Virtual Employee Onboarding Program: Implementing

Starting a new job can indeed trigger anxiety (or fear) of meeting new people. Hence, the first step the company takes in making an employee feel at home is never forgotten. If done well, onboarding can be a game changer for your company. It doesn’t just lead to higher job satisfaction and performance levels but also reduces employee turnover to a large extent.

Software like Lessonly ensures workers feel valued and can also achieve great heights after indulging in a superior learning experience. It truly makes the entire onboarding process easy and seamless.

 

 

But one single wrong step can force your employees to take an exit door sooner than they expected. A recent study has found that most organizations failed miserably in keeping their new hires hooked through the entire process. Only 12% of employees agreed to accept that their organization did a good job of onboarding new employees.

If your onboarding program hurts more than it helps, it’s important to dive deep into finding flaws and adopting ways to rectify them. There is a need for proper incorporation of the employee onboarding program. It will help to reduce the rate at which new hires quit their jobs and take others.

Let’s take a brief look at the major issues associated with employee onboarding and ways to combat their serious consequences:

 

Challenge 1 With an Virtual Employee Onboarding Program: Information Overload on the First Day Itself

Consuming all the information that they hand to the employees during onboarding is one of the biggest challenges that new hires face. This involves reading exhaustively long yet informative documents about the organization.

During online employee onboarding, there is no way to ensure whether employees read this information or not. Most often, they just skim through the pages. This could bear disastrous results as employees are unaware of their roles and responsibilities. As a result, their productivity gets lower.

 

Challenge 2: No Clarity on the Role

One of the most common challenges associated with onboarding is the non-clarity of the roles. The new hires think they are signed up for a different role while they are given something else on the first day.

This ends up disappointing the new employee and leaving them in a dilemma. HR should establish clear goals and accountability to boost employees’ productivity and also develop long-term relationships with them.

 

Challenge 3 With an Virtual Employee Onboarding Program: No Human Interaction

The major challenge that most companies face during remote onboarding is its impersonal nature and lack of human interaction. This could make the new hire feel lonely and isolated. Also, HR cannot judge the employees until they fully start working. They don’t know their strengths and weaknesses. The HR team therefore sometimes assigns a role that is not best suited to the new employees, and thus they are later transferred to a different role. This misjudgment wastes precious time and resources of both the employee and the organization.

If done well, an efficient training program results in employee retention and enhanced productivity.

 

Challenge 4: No Pre-boarding

Pre-boarding is the period between the day the employee signs the offer letter and his first day of work. A strong pre-boarding process should include the following points:

•   Helps in preventing employee turnover
•   Gives a hand in building employee loyalty
•   Helps the new employees in building long-lasting relationships with colleagues.

During the pre-boarding process, always ensure to share all the rules, regulations, and company’s culture with the employees. Share all the necessary paperwork, give them enough time to read; ask questions if any; and help them in setting up all the accounts, etc. to create a sense of belonging in them even before starting work.

Skipping pre-boarding means leaving the employees with enough idle time. And that could spark anxiety, nervousness, and ambiguity in their heads regarding their decision for the job, which is something nobody wants.

 

Challenge 5: Lack of Motivation and Engagement

A great onboarding program instills a sense of confidence in the employees, which helps in retaining them for a long period of time. They get settled into the company’s work environment fairly quickly. During training sessions, employees take part in various activities that need engagement, coordination, and also require collaborative learning.

However, with ineffective online onboarding, the employee starts to feel aloof and cold, and it takes more time to settle because of the absence of factors like engagement and discussions with peers. This is also the reason why many companies have to face increased employee turnover in the first year of joining.

 

Conclusion

When a new hire joins any organization, there are oodles of uncertainty. Anxiety about the new environment, new work, and new culture consumes them wholly. To add to their list of woes, the new hires who have not met their peers or team leaders before tend to feel aloof and cold.

Therefore, before implementing a virtual employee onboarding program, the above-discussed loopholes should be avoided and worked upon. If left unaddressed, it can cause irreparable damage to the organization. A good onboarding strategy wipes out uncertainty, apprehension, and distress in the minds of potential new employees.