Your employee retention is determined by how effectively you onboard your new employees. The employee onboarding process, on the other hand, is not a one-time process.
Successful employee orientation is not limited to the early joining days of an employee. Instead, it may take a company several months to have its new employees onboarded effectively. Moreover, everyone involved in the process is required to make efforts to make it a success.
Why do companies put forth effort in onboarding their employees and making the very process rather constructive? The answer to this question lies in the fact that the onboarding process is important for the long-term employee retention of a company. Employee retention, on the other hand, carries significance for any organization since it affects different aspects that determine the eventual success.
Understanding that employee onboarding is important for employee retention, this article looks at the additional consequences of ineffective employee onboarding. Moreover, it explains the grounds that make effective employee onboarding inevitable for long-term employee retention.
Why is the onboarding process important for long-term employee retention?
Betters the employee performance
Research results indicate that your employees are likely to perform better in the future when their onboarding is done right. It means that not only employee onboarding is important, but onboarding the employees with all the right essences is equally important.
Another research reveals that employees increase their efforts at work by 20% after an effective orientation, which shows that employee orientation also impacts employee performance positively.
The performance of an employee within an organization is one of the crucial factors in employee evaluation. Understandably, you don’t want someone working for you to underperform regardless of how skilled they may be.
With an employee not performing well for their company, they are unlikely to be retained. Therefore, the employee turnover, in this case, would be involuntary turnover.
With the arguments above, it is clear how not performing well affects the retention of the employees. And since the onboarding process helps improve employee performance, employee retention, as a result, also improves.
Makes the new employees feel comfortable
Our presence in a new environment is usually nervy. Especially when we are hired by a company, we usually feel the pressure to perform well. And this leads to feelings of anxiety and nervousness, which proves to be rather counterproductive.
The new workplace makes an employee take the unnecessary pressure of proving their competency. It actually comprises their performance and their retention eventually.
When the employees are made comfortable by the organization that they have just joined, it makes them work up to their full potential and leverage all their capabilities. One way of achieving it is by making use of the employee orientation at the beginning, which eases off the pressure. As a result, the performance level of the employees elevates, eventually leading to better employee retention.
Helps drives motivation
Welcoming the employees warmly and onboarding them intelligently can no doubt impact their future performance. However, what makes them perform well is the motivation that the employee orientation incites in the newly hired employee(s).
The reason why your employees are motivated through proper orientation is that it helps to leave an excellent first impression of the company. And with this understanding that it is a good organization they are working for, the very company is successful in making its employees work with rather dedication for it.
With the employees motivated, for an organization, achieving its every goal becomes a matter of time. It results in the company and its employees being satisfied with each other. Consequently, employee retention reaches the desired level.
Read More: Why Is Employee Retention Important?
Help define roles clearly
Oftentimes, companies and employees undervalue the importance of explaining and learning the job descriptions clearly. The lack of understanding of the job roles leads to future conflicts and, resultantly, increased employee turnover, decreased employee turnover, etc. And all of this can make any company vulnerable to loss.
With a proper onboarding of the employees, it becomes evident what their job positions require them to do. As a result, not only the future conflicts can be avoided, but the amount of energy and time can be spent on other necessary tasks.
As the employees are made to work clearly under the demands of their position, it improves their performance, which adds to the success of the company in the long run and also makes the employees work for the company for a longer period. Therefore, an onboarding process that helps define roles clearly plays an important role in employee retention.
Enables an easy transition for new hirings
Whether your newly hired employees are experienced and have made a shift from some other company or whether they are fresh and are inexperienced in working at a professional workplace, everyone requires some time to adjust themselves.
Some companies have been seen to not give adequate time to their new hires and assign them a list of tasks immediately or soon after their orientation. Doing so without giving them proper time for their necessary transition phase only lets them underperform and underutilize their skill set.
For a company to introduce the new employees to the people, they’ll be working closely with as well as the ones they’d have little to no interaction with is necessary. It is for this reason that it helps them adjust to the new place.
Without providing the required adjustment period for any newer employee, things may go South for both the organization and its workers in the end. It is one of the reasons why some companies who like to make their new hires challenged with difficult or overburdened tasks are unable to retain most of them in the longer run.
A company understanding and therefore creating an atmosphere for an easy transition lets its new employees become a part of their new company’s working culture, which helps to make them perform to the best of their capabilities, thus leading to better employee retention.
How may ineffective employee onboarding affect your company?
The onboarding of your employees impacts the retention of the employees in the long run. It, nonetheless, brings other downsides as well. Low company morale, high employee turnover, and slower business growth are some of the additional undesired effects that a company experiences with a lack of effective employee onboarding.
Lowers the employee morale
To the surprise of many, if you are unsuccessful in onboarding the employees properly, it hampers the employee morale in the future. And a workplace composed of low morale employees is hard to achieve success and thrive. Thus, how you incorporate a new employee into the company goes a long way in determining the morale with which an employee will be working in the future.
Higher employee turnover
Understandably, with employee retention hampered, employee turnover is also affected negatively.
Making new hirings against a position requires a company to spend a considerable amount of its sources. And with a company facing both voluntary and involuntary turnover as a result of its poor onboarding process, it has to go through the tedious process of hiring and training a candidate for a job role.
On the other hand, a well-planned process of onboarding new employees is a cost-free endeavor. And since it helps better your employee retention, the onboarding process helps a company save a considerable amount of its sources on re-hires.
Decreased business growth
Your business growth is also likely to take a toll after an unsuccessful employee onboarding. The reason is that since the poor onboarding includes assigning a new employee with an inappropriate workload, it adds to the pressure of being in a new place.
With newly hired employees made to work without being comfortable first and without clearly defining their roles and responsibilities, it makes them underperform. As a result, not only are they unable to make use of their skills in their early days at the company but in the future as well, which, for good reasons, impacts the business growth.
Lastly, with the growth of a company being compromised due to the underperformance of an employee, it naturally decreases employee retention and subsequently increases employee turnover. All in all, not just the growth, but a company may also experience other side effects of its ineffective onboarding in the form of reduced retention and increased turnover.
Takeaways
The reason your employee onboarding process affects your employee retention, in the long run, is that it betters employee performance, which brightens the prospect of the employee being retained. Secondly, it helps make the newly hired employees feel comfortable, which leads the very employee to perform without any pressure and, subsequently, to the best of their capabilities.
An efficient onboarding also leads to clearly explaining the roles a specific job position demands, which enables an employee to perform according to the expectations of their company. In addition to this, your employees are likely to become motivated after they’ve been onboarded constructively.
Lastly, you can learn more about the employee retention strategies that are proven to work here.
