If your business is looking for ways to save costs, increase productivity, get an edge on competitors and retain top talent, it’s a pretty good bet that your onboarding process is an overlooked opportunity. In fact, according to a recent survey by Kronos Incorporated, 76% of human resources professionals said onboarding practices at their organization were underutilized.
It’s a serious problem. Other research by Jobvite revealed almost 30% of survey participants had left a job within the first 90 days. Not surprisingly, the three most-cited reasons for these departures were issues that proper onboarding can help prevent. 43% said their day-to-day role wasn’t what they expected; 34% said they had a bad experience or negative incident; and 32% said they didn’t fit the company culture.
This is where a solid, visual onboarding program can help.
The benefits of onboarding
Most business leaders understand there’s a significant financial hit involved when an employee leaves—the rule of thumb is 20% of annual salary, or $14,000 to replace a mid-level employee making $70,000. But the negative impacts go well beyond that, ranging from lost productivity to reduced employee morale. In fact, the organizational costs of employee turnover are estimated to be 100% to 300% of an employee’s salary.
That’s why comprehensive onboarding is well worth the investment. Done properly, onboarding allows your company to experience a ripple of benefits company-wide, including:
- Better employee retention – New hires are more likely to stay with the organization longer-term, saving the costs of high turnover.
- Better employee engagement – Clear expectations, a staple of onboarding, is one of the top contributors to employee engagement.
- A stronger team with more knowledge retention – Teams that forge longer-term working relationships form stronger bonds and can retain more knowledge than those with high turnover. Managers’ satisfaction ratings increase by 20% when their employees have formal onboarding.
- The ability to attract top talent – As proper onboarding makes for more engaged employees, the resulting positive company culture is a key attraction for top talent.
- Increased productivity – It typically takes eight to 12 months for a new employee to become fully productive, but onboarding can help speed up this process, making new hires 50% more productive.
Visualization software, such as MindManager, can help you to establish a repeatable process that will not only save you, as team leader, a great deal of time, but will also ensure that each new hire to your team experiences a consistently high-quality onboarding experience.
Learn more about employee onboarding
In our recent eBook, All Aboard: Find Out 10 Top Onboarding Practices Can Drive You Company Goals, we break down some must-have best practices that you can implement to help achieve your company goals. Next week, we’ll dive deeper into some onboarding best practices, and talk further about how your can leverage MindManager in this process.
In the meantime, you can download this free eBook for guidance on how to implement a new onboarding program at your company.
Or, if you’re eager to start planning your new onboarding process immediately, you can download a free, 30-day trial of MindManager.
