Onboarding Training For New Hires: A Complete Guide to See Long-Term Success

When it comes to onboarding training your new hires, or even your existing team members, you might think that the job is done as soon as they've logged into their computers. You might think you did your part after walking them through that first day of training, but in reality, there's so much more that you can do to make sure they're giving their full attention to their jobs — and stay motivated.

Employee onboarding training is often considered a “nice to have”, but research says it's actually a “need to have”: This confirms what we all know intuitively — getting off on the right foot with new hires is important. A positive emotional and psychological experience during the first weeks on the job can lead to many benefits including higher commitment and engagement across an employee's tenure.

Onboarding training is a process with the purpose of helping new hires get up to speed and be successful in their roles faster. Regardless of what position they are hired for, effective onboarding training for new employees will improve their engagement, productivity, and longevity. This means organizations will also see a big jump in profits. 

This guide will cover everything you need to know about hiring/on-boarding employees and see results long term. Let's get started!

Why is onboarding training important?

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The onboarding process is one of the most vital aspects of employee development and retention. When companies invest in their employees, they reap many benefits.

one study from Glassdoor found that 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding.

Research shows that proper onboarding training can lead to:

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• Higher employee retention rates

• Increased job satisfaction ratings

• Improved productivity levels

• Increase employee engagement

• Lower the risk of new hire failure

• Reduce employee turnover

• A boost in overall business performance

How to go about your Onboarding Training Plan?

1. Understand the Current Onboarding Process

Regardless of industry or role, the key to successful onboarding training is consistency. How are your current employees being onboarded? Are there any gaps in their training? Does each department have its own onboarding process? Do employees have different experiences based on which manager is responsible for their onboarding? What does the process look like for contingent or remote workers?

Getting answers to these questions takes time and effort, but it’s well worth it. Without an organized onboarding process, you run the risk of leaving new hires feeling confused and overwhelmed. 

2. Describe the Ideal Onboarding Process

Start by identifying your training and development requirements. What expectations do you have for new hires? How long should it take for employees to be productive? What key skills should they have when they’re done? Answering these questions will help you build a stronger onboarding plan.

3. Collect Data on Your Current Onboarding Efforts

The next step in creating a great onboarding program is to collect data on your current efforts and find out where you need to improve. Some of the best ways you can do this are by:

4. Conducting a Survey at the end of the onboarding process.

Reviewing any negative feedback or comments you've received in reviews, or on social media. Talking to employees who have recently joined the team to get their feedback.

Checking out what other companies are doing for onboarding, and seeing if there's anything you can learn from them.

5. Build a Team to Support Your Goals

Building out your team is one of the most important things you can do to ensure success in your onboarding process. The team should include the following:

An appropriate leader who understands your goals and can manage the process on a daily basis. This is usually someone at the VP or C-level. The leader should be engaged, interested, and excited about getting started with onboarding training.

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6. Think of engaging ways to conduct onboarding training 

It’s important for businesses to create an onboarding training plan that’s not only engaging and interactive, but also helps your new hires to become more productive in less time.

Simulations are a great way to engage new employees with your business and introduce them to different aspects of the job. You could create simulations around how they will be working with different departments or what they need to do in case of an emergency.

Bonus: Gamified simulations are one of the most effective ways to engage your new hires. By incorporating elements of play into your employee training plan, you can help your employees learn faster and retain more information. 

How to evaluate the effectiveness of Onboarding training for new hires?

The key to evaluating the effectiveness of your onboarding training program is to measure the results of your efforts.

A few examples could be:

1. How many new hires have been promoted in their first year?

2. Are your new hires still with you after their first 90 days?

3. How quickly are your new hires getting up and running on their work?

4. What percentage of your new hires are contributing at a high level of performance?

5. Did you achieve your goal of reducing employee turnover? 

6. Did new employees learn what they needed to learn in less time?

7. Did they apply their training on the job and demonstrate that they built the skills you intended them to build?
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By answering all these questions and making sure you have the right tools in place, you will be able to track, collect and analyze data on how efficient your onboarding training program is.

To sum up:

Great companies put a lot of work into making sure that their employees are entering the right environment, so they can work comfortably without feeling nervous. But even with all this effort, turnover rates in companies are still around 60%. With such high turnover rates, it's not surprising that companies would want to make their onboarding process as simple as possible. But while organizations should look to optimize the onboarding training process, they should also realize that nothing will ever be perfect and embrace the fact that new employees will always have some questions and concerns. If these issues in the onboarding process are addressed early on, a company is much more likely to see long-term success from its new hires and higher levels of retention overall.

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