The importance of onboarding your staff

Fiona Regan, People Development Director at Revolution Bars Group, spoke to us about the importance of onboarding in attracting, retaining and engaging staff and discusses whether performance reviews are still relevant...

How can onboarding be improved – what do you think of the current process?

The onboarding process is absolutely essential in helping the new starter to navigate through the their first few months with the organisation. Often a candidate starts to idealise what their transition into a new job will be like. Our process is built on helping them to make sure that they don’t just get engrossed in the excitement and challenge of the new job but that they see their onboarding as stages within at least a 90-day plan.

Our induction for managers takes new starters through our company purpose, vision and values as we want to make sure we clearly explain why these are so important to the culture of the team and provide time to really discuss what these mean. In addition, there is a practical session where a manager develops a structured 90-day plan. This makes sure they consider how to adapt to a new manager, a new team and to find ways to manage a range of stakeholders. It looks at their manager, team, the culture and the organisation. An area of improvement I plan on building is in what more can be done between the offer being accepted and the new person starting with the company, to continue to engage them during that time whilst waiting to join the new role.