Employee Onboarding Guide: All you need to know
Getting your new employees onboarded is one of the most important processes for a business. You want to make sure it’s quick and efficient, but you need it to be thorough enough to make them self-sufficient in their role – it can be a tricky balance.
So, here’s everything you need to know about employee onboarding and how Omniplex Guide can make the process as seamless as possible.
What is employee onboarding?
First off, employee onboarding is the process of introducing and integrating new employees into a business. The staff onboarding process looks different for everyone but usually includes:
- Contract signing
- IT setup and policy information
- HR setup and policy information
- Health and safety for the physical site
- GDPR and data security courses
- Role-specific system and process courses
- Business history and values
This, of course, varies from business to business but it usually takes up at least the first week of an employee’s new job. Ongoing training is also a part of the onboarding process that’s commonly overlooked. This involves continuous professional development (CPD), new systems training, and more. You can see the four stages of employee onboarding below.
- Preboarding
- Orientation
- Role-specific training
- Ongoing development
Despite common perceptions of onboarding stopping after the initial orientation, good onboarding lasts throughout a career. After all, you can always do with a refresher course, or spend time upskilling to stay ahead of the game.
When it comes to Learning and Development, Omniplex Guide’s interactive, on-screen step-by-step guides, can help your team members get up to speed with new pieces of software, systems, and applications in an accessible way.
Omniplex Guide takes you by the hand and walks you through different systems, whether you’ve just joined the company or you’re integrating new software further along in your career.
For instance, if your business wants to start using a new invoicing platform, instead of lengthy L&D seminars, Omniplex Guide overlays the platform, offering clickable product tours, advice, and walkthroughs, complete with all the context you need to succeed.
Why is employee onboarding important?
Employee onboarding is important for the efficient running and development of any organisation. The more efficiently you can get a person onboarded with their role, the quicker they can start making money for the business – that’s the idea.
However, not all onboarding processes are created equally. When you use Omniplex Guide you get intuitive, interactive onboarding plans and processes, that you can tailor to individual departments or job roles.
Pick any sort of software, system, application, online tool, or website, and Omniplex Guide can be enabled over the top. Using the Omniplex Guide browser extension, you can add step-by-step instructions and user guides to any website or platform that your team uses. This can be at the start of their journey or as you add new tools to your company’s daily processes.
Having employee onboarding that exists without having to leave the platform or website you’re learning to use saves time and gives much-needed context that has been proven to improve learning and retention skills.
This is critically important for getting your employees to hit the ground running. Smooth employee onboarding means:
- The ability to adapt
- Keep up with innovation
- Improve efficiency
- Increase employee retention
- Improve user experience
- Knowledge retention
- Improved opinion of your brand as a workplace.
Onboarding best practices
As with any business process, employee onboarding has a number of best practices to consider. Over time, these have been distilled down to the four Cs:
- Compliance
- Clarification
- Culture
- Connection
These are sometimes expanding out into the six critical steps of onboarding:
- Compliance
- Clarification
- Confidence
- Connection
- Culture
- Checkback
Think of these as a tick list of requirements that your employee onboarding needs to instill in your new starter. You want them to be compliant with procedures and processes. They need to be clear in their approach and job role. They should have the confidence to do their job fully while connecting with the culture and ethos of the business. Ultimately, they should also be able to retain the information and check back in at any time in the future.
When thinking about best practices, you want to include the following things in your employee onboarding process.
- Interactivity
- Clear instructions
- Short and concise onboarding
- Mixed media such as text, images and video content
- Live walkthroughs overlaid on top of software, apps, online tools, systems, and websites, so team members don’t have to flip between tabs
- Personalisable depending on role or department
- Easy install and adjustments over time
Automating new employee onboarding
One of the easiest ways to scale your employee onboarding process is to automate it. That’s where Omniplex Guide comes in. We help you create clickable walkthrough guides, and integrate video tutorials, that simplify the onboarding process while making it a lot more engaging.
Onboarding takes up a huge amount of time for departments like HR and IT. Whether that’s through answering questions, setting up onboarding seminars, or troubleshooting queries, it’s time that could be used more productively.
With self-service and automated new employee onboarding, you’re creating a scalable ecosystem that allows your business to grow without excess resources being needed. You’re also empowering your employees to find answers for themselves and be more independent workers, which is a valuable skill in any business!
It’s simple to automate your onboarding process with Omniplex Guide – with an easy-to-use browser extension, intuitive step-by-step walkthrough creation, and a backend that’s full of reporting insights, you can quickly set it up and then just let it run!
How can Omniplex Guide support your onboarding process?
Omniplex Guide can support your onboarding process by enabling you to create interactive new starter plans that actually work. The engaging clickthrough process and video tutorials keep new employees hooked and mean they actually retain more information versus traditional in-person onboarding.
To find out more about how Omniplex Guide can support your onboarding process, book a call with the team today!