Bersin by Deloitte: Onboarding boosts employee success
Strategic onboarding, which entails the process of hiring up to successfully integrating hires into a company’s culture, can help newly hired employees ‘get off on the right foot’ and help succeed in the long term, concludes Bersin by Deloitte in its new report. In the report, the firm gives four guidelines to be followed for successful onboarding.
Bersin by Deloitte, a HR consulting firm specialised in HR benchmarking and analytics, recently released a new report titled ‘Onboarding Software Solutions 2014: On-Ramp for Employee Success’. The term onboarding is used for ‘the process of hiring, orienting and immersing new employees into their roles and into the organisation’s culture’, a process that is seen as both an urgent and important priority by 79% of business leaders. Bersin by Deloitte’s research underlines this importance and states that onboarding can play a significant role in engaging, retaining and helping employees succeed over the long-term. “Research tells us that 4% of new employees leave a job after a disastrous first day and 22% of staff turnovers occur in the first 45 days of employment. These losses can add up, given estimates that losing an employee in the first year costs at least three times that employee’s salary,” says Katherine Jones, Vice president Bersin by Deloitte.
In its research the firm challenges producers of virtual onboarding software to provide a consistent, compelling and contextual way of personalizing and delivering a positive new-hire experience, as onboarding becomes increasingly digital, including through mobile and social technologies, and the Internet. “The business case is strong for software that can get an employee productive quickly while bringing that employee into the cultural fold with the goals of increased engagement and retention,” comments Jones.
In addition, Bersin by Deloitte provides a guide to essential features required in an onboarding solution for organisation in the report. The four starting guidelines include customisation of the onboarding programs for various job roles and generational groups, providing of consistent experience and messaging throughout the entire organisation, automation of onboarding for efficiency and consistency, and onboarding should start earlier and continue until new hire has become integrated in the culture and is productive on the job. According to Jones, if these guidelines are followed “the onboarding experience can very likely lead to more rapid enculturation, higher engagement levels, and a decreased time to full productivity.”