With any organization or company, onboarding is a constant part of the team’s growth and operations. Hiring new employees brings new talents and ideas to help companies evolve and thrive. However, it’s important to prioritize creating a surefire onboarding process to ensure those new hires stay for the long run.
Companies with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82%! This is why it’s essential to have an onboarding process that informs and engages your new hires effectively. But with any new hire orientation, some employee onboarding challenges can happen along the way.
What are those new hire orientation challenges? Let’s take a closer look at the most common issues that can arise during the onboarding process. We’ll also cover strategic ways to solve these problems as they arise!
Most Common Challenges When Onboarding New Hires
When it comes time to onboard new employees, the process isn’t always smooth sailing. Whether you have a fully remote team, hybrid, or all in-person, challenges can arise in any scenario. When onboarding new hires, many issues can be easily prevented with the right preparation and strategies in place.
Here are some of the top employee onboarding challenges and how to overcome them:
Information Overload
The last thing you want to do is pile on too much information with your new hires. That’s the quickest way to burn out and lose a new employee that’s overwhelmed. Did you know the average new hire is expected to complete 54 activities during their onboarding process? Anything more than this is undoubtedly information overload! If you’re handing them piles of paperwork and training guides, that’s too much content all at once. This is where managing expectations of how much information to give new hires comes into play.
Space out your onboarding process with modules that give training and information in sessions. That way, you can ensure your new hires aren’t inundated with information. Add a timeline checklist so your new hires know when to complete each training information section. That way, they have time to retain and process further information over a few weeks rather than too much content all at once.
Unclear Role Duties
With everything that goes into the onboarding process, sometimes managing expectations of new hire’s role duties can get lost. First, there’s the job description they applied for, then there’s all of the new information in the onboarding, and then there might be tasks asked of them by other employees or managers. The issue happens when conflicting tasks and role expectations come from different sources.
The employer’s job is to streamline all of the job’s duties to ensure consistency and clarity. If your new hire feels they’ve been assigned tasks that don’t align with their original job description, they might not want to stick around. Make things as easy to understand as possible in the orientation so there’s no confusion about the role duties.
Lack of Remote Employee Engagement
If you’re onboarding remote employees, there are a specific set of challenges that come with that. Employers can send remote teams all of the information, but it’s crucial to have innovative ways to keep them motivated and engaged during onboarding. This is often due to unorganized or unclear remote onboarding procedures that are dull and repetitive.
With virtual onboarding, there needs to be more effort to boost remote employee engagement. Using video for remote employee onboarding helps to introduce them to key team members with introduction videos. It also gives the onboarding process a more interactive and demonstrative element through videos introducing them to their new role and the company. Use surveys for quality feedback from your remote team to find improvement areas.
Unrealistic Expectations
When onboarding, even if you’re short-staffed, don’t expect your new hires to jump right into performing at the same level as your current team. Sometimes, employers may place unrealistic expectations on their new hires that are simply not feasible. It’s poor form on the employer’s behalf to throw someone into a backlog of tasks right when they start.
Instead, give your new hires time to complete sufficient onboarding training first. Then, managers can start implementing tasks and managing expectations as they get settled. This can also include having a current employee show them the ropes to get them more acclimated. Set up a manager check-in at 30, 60, and 90 days to ensure your new hire is clear about job expectations and to answer any questions.
Outdated Onboarding Processes
Forget about the piles of paperwork and having people sit in a classroom for onboarding. Take advantage of learning and development software to take onboarding to a completely remote level. This allows employees to complete their onboarding training wherever they have computer access. There is no need to give them packets of assignments and outlines (this isn’t college anymore!).
Make it all digital and virtual to save time and money with the added convenience of everything being available online. Incorporate engaging onboarding videos to make the process easier and more interactive. These can be videos integrated into the learning and development software that walk your new hires through the onboarding journey from start to finish.
Ensure a Smooth Onboarding Process for New Employees
For new hires, management, and staff alike, everyone benefits from an onboarding process that’s effective and efficient. Many companies face employee onboarding challenges such as information overload, unclear role duties, lack of remote employee engagement, unrealistic expectations, and outdated onboarding processes.
The good news is there’s a solution to these common issues that may plague an organization’s orientation program. The first step is acknowledging there’s a problem and seeking out the next steps to rework the onboarding experience. At Reimagined Experiences, we help HR professionals level up onboarding and training with video! We aim to transform new employee orientations to incorporate high-definition video programming into your learning and development programs.
Book a free discovery call to reimagine your employee onboarding process with us!
