6 reasons why you need to invest in a good onboarding platform

Here are 6 reasons why you need to invest in a good onboarding platform for your company and new hires:

1. Save money! 🤑

Let’s start by talking about saving money! It costs much more and takes more time to hire a new employee than to retain a current one. Think of how much money is being lost if more than half of your employees are leaving within a year of being hired.

According to Gallup - replacing an employee can cost 150% of his or her annual salary when you consider the cost of re-posting the job, redoing interviews, and so forth... Another study by Deloitte shows: 'The cost of losing one employee can range from tens of thousands of dollars to 1.5-2X their annual salary'. The studies sound reasonable, but the exact costs will vary per company, industry, and role.

2. Start your onboarding program anywhere, anytime 🌏

Because of the Covid-19 crisis, we see there is a big shift from personal onboarding to remote onboarding. Organizations can benefit greatly from putting their onboarding program in a cloud platform and providing all their new hires access to information anywhere, anytime across all devices such as computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Because you give your new employees the opportunity to access their onboarding anywhere anytime they can get to know their new company, team, role at their own pace with the possibility to do so safely at their own home.

3. Start onboarding before the official start date 

With an online onboarding platform you give the chance to your new hires to get a glimpse of your culture in a fun and interactive way. You can prep your new hires and help them with their first-day-of-work anxiety by answering questions in the platform such as:

• Where do I sit?
• Who is the office manager?
• Who do I go to if I have questions?
• Do I bring my own lunch?
• What are the office hours?
• Where do I park?
• Who should I ask for when I arrive?
• What will I be doing on the first day?
• Do I bring my own computer?
• What should I wear?
• Does the office have coffee or tea?
• Which floor is the office on?
• Where are the restrooms?
• And many more...

Probably most of your new employees will be able to find the answers to these questions on their own, but you will make them feel more welcome and confident on their first day—not socially exhausted.  

4. Employee engagement and purpose 🎯

New hires that got a good onboarding experience are more likely to feel connected and engaged to the company. Through an onboarding platform, you give everyone that joins your company the same content and opportunity to learn what the purpose of the company & their new role will be in a fun interactive way! According to Mercer, thriving employees are three times more likely to work for a company with a strong sense of purpose. 

To bring across the company purpose you should at least include the following pillars in your onboarding platform: 

• The company vision
• Show how their new role impacts the company and its clients
• Share customer success stories
• Show recognition & gratitude
• Frequently bring across the meaning and value of the company
• Focus on the bigger picture

When you make sure your new hires are engaged they are more enthusiastic and more eager to put their best foot forward. This will as well make sure that they contribute to the improvement of the company faster instead of doing the bare minimum. 

Check out The Ultimate Onboarding Checklist for more tips on what to include in the onboarding program.

5. Monitor the process of your new hires 🖥

When you use an online onboarding platform you can monitor the process of your new hires and know which content still needs to be learned before their first day.  An analytics dashboard will give them a quick view of the onboarding progress of each employee. So as a manager, you can always check if a new employee is stuck somewhere in the process and offer to help. Furthermore, you can analyze end-user responses to the content and accordingly enhance it for increasing productivity. 

6. Continuous training 🏋️‍♂️

An onboarding platform can be used for more than just the introduction period. L&D teams can set up the platform to deliver continuous training to all their employees. Think of bringing across new GDPR rules, new safety measurements for employees to reboard them to the back to the office after the Covid-19 crisis or just to give them multiple learning courses so they keep developing in their current role. By giving your employees the opportunity to keep on learning and developing you make sure your employees are engaged and are more likely to stay within your company. 

💡 Appical Tip: Invest Time

The strongest investment that company leaders can make in their employees is with their own time and leadership.

There are certainly more reasons to invest in employee onboarding platforms, but we can't cover them all here. Luckily, we are here to help you. Contact us for more information.