Revamp Your Onboarding Process in 2017 with These 5 Strategies

Onboarding is one of the most overlooked processes in all of business. Yet it affects each one of your new hires, your HR department and has a major impact on budget through costly high turnover rates. When turnover is high, managers spend too much time recruiting and less time actually managing existing employees.

Many managers associate high turnover with the new “job hopping” trend due to the number of new hires that quit their jobs after just 6 months (33%). However, in this economy it is unlikely that this number of employees would be choosy when it comes to their livelihoods. What is more likely is that new hires have not been given an effective onboarding program to be successful or feel welcome in their new roles. Here’s what you can do to improve your onboarding program to better suit the needs of your new hires in 2017.

1. Invite the Team

Who better to show a new employee the ropes than the team members that they will be working with for the foreseeable future? Allowing multiple members of the team to onboard new employees not only gives new hires a better idea of the daily routine right from the start, but it also makes the other team members feel more involved in the company.

2. Two-way Onboarding

Unfortunately, an common way that new employees become disengaged is because the onboarding process all about what they can do for your company. A better way to get the most success out of your new hires is to establish the preferences of each side and finding the perfect compromise that will maximize productivity.

3. Throw a welcoming party

When you hire industrial workers, don’t just introduce them to the other workers on the line. Instead, throw a little, or big, welcoming party for your new hires to let them know how valued they truly are. Light industrial onboarding programs are often so sterile that new hires easily get lost in the crowd and rarely get a chance to feel welcome in their new workplace.

4. Strong start

If you are constantly running into slow-starting new hires, an easy way to combat this is to start your new recruits off with an important project to set them off on the right track. This will establish new team members as capable professionals from the start. This boost of confidence will bring the most out of your employees and give your team the assurance that they can rely on this employee to be a capable coworker.

5. Open Onboarding

Not limiting your onboarding program to a given strategy may put extra strain on your hiring managers and HR department, but it can minimize turnover rate by modifying each onboarding process to best suit each individual new hire. Each new position carries a different set of parameters that may benefit from one onboarding process over another. A given new hire may also benefit from a different kind or level of training than the next recruit. Having a number of onboarding tactics to use for new hires will give your onboarding program a major boost.

Give your company the boost it needs to stay atop your industry by working with a national leader in light industrial recruiting in The Reserves Network. Work with The Reserves Network to find your next great candidate today!