At long last. You’ve finally found the right person to join your team. After weeks of interviews. Tens of CVs. Finally.
The pressure on your team can ease. Projects can get finished. Everyone can breathe a sigh of relief (and stop breathing down your neck).
Except, you can’t relax yet.
Because there’s one thing that makes the difference between a great hire turned bad, and a great hire kept great. Or even better, a great hire turned exceptional.
A great hire who slots effortlessly into your team, energises everyone they work with and helps spur colleagues towards outstanding performance. A great hire who becomes instrumental in setting and maintaining a high-performance team culture.
That one thing is employee onboarding.
You mightn’t even think onboarding is in your remit – but it should be. Keep reading and we’ll prove why employee onboarding matters.
An anecdote about employee onboarding
Meet Sinead. Sinead’s THE senior healthcare administrator you need to turn resident engagement around in your flagship nursing home. You can’t wait for her to start. She can’t wait to start.
She signs the contract, hands in her notice.
And then, nothing. A resounding nothing.
Sinead starts to worry. Did she make the wrong choice? And her current boss says all the right things, even offers her a raise.
Maybe she drops out then, before she even starts. (Like the other 37% of new hires who admit they’ve dropped-out before their first day).
But let’s assume her first day comes.
But you’re busy – that’s why you hired her. So you whiz Sinead around the home, give her IT’s number, make fly-by introductions and that’s that. Employee onboarding done.
(The stats show, that’s probably you. Because 74% of businesses don’t do enough employee onboarding. In fact, 35% spend nothing onboarding – but thousands, if not tens of thousands, on hiring).
But that’s not good enough. Here’s why.
Sinead’s first week flies by, a haze of new names, paperwork and systems set-ups. But then her first month flies by too. And her second. And suddenly you’re assessing her six-month performance and resident engagement hasn’t improved.
And your team are still grumbling because they’re overworked – even more than they were, because they’re spending time helping Sinead too. Which creates bad blood amongst Sinead and her team, so she can’t manage effectively.
And she’s lonely, because she hasn’t formed strong friendships. And she’s haemorrhaging confidence – so she loses the get-up-and-go she needs to thrive. Her colleagues become increasingly resentful and their work suffers too.
And soon you’ve got a resident engagement problem and an employee engagement problem. And then Sinead leaves, and other team members follow, and you’re back to the recruitment drawing board.
Or worse, she doesn’t. And you’ve got the nightmare of an underperforming employee and no budget left to hire. And your boss is breathing fire because the home still isn’t performing but you’re trapped between a rock and a hard place.
Because here’s the thing.
Employee onboarding isn’t orientation...
