How to Enhance Your Onboarding Program? - Interactive Services

So, you’ve hired some new staff. You’ve completed the recruitment process, done the paperwork, sent your recruit a welcome pack and set a date for their start. But what happens then? How do you ensure that your new hire gets the best possible start to life at your company? How do you harness all that enthusiasm and get-up-and-go? How do you make sure that they don’t drown in information? How do you ensure that they get the support they need and get set up to succeed? How do you quickly get them to productivity? How do you ensure retention?

Chances are, if you aren’t able to answer these questions, your new hire may be gone within the first 90 days, and all that effort, all that expense and all that labor may go to waste.

“FACT! 22% of staff turnover happens in the first 45 days.”

Here at Interactive Services, we’ve been creating new hire programs for 25 years with the biggest companies on the planet: Walmart, Capital One, Thomson Reuters, Iron Mountain, KFC, Ardent Healthcare, BASF, State Street, Morgan Stanley, and more.

What We’ve Learned

In our 25 years in the business, we’ve been approached to partner with clients who have developed new hire programs that didn’t work. So we worked with our clients to find out why. Here’s what our research revealed:

We’ve found that many new hire programs don’t deliver the result organizations are expecting, because:

1. Analysis focuses on content delivery and fails to take account of existing data around attrition and productivity.
2. The LMS or hosting system is difficult to use and creates a bad first impression and a difficult journey.
3. The culture of new hire onboarding fails to set the new hires, managers and sponsors up for success.

Where It Goes Wrong

In the 25 years we’ve been doing this, we’ve seen onboarding programs with GREAT content fail, because…

1. The analysis wasn’t meaningful and didn’t target organization-specific issues
2. The design didn’t address those specific issues
3. The content failed to engage the new hires on a personal and inspirational level, connecting the individual to the culture and mission of the organization
4. The new hire found it difficult to access materials, or juggle multiple platforms, and
5. THE BIG ONE: Leaders and managers were not engaged with the new hire journey, and didn’t have the time, materials or motivation to provide the necessary support

“FACT! Successful onboarding programs can result in a 50% increase in retention and a staggering 54% improvement in time to productivity.”

Above all else, we’ve found that disengaged leaders and managers is the critical factor that will contribute to an onboarding program failing. To put it starkly, if hiring managers, buddies and HR staff don’t have a commitment to ensuring that the new hire is supported beyond the initial flurry of activity, you run the risk of failure. This is what we call The Accountability Principle. It’s the silver bullet at the core of everything we do.

Interactive Services’ Top Five Tips To Turbo-Charge Your Onboarding Program:

1. We design onboarding experiences that build accountability into the process, to guarantee that new hires get supported from Day 1 to Day 365. Everyone has skin in the game.
2. We ensure that new hires have a clear framework for success and a go-to network for support. This means a manager or leader who can help them set goals, a buddy who can help them with smaller, more informal needs, and a clear path of communication and backup for HR tasks and queries.
3. We build in regular checkpoints – meetings and events to provide structure and opportunities to explore areas for discussion. What gets discussed, sticks.
4. We nudge – that is we use the power of the My First Year portal and approach to remind people what they need to do and when they need to do it.
5. We provide easy-to-use tools and resources to drive people towards self-sufficiency and self-development, making sure that new hires are assuming accountability for their own progress from Day 1.

“FACT! Employees who participate in a structured onboarding program are 69% more likely to stay with an organization for 3 years.”

Find Out More

We know that the investment your organization makes in onboarding is one of your most critical spends. So, we’ve created My First Year to make sure that investment produces results. Watch this short video to find out more:

We’d love to walk you through some of our new hire solutions. Contact us to ask for a demo, and we’ll be in touch to set up a 30 minute call.

My First Year from Interactive Services: The onboarding your future leaders deserve.

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Written by: Damien DeBarra
Learning Solutions Director