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Have you got a quality onboarding programme in place for your new employees in 2023?
Bruce Mundell • February 5, 2023
The media industry is known for its churn and turnover. There are many factors on why employees exit a business that you cannot control but one you can is making sure their first impression is favourable and memorable. Having a quality and established onboarding programme is proven to lead to higher retention rates, more loyal employees, and a strong ROI..
Below are some tips and rationale for why you should spend the time to create (or upgrade) a quality onboarding programme for your new starters in 2023.
“Great employee onboarding can improve employee retention by 82%”
A famous global research stat by Brandon Hall Group.
“New employees with a good onboarding experience are 18x more committed to their employer”.
Another stat from the US's Bamboo HR.
On the flip side - Gallop have research that states only
“12% of employees surveyed globally agree that their business has a good onboarding process”.
With these kinds of global stats - It is worth the time & money to make sure your business and current employees have a programme in place to make sure your new starters feel at home from day one.
A great way to build or upgrade an onboarding program is to assign a working group with your happiest and most loyal staff members – ask them to brainstorm initiatives and tactics based on ideas that will build advocacy and loyalty. You can also have a company goal – to deliver a market leading onboarding programme for new starters and make it a key KPI with all leaders in your business.
When asked to give advice, below are some of our tactics & ideas for media publishers and their B2B teams on how to create a market leading onboarding programme.
a) Before Day 1!
- When a new employee has signed a contract, get a senior leader in the business to call or send them a video telling them how excited the whole team is on the news they will be joining the team. This tactic can be very powerful especially if the senior leader wasn’t involved in the interview process.
- Before they start – their line manager should find time to meet them for a social face to face meeting. Ask them what the important initiatives the business can be doing to support and keep them once they have started. Get to also try and know them on a personal manner to start building a relationship based on trust and care.
b) When they start
- Make sure their day/week one is smooth. Have all their technology tested and ready to go as well as build a great welcome pack. Build them a go to onboarding bible that outlines your best practise processes and a step-by-step guide on how to use important tools.
- Assign them an office buddy whose responsibilities are to give them a location tour of the office + also the best places to lunch/coffee etc – ideally someone who is doing a similar role to them who they can go to if they have immediate questions.
- Set some KPI’s together for their probation period – these should be very achievable – simple core goals that will be their backbone of them achieving their job spec. Schedule regular check in’s during their first months of employment. Constantly ask them to share feedback of how they are going.
c) During Probation period
- Set up their first four weeks of meetings – start with internal stakeholders and then accompany them to external meetings with their most influential customers.
- Invest in a training onboarding programme that occurs every quarter for new starters – this programme should be for all new starters and ensure they do it within their first 3 months – within the probation period. This programme should identify what your team sees as best practise processes and use of your key tools & be full of real-world scenarios for them to workshop as teams.
- Check in mid-way through their first 3 months’ probation and encourage them to identify the parts of their scope that they are confident and not so confident – Offer to organise additional training for the parts they identify as not as strong.
d) End of Probation
- Make sure you have a process in place to measure your onboarding programme - Four questions you should ask new starters at the end of their onboarding experience and benchmark yourself against your peers.
- Out of 1 to 10 – How confident are you in being able to fulfil your new role at our company?
- Out of 1 to 10 – How much would you recommend our company to a friend or x colleague?
- What would you change or add to our onboarding experience?
- Is there any additional training or help you feel you need to address any concerns?
- We also recommend you have a little team celebration with new starters when they complete their probation period. This could be a team lunch or social drinks after work. A lot of business have celebrations when people leave a company, whereas I believe the emphasis on investment should be more about celebrating when they are officially starting.
The investment to create a market leading onboarding programme won’t necessarily drive short term returns, but in the long run they will be influential in your company culture and staff happiness which will have long term benefits to your success.
If you are looking for a way to be better then your competitors and attract the best talent then we highly recommend having a quality programme in place.
Market SHIFT Consultants can help your business create quality onboarding programmes and we have media sales training programmes that we can recreate bespoke to your companies processes and tools. If you are interested in getting some help in 2023 – please get in contact!
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