3 reasons to start investing in onboarding immediately

New employee onboarding is a key part of the employee experience. A lot is spent attracting and converting a candidate into a new employee. The company then invests heavily on perks & benefits to try and keep employees engaged and happy. What we see too often though is things fall to pieces in the first critical weeks and months of a new employee's tenure. When talking about this window of opportunity to enable a new hire, SHRM discovered that half of senior hires (i.e. the most expensive to find and replace) will not succeed in the first 18 months in their role.

This post will help build a strong business case for investing in your employee onboarding experience and the returns you can expect.

1. Employee onboarding improves tenure

Fact: 91% of employees stay with a company for at least 1 year if onboarded efficiently.

With a focus and investment on your onboarding process, you can expect 9 out of 10 new hires to see it through their first year. Of those employees onboarded efficiently, 69% will still be around 3 years later! Spoiler: with current job tenure trends, anything you can do to keep employee around is worth it!

If you're working to find, attract, and retain the increasingly hard to find talent, allocate a portion of time and funding towards creating an efficient and engaging onboarding experience for your new employees. Leaders at every level, from executives to hiring managers, will agree that reducing the risk of losing key team members is worth focusing on.

2. Employee onboarding reduces turnover

Fact: It can cost upwards of 20% of an employee's salary to replace them, depending on a few factors.

Building on the idea of increasing tenure, reducing turnover will also result in huge savings to your bottom line. Let's take the example of a mid-level employee making $60,000 per year. At 20%, that means it would cost $12,000 to replace them. This is driven from separation costs (i.e. severance pay), replacement costs (i.e. job posting, recruiter time), and the need to retrain their replacement.

Going to our earlier stat around tenure, would you invest a fraction of $12,000 to reduce the risk of turnover costs by 91% in the first year? Simple math eh? If you are looking for any tool or external support to help with setting up and delivering onboarding, put the cost of it in perspective of how much you'd lose for each churned employee.

3. Employee onboarding improves productivity

Fact: happier employees are anywhere from 20% to 37% more productive.

What does onboarding have to do with happiness you ask? Patrick Lencioni writes in his book The Truth About Employee Engagement that an employee feels happier when they know that:

1. They matter
2. Their work has impact
3. They are able to make progress

What better way to show an employee that they matter than by designing and delivering a well thought out onboarding plan? Much better than the often cold or absent welcome they are used to receiving! By clearly defining their goals and objectives during their first few weeks with your company, they will have a clear line of sight on how their work has impact and how they can make progress.

On the topic of progress, make the onboarding experience something that can be tracked, and give the employee a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. Through this, you offer an easy and early win for that new team member. This builds confidence and makes them feel happy!

Takeaway: The investment you make in your employee onboarding process can directly impact the success of your company.

Building a business case for investing energy, resources, and funding to your onboarding process is can be broken down into how it helps improve tenure, reduce turnover, and increase productivity (for the new employee, and the team by extension).

At Aboard, we help maximize that investment in onboarding through automation, organization, and engagement. Please follow us on LinkedIn and feel free to share this article with anyone who might find it helpful! Interested in chatting? Feel free to grab some time here. Otherwise we invite you to try Aboard for free for 14 days!

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