Ideas to Engage Employees Beyond New Hire Onboarding Orientation

If your new hire orientation is confined to asking your new hires to read an outdated three ring “company overview” binder followed by a few hours of “shadow training” than you might want to continue reading this article.  

According to the Wynhurst Group, the cost of losing an employee in the first year is estimated to be at least three times their salary.  What’s more, 22% of staff turnover occurs in the first forty-five days of employment.

For any business, new hire onboarding orientation is an investment in your time, money and resources. If your new hire orientation isn’t engaging, it will have a detrimental impact on your business leading to lower employee productivity, high turnover, and customer churn.

Once first day impressions have come and gone however, what is next?  Coming up with new and creative new hire orientation ideas are essential to driving employee engagement and cultivating long term employees.  What methods can IT staffing firms deploy to drive employee engagement beyond the initial new hire orientation?  What are some of the best practices and who else and what else in the organization can be leveraged to drive employee engagement?

Here are some ideas to engage employees beyond new hire onboarding orientation.

Let’s start off by taking a look at the new hire orientation map provided by my friends and technology partner, Mindtickle.

When new hires are brought into any company their experience is highly influenced by those around them including their peers, manager, subordinates, HR and the executive leadership team including the CEO. These are the various touch points that a typical new hire “touches” when going through new hire onboarding orientation. When it comes to crafting your new hire orientation onboarding program you should take into consideration all of these touch points and how each can make the new hire orientation process that much more engaging.

New Hire Orientation Best Practices

While the focus of your new hire onboarding orientation is to get your new hire acclimated with your company and services offering, you should still be open to and seeking out information and ideas from your new hires.  As they experience the “new hire journey” you should be asking for their feedback and ideas on how to improve the overall experience. Companies like Google and Zappos are masters in  gathering the  thoughts and ideas from their new hires on their experience assimilating into their new role and company. These companies also incorporate executive leadership into this exercise.  This sends a strong message to the new hire that executive leadership values the feedback of their employees, even their new hires!  This in turn plays a big role retaining employees because they feel comfortable and confident that they can speak open and freely with senior management.

Integrate feedback sessions throughout your new hire orientation.  Share the responsibility by empowering HR, peers, managers and executives the opportunity to host feedback sessions throughout and after the orientation has concluded.

Engage New Hires Early and Often in Peer Events

Engage your new hires early and often in peer events and activities. This of course needs to be mapped out and planned in advanced. Going out to lunch on their first day of employment is a nice gesture (keep doing this) but what is your plan for the rest of the week and the following 12 weeks?  Remember the high cost of turnover not to mention that investment of your own personal time and resources to recruit and hire your new hire.  Employers need to nurture their new asset.

Schedule Activities with Executive Leadership

Schedule activities with executive leadership to gain feedback and also gauge your new hire’s level of engagement. Here executives should be on the look-out for “up and coming” leaders, the future leaders of the company

Leverage Blended Learning

We can’t expect to a put new hire through a one day or multi-day workshop and/or ask them to read that outdated company overview three ring binder and expect them to be  “ramped up” and ready to be productive.  For sales onboarding to be impactful it must incorporate blended learning which includes online sales training.  But it should also include instructor-classroom training and all of it should be reinforced with sales coaching from their direct supervisor.

Finally, be sure to incorporate gamification into your new hire onboarding orientation. Given people's attention span and how today's younger workforce prefers to learn, gamification is a must. A recent study conducted by Gap Gemini tells us that enterprise gamification is emerging as a leader for new onboarding activities and employee engagement.

Download your personal copy of the eBook about accelerating new hire onboarding and learn how can you break this vicious cycle and onboard recruiters and salespeople in a way that actually works.