Induction Process Review

After hiring the right people the next most important step in retaining employees is onboarding them properly.  You only have 1 chance to make a first impression.  

But so many companies get it wrong and have high staff turnover as a result:

• According to the Wynhurst Group, 22% of staff turnover occurs within the first 45 days of employment.  They also say that “New employees who went through a structured onboarding program were 58% more likely to be with the organisation after 3 years”.
• Leadership IQ found that “46% of rookies wash out in their first 18 months” in their study of 20,000 newly hired employees.
• Executive search firm Egon Zehnder states that, “Many companies leave executive onboarding to chance, and as a result experience failure rates in excess of 50% when it comes to retaining new executive talent”.

Employee turnover is expensive.  Conventional wisdom pegs this figure at between 50 - 200% of a staff member’s annual salary.  Employee disengagement (running rampant at around 80% according to Hewitt) can cost a company up to 1/3 of the disengaged employee’s salary in lost productivity.

One of the best ways to reduce unwanted staff turnover is to onboard properly.  Many companies’ onboarding programs (if they have them at all) are woefully inadequate.  They concentrate on the systems and processes required to get the new hire up and running, rather than helping them settle into the team and become as productive as quickly as possible.  

A few years ago my friend Mel Kleiman, Founder and President of US consultancy, Humetrics was engaged by a client to do exit interviews on staff who had left his client within the previous 90 days.  To his amazement he found that a large percentage of these former staff members would consider coming back to their old employer.  Why?  Because they had not yet settled into their new team.  They didn’t feel like a valued member of the new company.  They had not yet developed the emotional attachment to their new employer that they had to their old one.

The lesson here is that the faster you can break the emotional ties to the new staff member’s old company and establish ties to yours, the risk of you losing that new employee not only diminishes for the first month but also for 3 months or 18 months.  As we’ve seen in the above Wynhurst statistic, you are more likely to keep them 3 years or longer.  

And this translates into bottom line cost savings and productivity increases for you.

So how do you break their old emotional ties and establish new ones?

• Start onboarding with the offer
• Complete any administrative, process or procedure oriented work prior to Day 1
• Get them as productive as possible as soon as possible (starting with Day 1)
• Help them develop positive relationships with their co-workers and other stakeholders immediately
• Communicate well and often during the first 6 months

During the Employee Onboarding Review we help you establish a very robust framework and set up processes to accomplish all of the above.  

We will:

• Teach you best practice offer procedures
• Help you design a framework including onboarding templates to use to bring all new hires quickly up to speed with their new company, enable them to be more productive faster and to establish positive relationships immediately.
• Help you to establish a robust communication framework for the first 180 days
• Give you several tips and techniques to help you help them cut the ties to their old employer and quickly develop emotional ties to your company.