EMPLOYEE

ONBOARDING
THE COMPLETE GUIDE
Introduction

Employee onboarding is incredibly important, but hard to get right.

You spend all of this time, energy and money on hiring an employee only to leave them
high and dry when they start work.

You know that if you can successfully onboard a new employee with a structured plan,
theyll be more productive, more likely to stay at your company, and more engaged. But
for some reason, we often get onboarding wrong.

Your intentions are good, and while youd love to spend a dedicated three months making
sure a new employee is onboarded properly, you just dont have the time. You needed
someone up and running yesterday.

So, your onboarding process ends up lasting for about a week, if youre lucky. You
promise youll do better next time, but you never make it priority.

This is a huge mistake.

Onboarding is your one shot to integrate an employee properly into your culture.
Its a way to ensure that theyre successful long term, and have all of the resources they
need to be an eective, autonomous, productive employee.

We put together a complete guide to teach you everything you need to know about
employee onboarding, so you can be sure that each new hire is successful.

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Employee Onboarding Statistics
In our research report, the State of Employee Engagement, we found that onboarding
was a major problem at many companies all over the world.

The report updates in real-time, but as of December 2016, when we ask employees Does
your organization have a great hiring and onboarding process? we find that a massive
51% of people think their company's onboarding process could be improved.
This is a huge opportunity for organizations to increase employee engagement.
Here are a few more powerful statistics that really explain how crucial employee
onboarding is.

8 Powerful Employee Onboarding Statistics You Need To Know :

1 69% of employees are more likely to stay with their company for 3 years if
they experienced great onboarding. (source)

2 20% of employee turnover happens in the first 45 days. (source)

3 Employees who go through a structured onboarding program are 58%

more likely to be with the organization after three years. (source)

4 Organizations with a standard onboarding process experience 50%

greater employee retention. (source)

5 60% of companies fail to set goals for new hires. (source)

6 Only 37% of companies extend their onboarding programs beyond the

first month. (source)

7 22% of companies have no formal onboarding program. (source)

8 20% of employees are more satisfied with their managers when they have
formal onboarding training. (source)

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The Biggest Onboarding Mistakes
Onboarding is the most important part of the employee lifecycle.

You only get one chance to make a first impression, so youll want to make sure your
onboarding is done right.

The more confusion there is in the process, the more likely an employee is to take longer
to ramp up, have the wrong impression of the company, or even worse, quit.

Here are a few of the biggest mistakes that are commonly made with the onboarding
process that youll want to avoid.

Not Setting Clear Expectations

The key thing you want to avoid for any employee, especially at the beginning, is
confusion.

If an employee is confused, theyll spend unnecessary time and energy wondering and
worrying about what theyre doing.

Also, at the beginning, all an employee wants to do is impress their new boss. Its tough to
know if youre impressing them if you dont know exactly whats expected of you.

How to fix this:

Make sure employees are 100% clear from the beginning what their goals
and expectations are. Using something like OKRs to set goals is a great way
to create that clarity.

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Not Giving Onboarding Enough Time

This is probably the most common mistake made with employee onboarding.
I understand why this happens, but youre doing a huge disservice to your employees by
not giving them enough time.

The problem is, managers want their new employees to be up and running as quickly as
possible, so they dont invest the right amount of time in developing them.

But remember, short term pain, long term gain.

How to fix this:

This is easier said than done, but what you need to do is be patient with
your employees. Understand that its going to take some time to develop
them. Be ready to invest time and money so that theyll be way more
productive long term.

Not Having A Process

Onboarding is what sets you up for long term success in a company, meaning that its so
important you take it seriously.
Part of taking it seriously is ensuring that you have a formal process for onboarding. Make
sure you have things like:

A checklist
A plan
Goals
Checkins

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Having a process will make scaling and improving easier for you, and youll be able to find
problems in the process faster.

How to fix this:

Work with multiple members of your team to create a formal onboarding
process that everyone can agree on. You can have dierent owners for each
step of the process.

Having Too Much Of A Process

While having a process is important, its also important to make sure each employee is
coached and trained the way they want to be.

Each employee is unique, and so you might want to adjust your process depending on
their preference. Some employees will require more feedback, and others will want to
learn about their role in a dierent way, so its a good idea for you to adjust.

Try to personalize the onboarding process as much as possible.

How to fix this:

Dont get into the mindset of following the process word for word. Its okay
to use it as a guide, but then adjust accordingly. Be mindful of what your
new employees would want to make them the most successful.

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Not Collecting Feedback

If you dont collect feedback about your onboarding process, how will you know if its any
good?

Many managers make the mistake of assuming that its their job to get an employee up to
speed quickly, train them how theyve done things, and move on.

But if you do that, then what was the point of hiring someone in the first place?

You want to make sure that employees are actually getting value out of the program so
that when new employees join, their experience will be even better.

How to fix this:

Collect frequent feedback from new employees about how their
onboarding is going. At the beginning, feel free to check in every day (you
want to check in more often at the beginning). Then, I would check in at the
end of week one, week two, month one, month two, and month three as a
minimum.

Not Doing Anything Before An Employee Starts

A new employee should already have had some interaction with your company before
their first day.

While you dont want them to feel overwhelmed or like they have work to do before they
even start, sending them helpful guides, company history information or links that might
help them is a great idea.

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You could send them a friendly email letting them know how excited you are for them to
join, you could send them a welcome package, or even simply let them know what to
bring on the first day to help ease them in.

How to fix this:

The key here is to remove any of that fear or nervousness that a new
employee likely has. Get creative, but remember to show them how excited
you are for them to join, send them helpful links, and make sure they know
what to expect when they arrive.

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6 Crucial Onboarding Best Practices
Sourcing and hiring someone is an incredibly diicult task.

Once thats done, and youve found someone who you think is right for the job, you need
to make sure their first few months at the company are amazing.

You dont want them to quit after all you went through to get them on the team, so follow
these tips to ensure a successful employee onboarding.

1. Take Your Time

This is by far and away the most important tip for employee onboarding.

Onboarding takes a minimum of three months to complete, but most companies dont
give their employees more than a week.

They want their new hires to be up and running as quickly as possible, but you dont want
a half-baked employee working on the team.

There is so much that a new employee needs to understand. The ins and outs of your
company, its culture, your product/service, how the team works, the voice and tone, the
tools to use, etc.

More than anything, you need to understand that it takes time, so you have to be patient.
The longer someone has to get up to speed, the faster they will reach full productivity.

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2. Establish Clear Goals
While you need to take your time and exercise patience with new employees, one way to
get them up to speed faster is by establishing clear goals for their first three months and
checking in on them frequently.

This helps them focus on the right things and gives them a target to aim for.
The worst thing you can do is have a new employee just sitting there twiddling their
thumbs, so setting goals early on is a good way to keep them working on whats
important.

Its also a great way to ensure that youre both on the same page and that theres no
confusion. One of the biggest concerns for any new employee is if theyre doing what you
want, so setting goals helps makes sure this happens.

Remember to check in on the goals frequently. Ideally, at least every two weeks.

3. Set Up A Mentor
Mentorship programs are great for any employee, at any stage in their lifecycle, but
during onboarding theyre even more eective.

When first starting out, employees might be nervous, confused, and overwhelmed.
Providing them with a mentor is the perfect way to ensure they have someone to help
them through this intimidating process.

Asking questions can be tough for anyone, but for a nervous new employee, its good to
know they have someone they can go to directly.

Plus, it lets the mentor focus exclusively on onboarding that new employee, making the
process even smoother. With multiple people, it wouldnt be easy to pinpoint where the
issues in the onboarding process are.

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4. Make Their First Week Amazing
You only get one chance at a first impression, so you want a new employee to have an
amazing experience joining your company and the team.

Ideally, youve had contact with them before they even start, but you want to make sure
that when they first arrive, they start o on the right foot. You need to understand how
nervous and how shy theyll be.

Make sure that everything they need for work is set up on day one (youd be surprised
how often this is forgotten about).

The secret to getting this right is to be mindful. Think about the new employee and take
care of them.

Then make sure to do things like:

Decorate their desk with goodies

Take them out for lunch
Introduce them to everyone the team (have them spend some time with
each team to understand what they do)
Give them swag if you have any
Invite and include them in meetings

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5. Check In Frequently
Remember, theres no such thing as too much communication.

At the beginning of the onboarding process, its incredibly important to check in often to
see how things are going.

This is the exact process I would use to make sure youre checking in often enough.

1 Check in every single day the first week (10-15 minutes each day)

2 Hold an end of week review at the end of week one. Recap the
week, and then plan the following week.

3 Repeat this process each week for the first month

4 Recap at the end of month three, but still check in every now and then

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Examples Of A Good Employee Onboarding
Process
Lets learn from the best.
Companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter are well-known for their culture, and have
successfully onboarded thousands of employees.

As a source of inspiration, here are examples of the onboarding process at some of the
most notable companies in the world.

1. Twitter
Twitters onboarding starts before you even walk in the door. This is an important lesson
for companies: dont start your onboarding on an employees first day, start it as soon as
they accept the oer.

They have a program called Yes To Desk which outlines everything that needs to be
done from the time an employee says yes to when they arrive at their desk. Things like
making sure their computer, emails, and any tools theyll need are set up, their desk is
filled with swag like t-shirts, and theres something celebrating their arrival, like a bottle
of wine.

One of the smartest things they do is how they plan the first day. From a Quora answer
about their onboarding:

We reserve tables in our lunch area and each new hire has lunch with their new
team (no "who do I sit with in the cafeteria" anxiety). Afternoon is spent in a
"company ramp-up" session run by me, where we spend hours getting the new
hires up to speed on teams, projects, company history, inside jokes, Gmail filters,
internal tools etc.

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Theyre always improving, talking to people every one or three months to see what, if
anything, should be changed.

2. Facebook
One of the best and most noteworthy examples is Facebooks Bootcamp, a six week
intensive course for engineers to learn the ropes at Facebook. Heres a quote from the
Facebook post that talks about how it works:

By centralizing the mentoring and onboarding responsibilities, we've greatly

decreased the costs hiring has on the rest of the organization in terms of time
spent showing people the ropes and keeping our standards consistent.

Check this video where Jocelyn Goldfein from Facebook explains how their Facebook
Bootcamp works.

3. IBM
IBMs onboarding program, Succeeding@IBM, is known as one of the best onboarding
processes of any company.

What makes it so exemplary is that it lasts for two years.

At most companies, youre lucky if onboarding lasts more than two weeks. IBMs two-year
rollout ensures that their employees have enough time to learn everything they need to
know, slowly and comfortably.

The onboarding process comes with a ton of technology to make things simpler for the
employee, like internal social networks to meet coworkers, career plans, mentoring, and
training.

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4. Warby Parker
From a New York Times article detailing their onboarding program:

Warby Parker sends an electronic welcome packet with the company history,
core values, press clippings and what a new employee should expect the first
day, week and month. The night before starting, new employees get a call from
their direct supervisors to make sure they know where to show up and when.

One of the coolest things they do in their onboarding program is something called
Lunch Roulette, where a software application randomly selects two groups of four
people (no more than one person per department) to go to lunch on the companys
tab.

5. Zappos
All Zappos employees go through a four week training program similar to Facebooks
bootcamp.
From Zappos onboarding document:

The Zappos Family New Hire program is four weeks of training designed to
grow our culture, build a stronger team, and create lasting relationships
throughout the entire company. Everyone who joins the company, regardless of
department or job function, goes through the same four-week program. This
helps us keep our culture of customer service strong, even as the company
grows.

And of course, they famously oer new hires $4,000 to quit in order to make sure that
employees are joining the team because they want to be there, not for the money.

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 Key Takeaways

1 Start your onboarding before an employees first day.

2 Do whatever you can to make them feel comfortable.

3 Make sure everything is properly set up for them (their desk,

computer, etc.)

4 Be patient, and give employees more than enough time to

ramp up.

Collecting Feedback During Onboarding

Getting feedback on the onboarding process is the only way to know if employees are
actually benefitting from it.

You can have the slickest process and the most robust training program, but if employees
dont find it useful, then youre just wasting time and money.

You always want to be getting better, and you should empower each new employee to
help you improve for when new ones come on board.

Check in often.
Ideally, very often at the beginning (every day during their first week), then check in at the
end of week one, week two, etc.

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Using onboarding surveys is a great way to get consistent feedback on the process and
organize it in an easy way.

In your onboarding survey, ask how they think you can make the whole process better,
with questions like:

If there was one thing you would change about the way your onboarding is
going, what would it be?

Is the onboarding too overwhelming for you?

What can I do to make your onboarding more successful?

Have you met some of the coworkers? If so, were they nice to you?

Did we make you feel welcome on your first day?

So far, is the job what you expected it to be?

So far, what part of the onboarding process has been the most eective/
beneficial?

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Many organizations miss out on an incredible opportunity by not collecting feedback
during this crucial moment.

Its possible that during those first few days theyre questioning their decision of having
joined your organization. Its during that vulnerable moment when they need reassurance
more than ever.

When an employee first joins the organization, theyre

nervous, so its up to you to calm those fears.

You want to make it as smooth and comfortable for the employee as possible, to ensure
that they grasp everything.

They also have a fresh set of eyes, so theyre perfect for telling you whats wrong with the
process.

A smart idea that I once heard from HubSpot, a company thats well-known for
their amazing culture, is that they make each new employee responsible for
improving the onboarding process for the next employee that joins.
This ensures that the process is always improving, and gives employees
autonomy to change an organizational process early on.

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 Employee Onboarding Template

Theres a lot to remember to make sure you have a good onboarding process set up, so
Ive prepared a template that you can use to make your life easier.

I tried to keep it as simple as possible. There are many things that you should keep in
mind with onboarding, but here are 9 crucial points that will make your new employee
onboarding a breeze.
 Improve Onboarding At
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