5 Methods to Study the Effectiveness of Your New Hire Onboarding Program
The HR team pours its heart and soul into developing an onboarding program for the fresh talents they have hunted. It feels so great when all the new hires complete the onboarding program and looks really promising. But are you sure your onboarding program was effective? Was it successful in helping your new recruits feel at home in their surroundings, foster a feeling of belonging, and encourage long-term employment? Not sure? No worries, let’s learn how you can measure the effectiveness of your onboarding program in the right way.
Compare the Employee Turnover Rate
The quality of your onboarding program has a direct relationship with the employee turnover rate. Most employees decide if they want to work in a company or not in the first few months. This implies that if the employee onboarding program was successful then the turnover rate should ideally be decreasing compared to the last year. If you are seeing a decreasing pattern in your employee turnover rate, you can be sure that you are on the right track.
Was Your Employee Happy?
The next thing you should start looking at is if the employees were engaged and if they are happy working for your company. How do you do this though? This is where new-hire employee onboarding software programs become really handy. You can drop in a quick feedback form throughout the onboarding process and your employees just have to select a number or an emoji to reflect their satisfaction. You can use this data to determine whether or not you are doing the right thing.
Employee Performance
Another thing you need to consider is the new hires’ performance and how productive they are. You can track the progress of their work using the onboarding software. Other than that you can ask the managers to give feedback on their performance. While you do that you can also try to get some input on how you can make the onboarding process better.
Talk to Your Employees
The easiest way to see if you have created a good onboarding program is to straight away talk to the employees. The employees might hesitate to give constructive feedback but make sure you encourage them to do so. Talk to them like a friend, and tell them why you are trying to get this feedback. Most employees will cooperate.
Test Retention
We don’t want employees to just complete the program and get done with it. We want them to remember what they learned. A quick quiz on the onboarding software after the course is completed is enough to give you information about how much information learned is retained by the employees. If the retention rate is lower you might want to work on your course design. You can add more quizzes between the modules for a quick revision or include more opportunities for practical experience.
Is it Really Important to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Program?
Of course, it is. Without measuring the results of your onboarding program you will not be able to determine if there is something you need to work on. Moreover, an onboarding program that was effective a few years ago may not be effective now. That is why you have to keep gathering data to ensure the effectiveness of your program.
Another reason is the amount of money, time, and energy the company spends on hiring employees and then conducting the onboarding program. You need to make sure that you get a good return on your investment. If the onboarding process was bad the employee will most likely leave your company and a high turnover rate is dangerous.
Bottom Line
The onboarding program is the first impression of your company culture and the work-life the new hires will have. You might be a fantastic company that loves and adores its employees, but if you are not able to communicate it properly during onboarding the employees will never know how good you are. Hence an effective onboarding program is very important. Your employees completing the onboarding process doesn’t imply that you have created the best program. You might want to work on it.
This article has been published in accordance with Socialnomics’ disclosure policy.
