The complete guide to New Employee Orientation

New employee orientation is the process of providing your new employee with critical information about the company culture, environment, workplace, pay, benefits, etc. It’s essential to train all new employees because a new employee orientation significantly influences your employee’s productivity and loyalty.

With a practical employee orientation, 69% of employees are expected to stay with the company for at least three years. On the other hand, companies lose 25% of their employees within a year of their onboarding after low employee orientations. A new employee can take eight to twenty-four months to reach its full potential depending on the orientation you are offering. To grow your company and set your employees for success, you need to follow the best procedures for implementing an effective new employee orientation program.

Let’s take our first step in building a comprehensive employee orientation program by figuring out an employee orientation?

What is a new employee orientation?

The orientation training program for your new employee is the process of introducing new hires to their job responsibilities, company cultures, procedures, and teams. It is a systematic process of welcoming new hires to the organization for communicating clear expectations of their work responsibilities. The organizations offering a great orientation program can retain 50% of the more significant new employee productivity.

Why is new employee orientation important?

The new orientation program is vital for making your new hires familiar with the organization, roles, and responsibilities. A knowledgeable mentor makes it easier for new employees to get acquainted with the new work environment. The right employee orientation benefits your organization in numerous ways; some of them are as follows:

• It establishes excellent and friendly relationships between employee and employer.
• Boosts your employee retention rates by clarifying the company’s vision and job responsibilities early on.
• Provides all relevant and required information to every employee to perform the role efficiently.
• Increases your employee’s productivity by making them aware of their goals and milestones.
• It helps your new hires understand and familiarize themselves with the company culture better.

Your employees can feel bewildered and overwhelmed if not greeted and communicated well. When your employees feel that way are unlikely to stay committed and loyal to the company. Moreover, without thorough and comprehensive training, your employees can take months to reach their full potential in their roles.

How employee orientation and onboarding are different?

The terms employee orientation and onboarding appear to be alike, but actually, they are entirely different concepts. Today, organizations require both employee orientation and onboarding training for accomplishing their company goals and milestones. Let’s understand the difference between employee orientation and employee onboarding:

Employee orientation is part of the employee onboarding process. It is a structured way of welcoming your new employees and familiarizing them with the company rules, values, vision, and job responsibilities.

Employee onboarding is the continuous process that commences as soon as the candidate accepts your offer and continues for three months after a new employee has joined the organization.

The primary motive here is to welcome the new employee and acquaint them with their visions, environment, and teams. Unlike employee onboarding, it is not a continuous process.

The primary motive here is to communicate well with the employee for smoothly bringing them to the company and acquainting them with the company goals and milestones.

New employee orientation is an event that lasts for few days, with the primary focus to introduce the new hires to the company and teams. In comparison, employee onboarding is a long process lasting from 3 months to one year. The onboarding process focuses on providing on-the-job experiences to facilitate the employees with more in-depth insights about the company and their job.

The new hire orientation process is quick, i.e., it will take a day or so for new hires to meet their colleagues and become comfortable with their job role. However, it is recommended not to rush the process. Have your new hire orientation process checklist ready and allow it to last for one week at least before moving to any official training for your employees.

How to plan for a compelling new hire orientation program?

It’s always essential to have a plan before designing any of your employee orientation programs. Let’s uncover the ways to making your orientation program fun and engaging for your employees.

What to encompass in your new hire orientation program?

Always remember that your new employees have three months to get more familiar and comfortable with people, tasks, and other processes. Make your new employee orientation program briefer and focused by sticking to the essential topics like:

Although paperwork is not the most exciting and amazing part of the orientation process, it is mandatory. Your employees need to know everything about the company rules, policies, regulations, tax forms, etc. Include all these documents in your company’s employee handbook.

You can even centralize your paperwork process by making all these documents accessible on your LMS, where your employees can easily access and read them. In case they wanted to return the documents, employees can put them on the same platform.

When your employees are greeted warmly, it makes them feel like a part of the team and stay committed and loyal to the company in the long run. To make your employees feel embraced and appreciated, you can send them a welcome letter from VP or CEO. Arrange an office tour for your new hires and show them all the company’s essential rooms and common spaces. Then, you can organize a team lunch to let your new hires know their colleagues. Also, ensure that you gave your employees an orientation schedule to provide them with a clear picture of upcoming events and activities.

To make your employees productive and engaging, make sure you provide them with access to all the necessary hardware, software, and other tools required for their job. Your employees will likely be using project management tools, communication tools, HR tools, etc., to do their jobs. You can create an online course or slideshow to familiarize them with all the tools and software they will use throughout their job. This way, your employees can even learn new software (if any) at their own pace.

Arrange introductory training for your new hires to make them learn the skills required for their job. This essential training can be soft skills training, compliance training, safety training, or any job-related technical training to make your new employees align with the company’s vision and mission.

Roles and responsibilities during a new employee orientation

Making your new hire employee orientation interactive and engaging involves doing all the required planning beforehand. Prepare a detailed list of orientation tasks and activities by assigning a particular person for each job. You can prepare a spreadsheet highlighting roles and responsibilities for each employee during the orientation program. Let’s see how different departments can ensure a positive and interactive orientation experience for newly hired employees:

The Human resources department is one of the most crucial departments when it comes to new employee orientation. The HR department organizes the orientation program by creating new employee orientation plans and templates and ensuring that new hires can access its LMS and other resources.

The immediate manager of the new employee is the second most crucial role in an orientation program. As a team leader, the manager is responsible for ensuring that all the employees are feeling comfortable and productive. The managers need to set clear goals for all the team members.

Your newly hired employees are likely to get familiar with all the software and tools that your company is using, and the employee is expected to work on to meet his job goals. The technical team of the IT department plays a vital role in making new employees familiar with all the technical applications like LMS and other tools to get the work done.

How to conduct an Online new hire orientation program?

Remote employees often face more difficulty in adjusting and grasping the job responsibilities than their in-house counterparts. Eventually, the orientation and onboarding of remote employees require more attention and planning.

After delivering your online orientation program, your new employees should have effectively grasped the job responsibilities, company information, and tools. Above all, the employees should start feeling comfortable and part of the team.

Let’s uncover tips for conducting an online new hire orientation program effectively:

Make your remote employees familiar with the tools and technology as soon as possible. For streamlining teamwork and accomplishing the goals, your remote team requires tools like communication tools, video conferencing tools, project management tools, etc. Therefore, setting up technology should be your priority. Simultaneously, ship configured laptops to your remote team members with all the necessary software pre-installed in them to automate time-consuming tasks.

A company’s culture is a significant factor in employee retention rates. According to a LinkedIn survey, 70% of employees leave the company because of bad culture. On the other hand, 71% of employees enjoy working for the company having a mission that employees believe in.

A successful and effective employee orientation program is where employees get to know about the company and get to know everyone in the company. You can create a group on LinkedIn for new hires. This enables them to stay connected and develop relationships with other employees as well.

Your remote hires should have access to all the company guidelines, office tours, training materials, company rules, and regulations. You can incorporate a Learning Management System to store, organize and distribute all your material in one place.

LMS helps you save your time by letting your employees access the resources and acquire the required skills at their own pace without waiting for the scheduled training sessions. Moreover, you can quickly create, edit, store and distribute the content with your employees in just a few clicks.

How to efficiently streamline your new hire orientation process flow?

No matter how engaging and interactive your new employee orientation program is but it will only be successful if it runs smoothly for every new employee involved.

Let’s uncover our top strategies for creating a seamless and effective new employee orientation experience:

1. As we mentioned earlier, it’s vital to identify the orientation program’s requirements and goals for assigning particular team members of departments. You will have to rely on team managers, technical teams, HR teams across the organization to deliver a positive and seamless orientation experience.
2. To deliver an excellent orientation as per your plan, create a checklist of all the mandatory events and activities for your new hires to complete. We have created a new employee orientation checklist template to quickly download and customize your needs and try out on your new hire.

The new employee orientation overwhelms you with its associated documents and administrative tasks. But technology has improved the orientation process and experience. Instead of dominating your new hires with a stack of papers, forms, manuals, employees can read, access, and submit the resources through Learning Management System. With LMS, you can also deliver and track your employee onboarding training. Utilize your LMS’s gamification, social learning, and collaboration features to fasten the learning process and keep your employees motivated and productive. Use analytics to track the progress of your new hires.

The new hire employee orientation program should be consistent throughout the organization, i.e., every employee involved in the orientation program should interpret the expectations of their job role. To ensure this, clarify the orientation’s objective to team managers, technical teams, HR department, etc. Always keep your orientation checklist ready for accomplishing all the orientation-related responsibilities.

Delivering result-oriented and high-quality employee orientation can be overwhelming significantly when the number of new hires is growing. Staying consistent in such a scenario can be difficult and tricky. The most acceptable way to figure out of your employees find the orientation useful is by encouraging feedback. Collect feedback from your new hires during and after the orientation. You can quickly figure out what sections of your orientation program are best performing and what areas need improvement. You can also discuss the improvement strategies with the associated employee. Lastly, your employee turnover rates and performance are dependent on the orientation program.

Conclusion:

It is well said, “The first impression is the last impression.” The way you welcome your new hire will have a sound and direct impact on their performance, engagement, and reaching their full potential in the job. According to a BCG report, employee orientation and onboarding have a direct impact on employee retention rates.

Online employee orientation is a new trend these days for most companies. Reputable companies like Dell, Microsoft have been doing it for years and integrated their roads to success. KloudLearn also has created a checklist for virtual onboarding to help you plan every step efficiently and create an engaging, interactive and seamless experience for our new hires.

Companies that nail new employee orientation programs have better employee retention rates, engagement, productivity, and talent branding.

KloudLearn, an autonomous and user-friendly Learning Management System, helps you deliver an interactive and engaging new employee orientation program. To know more, Contact us now.

We have created a new employee orientation and onboarding checklist for you, which you can download, customize, and implement for the next batch of new hires:

Originally published at https://kloudlearn.us on February 24, 2021.