Onboarding and Employee Engagement

We hosted a webinar last week, titled Onboarding: An Employee Engagement Tool, and posed a poll question to our participants:

"How do you currently know if your new employees are highly engaged at the 100 mark?"

Here are the responses--

54% used surveys
21% had one-on-one conversations
25% did not know and does not measure new hire engagement

The great news is that the majority of the organizations in our audience were taking the time during the onboarding process to find out how engaged their new hires are. As studies have shown, the decision to stay in a new job usually happens within the first 6 months, so it is critical to get a gauge of the engagement level of your new hires.

How are you collecting this data? What changes are you making to your onboaridng process in response?

Onboarding Resolutions

I guess it was the new calendar that I opened the other day, or maybe it was the list I made of things that I wanted to accomplish both personally and professionally, or maybe it was the barrage of media that switched from gift ideas to weight-loss programs, but I have definitely been thinking about resolutions.

Resolutions don’t always have to be something pledged on Jan 1 and forgotten by the 15th. They can be planful changes made based on research, best practices and implemented strategically over time. Those are the changes that stick.

If your organization’s onboarding program is in need of updating, overhauling or even just started, there are more resources available now more than ever.

There is a new report out by SHRM titled, Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success, by Dr. Talya Bauer. Its purpose, by my read, is twofold: to give the most recent information about what is being done inside organizations with regards to onboarding, and to give HR professionals some suggestions for putting the best practices into place in their organizations.

The author’s research-based model of onboarding also fits well with our own onboarding solution model of successful onboarding. Both focus on three core pieces; gaining knowledge, building relationships and getting/acting on feedback, delivered over about a four-month time period with a blend of coaching and technology.

It is most interesting to note that the biggest take-away is that onboarding seems to have left its “nice to have” status in the HR world and entered in the “must have” category.