Employee Onboarding: A Stepping Stone to Effective Career Transition
Employees move through various career stages in their career life cycle, whether it is from campus to corporate, one organization to another, one role to another or back to work after a break. Managing these transitions effectively makes adaptation to the new surroundings easier and faster. Since decades, organizations have practices like induction and onboarding in place to welcome the workforce on board.
Onboarding is the process of integrating new employees into an organization and its culture. It enables new hires to adjust to the social and performance aspects of their jobs to become productive and contributing members of the organization. However, onboarding wasn’t as structured, comprehensive and well-thought about before. The trend of onboarding has been evolving gradually since past few years:
The earlier onboarding methods often failed as there wasn’t enough room and time for employees to transition to the new roles. Eventually, those who were unable to meet company’s expectations, would choose to leave the organization. Organizations with ineffective onboarding processes set the stage for an early exit of talents. Following are some of the
observations gathered from poorly managed onboarding exercises:
Early turnover is detrimental for everyone in the organization: It disrupts the team, costs money, and damages organization’s reputation. Today, organizations have recognized the importance of structured and customized onboarding for better career transition for new hires at all levels. The focus is now on assimilation and acculturation of the new hires that goes beyond the traditional orientation and induction. The focus is to provide job clarity to new hires, help them understand the business and their role in supporting the business, understand the organizational networks and key stakeholders and get used to team culture.
New hires who assimilate well to the culture of the organization, manage their interpersonal relationships at their workplace smoothly and understand their role and business well, are able to boost the productivity and business growth of the organization, improve job performance, and build trust and business alignment. Advent of technology has also aided in improving the onboarding process as online tools and software improve efficiency of the administrative work and accelerates the process. As a result, the HR and line managers can focus on investing their time and energies on building relationships and explaining business which in turn strengthens the bonds for new hires and improves retention.
In conclusion, an evolved employee onboarding process is a stepping stone to the success of new hires to support their transition and learn their jobs well to improve performance and meet organization’s expectations. A smoother onboarding ultimately leads to higher job satisfaction, organizational commitment, decreased turnover, better performance levels, and lowered stress.
