Onboarding Best Practices: How to Increase Your Revenue 50% Per Employee (Part 2/2)
Graham Moreno

Now that you’ve made your onboarding experience celebratory and inviting you’ve immediately engaged your new employee thanks to the warm welcome they’ve received. Great start! Now on to the remaining onboarding best practices which are making onboarding easy for your existing employees and implementing continuous onboarding.

Grease the rails

The next step in implementing our onboarding best practices is to make the work done for onboarding (paperwork, physical access, technology, logins, and so on) as effortless as possible on your current team. You need to “grease the rails”, so to speak.

The onboarding process should involve minimal clicks, no follow ups, and should come with clear directions so your team can quickly get their future colleague set up and ready to go before they arrive.

Sounds dreamy right?

Use a system like Kordami to:

Add each system your team needs. Give directions about how to get those systems set up(and who should be doing it). Set how long before someone’s start date these tasks should take place. Set up reminders in Kordami so follow up on tasks is automatic. Putting a system like Kordami in place makes Janice’s life easier because all she has to do is check the tasks and their statuses to see what is and isn’t done rather than trying to track down the necessary people to ensure that they’re doing what she asked them to. After that you can click “go” and the onboarding process will be initiated and tracked automatically.

Putting a system like Kordami in place makes Janice’s–the People Operations lead from “Snapbook” tasked with handling onboarding in Part One— life easier because all she has to do is check the tasks and their statuses to see what is and isn’t done rather than trying to track down the necessary people to ensure that they’re doing what she asked them to.

Similarly, automatic followup emails mean that she doesn’t need to try to remember to follow up while trying to do the three other jobs she’s doing to support the company growth. Your team also benefits from seeing all of their tasks in one clean interface rather than trying to remember the email they got 200 emails ago at 8am.

Making onboarding as effortless as possible—greasing the rails— for your team allows them to focus on their main job — growing the business — while still enabling them to celebrate onboarding new employees and what it means for the company.

Continuous Onboarding

Onboarding doesn’t stop when an employee’s first week is over. Build “continuous onboarding” into your 90 day onboarding plan. This will ensure that employees are fully trained, integrated, and engaged after their first quarter.

Kick off continuous onboarding by scheduling trainings once or twice weekly for their first ninety days. This will reinforce existing knowledge, help new employees fully absorb company culture, and will prevent information overload.

Similarly, schedule monthly check ins and do a “post-onboarding” interview after the first ninety days to gather feedback from your new employees so you can continuously improve your onboarding experience. These interviews will also allow you to directly address knowledge areas your new employees feel like they aren’t up to speed on after the first ninety days. Covering these gaps will help both you and them and will provide invaluable insight on how you can bolster your existing onboarding process.

Conclusion

Companies invest heavily in profit centers. They pay handsomely to sell to customers, invest heavily in engineering to build better products that customers will pay more for, and spend on marketing to get in front of the right customer. Companies tend to shy away from investing heavily in onboarding because it’s viewed as a cost center that takes time away from employees main jobs—growing the company.

Today we’ve gone over onboarding best practices that will help you create an onboarding process that will:

  • Increase revenue per employee
  • Increase customer satisfaction
  • Decrease recruiting and onboarding costs by increasing employee engagement and loyalty

Getting these results with onboarding is far easier than trying to achieve this with sales, marketing, or engineering because you already have all of the things you need—growth and great employees.

To review:

  • Create a culture that celebrates onboarding and growth.
  • Grease the rails for your team to make onboarding a new colleague easy and fast.
  • Continue onboarding for 90 days with a feedback loop at the end.
  • Use these onboarding best practices to transform your onboarding and start reaping the benefits. Your employees, customers, and bottom line will thank you.
Transform your onboarding and offboarding with Kordami
Transform your onboarding and offboarding with Kordami