarding programs to a new level altogether, so consider innovative solutions such as our own transform onboarding application.
