There might come a time when your business grows, and you realise you need to take on more (and more) employees. That’s a wonderful moment, and it’s definitely a sure sign of success, but the more people you employ, the harder it becomes to onboard them in the right way. After all, when you hire your first employee, you’ll be able to spend lots of time with them, helping them understand your processes and their job. Perhaps you can do the same with your next few hires, but over time, you’ll be too busy, and that crucial onboarding could be lost, leading to dissatisfied employees and poor productivity. With that in mind, here are some ways to make onboarding easier so that everyone gets the same chance to succeed, including you and your business. Read on to find out more.
Know Why Onboarding Is Important
If you’re finding it hard to be motivated to carry out proper onboarding with new team members for any reason, it’s important to think about why onboarding is important. Bearing this in mind will help point you towards putting proper onboarding in place for everyone, no matter whether they’re your first employee or your one hundredth.
In essence, effective onboarding sets the tone for the employee’s entire journey within the company, and introduces them to your business’s goals, values, and expectations. They’ll know what they’re meant to do right from the start, and that will help them be more confident but it will also show them that you care about their wellbeing and how well they do, and that will give them an extra boost of motivation to work harder and be as productive and efficient as possible. And of course, onboarding will help with health and safety too, ensuring everyone stays protected and uses equipment and machinery in the most sensible way.
Design An Onboarding Plan
The best thing to do if you’re going to have to onboard a lot of people is to design a comprehensive onboarding plan. In this way, you’ll know that each and every employee who starts with you will be taught the same things in the same way, so there’s consistency and clarity throughout the process, no matter how many times onboarding is carried out.
The onboarding plan needs to contain information on everything from administrative tasks, like paperwork, to training sessions and even introductions to other team members. In reality, it should be a large document that details everything a new employee might need to know when they’re just starting out in your specific business.
It’s the specific nature of the onboarding plan that really counts; don’t just download a template from the internet and hope for the best, as it could be that it contains information that’s just confusing because it’s not relevant and that it misses out of a lot of other things that are important. It’s better to take your time over creating the plan yourself, thinking about each element of the process. You can use online resources like Learningbank onboarding to help you work out what you need to note down, and it’s also a good idea to speak to your current employees. They can tell you what worked in their onboarding and what they needed more information about. In this way, you can craft a plan that includes everything.
Use Your Current Team
We mentioned above how your current employees can help you come up with the ideal onboarding plan, and that’s a fantastic resource to tap into. However, they can be even more helpful than that; they can carry out the onboarding on your behalf.
By delegating the task of onboarding, you’ll free up your time, and you’ll also show your current team that you trust them and know they’ll teach newcomers what to do in the right way. As we’ve seen, this kind of trust boosts productivity and morale, and since the onboarding will be more personal (these are people who’ve gone through the process and who do the elements mentioned in it on a daily basis), it should be easier to remember and much more in-depth.
You might even want to take things further and allocate an onboarding mentor to each new starter. Not only will this mentor – an employee who’s been with you for longer, in other words – onboard your new hire, but they’ll be able to stay with them for a set amount of time, ensuring they are following the rules and that, if they have any questions, they know precisely who to ask. This is a big responsibility, but it’s something that can help both the older and newer employees, as well as give you more time for other things.
