When a new employee joins a company, one of the employer’s main jobs is to integrate the hire into the team in an onboarding process.
However, according to research by Time is Ltd., companies are failing at just that.
Prior to the hybrid model, companies were unsuccessful at onboarding. This is not a new thing. Employee integration can be difficult. In the digital age, communication overload is draining employees, directly affecting their performance and overall experience. There has been a 16% decrease over the past year in onboarding effectiveness.
Company success starts with prioritizing employees. Looking at the numbers, companies haven’t been doing this. Many justify this decline due to the pandemic, but onboarding ineffectiveness was already 40% lower pre-pandemic. Now, hybrid work continues to aid this decline. New employees only have 50% of the internal network compared to tenured workers.
“Over one-third of companies do not have a structured onboarding process,” according to Business News Daily.
This failure to plan is a major cause of employee turnover. Though the employee may own some of the blame, the clear disinterest companies have in onboarding is hurting them, not helping. This problem will continue to get worse if action is not taken. “Poor onboarding has been proven to have a direct impact on employee productivity, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and even retention,” Time is Ltd. reports.
Building a team and forming a network have been taken away in some aspects due to many employees working from home. Because of this, there is a lack of work satisfaction and team productivity. Companies need to realize that this problem will only worsen if they don’t take action.
The solution, Time is Ltd. concludes, is measuring employee engagement. Employees are more likely to stay and have a better work experience if they have a successful onboarding process.
“Employers need to establish a comprehensive checklist for every new employee and incorporate more automation to provide a better, more efficient experience for employees, their managers, and HR,” Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer at CareerBuilder, said.
There is no one way to combat this problem or a succinct plan to fix it automatically. However, Time is Ltd. observes that by recognizing the decline and forming a plan of action, each company can begin to improve its onboarding process.
Time is Ltd. concludes, “The first step to getting onboarding right is to leverage collaboration insights to measure how new employees are integrated into a company. Without this, it’s impossible for companies to understand how changes to onboarding processes impact their overall onboarding experience.”
Not only will this benefit the employees, but it will also strengthen the overall effectiveness of the company. Everyone should get back to the office and strive to create a team-oriented work environment that will cause all employees to feel more connected to the company and their job. Efficient onboarding is that first step.
Esther Wickham is a summer 2022 Washington Examiner fellow.
