Employee Retention: Lay The Groundwork To Retain Your Top Talent With Strategic Onboarding

Employee retention is a much sought-after goal for any growth-minded business. To drive those high retention rates, you need to invest in the strategic talent development and processes that develop high performing employees. Onboarding is a surprisingly important part of that strategy in part because those first couple months are critical in retaining new employees. Here are a few things you can do to improve your onboarding process and lay the groundwork to retain your top talent for the long term.

Lay a great foundation with:

An Effective Onboarding Process

Most new employees go through some form of an onboarding process, whether strategic or not. Onboarding is their first experience of the day to day life of an employee in your organization. It is also one of the most important opportunities to make an impression on the new hires and transform them to loyal employees with the potential to make a great positive impact in the business. While the onboarding process is often tasked with the responsibility to finalize any dangling procedural requirements, its primary purpose is to be motivational. From a new hire’s perspective, it should be rich in relevant and useful information. From the organizational perspective, it should also be reliable, repeatable, and most importantly flexible to meet the needs of the individuals experiencing the transition.

A Tailored Experience

Everyone learns slightly differently. The goal of the onboarding process is not to enforce uniformity in the learning styles but instead to deliver a great first impression and provide other relevant information. You will have the most success in grabbing and retaining the attention of a large audience if the onboarding process incorporates flexibility. This could mean having multiple different delivery mediums such as in-person sessions, online information, onboarding videos, and group sessions versus a more personalized session. Different people will find different parts of the content more appealing to them. It is important that the delivery mechanism is tailored towards that and lets employees go at their own pace.

How Onboarding Supports Success and Productivity

Onboarding processes provide a great opportunity to present relevant information to new employees and make them productive members of the organization. Don’t overlook this vital opportunity. Make the onboarding process flexible so that it can be tailored to each and every employee’s learning style. Importantly, you should know how your employees are experiencing the onboarding process. Provide them with the opportunity to give their feedback (anonymously as well as not) about how they were onboarded, what worked and what didn’t, and how you can improve processes to lay the foundation for new hire success. That will help you iterate and grow as a company to further your retention strategies.

Mentorship Enables Employee Retention

Mentoring is an excellent tool to prepare and coach your new hires to function at a high level in a new team. Having a buddy or go-to team member that will help a new employee learn the ropes quicker and deliver value in a meaningful way. Also consider introducing them to their larger team in a formal and engaging manner. Avoid all the side chatter and send out an email bio, add them to the company newsletter, or organize an in-person meet and greet style event. They will appreciate the warm welcome and their coworkers will appreciate the information about who the new employees are and what their role will be as it relates to them and their own day to day work.

Are you looking for training solutions?

Does your employees’ performance improve after they complete a training session? If not, why not? What can you do to improve your current training program? If you’re unsure, you need better insights into your training program. Using valid data and a strategic approach, Clarity’s expert consultants will work with you. For more advice on how onboarding can influence retention, connect with the experts at Clarity Consultants today.