By avoiding these 5 common mistakes during the employee onboarding process, you can ensure your new hires are happy, motivated and ready to contribute.
Do you think your business’s employee onboarding process is a good reflection of how you run your company? Do new hires seem happy and dedicated after being welcomed as a member of your team? With the employee onboarding system being a critical element of growing your company, you must ensure that the process is as polished and seamless as possible.
In order to enhance your onboarding procedure, make sure that you avoid these five common, detrimental mistakes.
1. Being Unpersonable
Employees want to feel welcomed to their new place of work. By briskly rushing employees through the onboarding process, you run a great risk of coming off unpersonable and cold. Instead of running through a cut-and-dry to-do list, give new employees a brief taste of their work responsibilities on the first day. This will help break up the monotony of paperwork, reading materials, company standards and regulations, etc.; it will help employees feel like they are needed and already making a difference.
2. Paperwork Nightmare
Paperwork is an inevitable beast ingrained in the onboarding process. And while you shouldn’t neglect the legal and procedural requirements of completing such paperwork, there are ways that you can make this paperwork easier to fill out like employee onboarding software. With onboarding software you can electronically alter your paperwork, and forms can be downloaded, filled out, scanned and signed in a quick, efficient, and easy manner. These documents can then be stored to cloud technology and accessed with a click of a button. By using the latest in technology gadgets, you no longer have to side-step the onboarding process and you can have the chance to make a great impression on new employees.
3. Slow Training
One of the biggest, most common mistakes you can make while onboarding new employees is failing to have an upbeat, effective training period. Remember that you’ve hired this employee because of a particular skill set, and by drawing out the training process you’re preventing them from contributing to the success of your company. Yes, they need to understand company standards and procedures, but by letting them sit around for a week or two with nothing to do, you will be throwing away money and your new employees will likely be bored and disappointed with their new job.
4. Careless Hand-Off
Carelessly handing off your new employees to the onboarding team for training or introduction purposes can have serious backlash. Chances are your new hire will feel lost, and you’ll likely fail to give them the immediate, beneficial connection to the company that makes your staff realize the positive reflections of what your business stands for. Similarly, if you ever want to depend on new hires to be part of the onboarding team in the future, they’ll be more likely to treat others with the same procedural stiffness that they received as new employees.
5. Information Overload
Lastly, another major mistake that many companies make in the onboarding process is overloading new employees with too much information. Instead of bogging new hires down with loads of information on policies, procedures, duties, etc., break these employees in slowly by giving them information as it becomes necessary. You can also give your new hires an opportunity for some hands-on experience that will help them better understand and retain the information.
Remember that the ultimate purpose of new employee onboarding is to welcome new hires to the company in a manner that makes them feel needed and appreciated, while also catching them up-to-speed on the internal business community. By avoiding these five common mistakes, you can enhance your onboarding process so it achieves just that.
By Annabelle Smyth
Source: Business2Community
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