How are companies impacted by onboarding?
Onboarding has been a boon to the employee experience: it improves engagement, decreases the learning curve to full productivity, and accelerates new hire integration and team cohesion. However, the benefits (and potential pitfalls) of onboarding don’t stop at the employee level, there are many ways the entire company is influenced by onboarding.
Here are the top 5:
1. Brand perception
In the age of instantaneous internet reviews, your employees are talking. New hires could be tweeting about the incredibly thoughtful welcome box they received, filled with company swag and thoughtful treats or about how lousy their first day was. Being intentional about your onboarding helps positively solidify your brand in your new hire’s mind.
2. Employee data
Employers are responsible for collecting significant personal data from each employee, and most of it is collected during the onboarding period. Once collected, the employer is responsible and liable for protecting the data and keeping it safe. Email and manual storage screams for an audit and/or a data breach which yields hefty fines and negative publicity. A centralized, cloud-based, secure repository that is GDPR and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant is an employer’s best bet to prevent a data breach.
3. Employee churn
Employees like interviewing for new jobs about as much as employers like spending the time and effort to find ideal candidates. However, poor onboarding makes new employees question their decision to join the company and increases the likelihood of them leaving. Great onboarding makes new hires feel good about their decision, helps them get acclimated, and makes them want to stick around. This provides you with a steady state of loyal employees, instead of a revolving door of candidates.
4. Compliance exposure
Between local and state tax regulations, remote worker considerations, and the many required forms, being compliant is a constant and ongoing challenge with high stakes. An automated system with best practice workflows and forms built in can mitigate these risks but a paper-based, manual system leaves companies perpetually at risk.
5. Pay day
New hires rely on HR to process their employee profile so they can be paid on time. Manual onboarding can lead to delays in profiles being entered into HRIS systems, which leads to payroll delays, unhappy new hires, and compliance issues. Not to mention – what a terrible first impression! Don’t kid yourself, one of the main reasons your new hire got a job was for a paycheck! Automated onboarding ensures all employee data flows seamlessly between systems so new hires are never paid late.
Onboarding is so much more than an HR function. The effects of onboarding, good or bad, ripple out in waves, leaving trails of consequences for poor onboarding and happy new hires in the wake of great onboarding.
