Rounding up the latest in sales research and innovation.
September 08, 2021
By Rachel Smith
This month our focus is on onboarding, a particularly relevant topic as businesses vie for the limited number of job candidates in today’s market. Once you hire a new employee, your process as they come on board has a large impact on whether they will stay.
Later this month we’ll be writing about designing a great onboarding experience and how to keep the momentum going, but until then, here are some great resources for you to explore.
Kaitlyn Pavlina of Pepperdine University completed her Master’s thesis, Assessing Best Practices for the Virtual Onboarding of New Hires in the Technology Industry, in 2020. What’s great about a Master’s thesis is that the literature review provides a snapshot of all relevant studies on the topic up to that point. (Just make sure your office does not flood when you have checked out everything the university library has on a single topic. I’m something of a legend in the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point library system. Not in a good way.)
Not only does Pavlina’s study summarize the research that has been done—the purpose of her research was to learn what aspects of virtual onboarding are most important to new employees. The feedback she received from study participants sheds light on how new hires feel about specific onboarding experiences. The study’s timing also makes it one of the earliest assessments of onboarding post COVID-19.
Recent Gallup research took a deep dive into the employee experience. Part of what emerged from this work are six steps that should be included in any onboarding program, as well as five questions that every onboarding program must answer. According to Gallup, onboarding can impact an employee’s perceptions about the organization more than any other stage of the employee experience.
One of the main takeaways of the Gallup work is the importance of involving everyone in the onboarding process. It should not just be the responsibility of a hiring manager or boss to onboard someone. It needs to be the responsibility of all leaders, managers, and team members.
It’s difficult to modernize your onboarding program if you’re keeping track of it in an antiquated manner. I’m talking about Excel. Although better than nothing, that little paperclip guy is not your best bet for a developing a solid onboarding program.
The folks at Process Street go into detail about the many reasons Excel simply isn’t enough anymore. While they are clearly trying to sell their own software, the reasons are solid, and could be used to support any one of the many onboarding tools now available.
We’ve written about the many benefits of using storytelling in sales before, and we even covered how it could be used to attract new hires as well as new clients. It turns out it can also be quite a useful tool for onboarding.
Take a look at how Drift co-founder and CEO David Cancel has shifted storytelling from an external to an internal strategy. When Cancel’s team runs into problems, they make videos to share the story of how the problems were solved. These stories then become part of the onboarding experience
From wearing masks to working from home, nothing has forced us to make changes faster than the coronavirus. Onboarding is no different. Hiring did not stop during COVID-19 as many people feared it would. If anything, it has increased in many sectors. That means that in some organizations, what was once a day-long onboarding information marathon became a series of videos, which has actually been an improvement.
Why has this been successful? Because video is a great tool. It’s a great way to create an engaging experience, and probably should have been used to enhance onboarding programs before now. A recent study by Paychex found that while most employees prefer in-person training over remote, this doesn’t seem to hold true for onboarding. More people find remote onboarding to be successful than the in-person alternative.
It might not be just brand-new employees who need onboarding right now. Many companies onboarded employees for virtual work, but now these individuals are coming into the office for the first time. It makes sense for these employees to be re-onboarded.
Depending on your sector and company, even veteran employees might need some onboarding attention. A recent Harvard Business Review article explored how recent job turnover and uncertainty means long-serving employees are feeling unanchored. Onboarding is all about connection, and that might be lacking for all of your employees right now. Onboarding for all!
Are you looking for help with recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training? Get in touch at mastery@maestrogroup.co.
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