Onboarding really means…
Onboarding begins during the recruitment phase when an employer acclimates prospective employees to the company culture. Onboarding is an executive leader’s opportunity to build foundational rapport with a new team member. The duration of onboarding is role-based but is often 30 to 90 days from the employee’s start date. Throughout the onboarding period, new employees are thereby enabled and engaged.
Pending context, the word enabled can have a bad connotation. In this topic of onboarding, enabling an employee means creating space for them to be creative, innovative, and utilize their skill-set. Glint’s simple definition is fitting and states employee engagement is the degree to which employees invest their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral energies toward positive organizational outcomes. Make no mistake that employee engagement is a scrambled attempt to boost morale. Incorporating employee engagement in the onboarding plan and as a daily practice offers benefits such as work satisfaction, established lines of communication, and goal achievement.
Onboarding plans can include 3 phases :
A welcoming phase: This is an opportunity for the team to gather and celebrate a new addition.
A training phase: Role-specific training is one of the most important phases in the onboarding process. According to Survey Monkey, roughly 86% of employees say that job training is important to them—and nearly three out of every four (74%) are willing to learn things outside of work hours to improve their job performance.
A mentoring phase: This is often the last phase during onboarding. Executive leaders transition from teaching during the training phase to influencing, guiding, and directing new team members. Mentoring should continue throughout an employee’s tenure.