3 Tips to Cutting Your Onboarding Down By HOURS

Your onboarding process is a critical component of employee success. It ensures new hires are properly acclimated to your environment, their team, and the role itself. Without robust onboarding practices, new hires may be left to fend for themselves. If that happens, they may take longer to reach full productivity or, in the worst-case scenario, feel so unsupported that they decide to quit.

While, based on that, it may seem like reducing your onboarding time isn’t possible, that isn’t the case. By using the right approach and focusing on efficiency, you can reduce your onboarding process by several hours, if not a few days, without harming the quality of the experience.

If you are wondering how you can cut your onboarding process down while still achieving exceptional results and offering a high-quality experience to new hires, here are three tips that can help.

1. Eliminate Busy Work

After an initial orientation, managers often need to give the new hire work tasks to start handling. At times, managers believe that providing the incoming employee with busy work is the best approach. After all, those activities tend to be the simplest and require little oversight.

Since the onboarding process tends to require a lot of management input, mixing in busy work may seem like a great way to achieve balance on your end. It gives you time to handle other responsibilities without leaving a new hire with nothing to do.

The issue is, busy work doesn’t provide the new hire with any value. Rarely does busy work help boost their skills in relation to their new role. Instead, it simply fills their time.

Since getting the incoming employee to full productivity as quickly as possible needs to be a goal, giving them busy work is counterintuitive to the situation. It may slow their progress toward full productivity. By eliminating busywork from the plan, you can focus the new hire on relevant skill-building tasks instead, allowing them to become a valuable addition to your team faster.

2. Build Up the Difficulty

Another process that can reduce onboarding time is to create a project schedule for the new hire that ramps up in difficulty over time. Begin with an assignment that’s challenging based on where they are starting out. Then, choose a subsequent task that builds on what they learned with the first and is slightly more complex.

The idea is to keep the work challenging without it becoming overwhelming. Additionally, by having each task build upon the last, you create a system that promotes learning, allowing them to progress in a logical fashion.

3. Embrace Constant Feedback

Input from a manager can actually shorten onboarding times when it’s delivered consistently. By embracing a constant feedback model, you give the new hire critical support and direction. Additionally, you make frequent discussions are part of the paradigm, ensuring the employee has plentiful opportunities to ask questions.

With constant feedback, course corrections, when needed, can occur at the earliest possible moment. Overall, that will reduce the learning curve, allowing them to reach full productivity quickly.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can make your onboarding program more efficient, the team at Apogee Managed Solutions can help. Contact us today.

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