Top 5 Tips For Staying Engaged With New Hires During Onboarding

Onboarding in the digital age is a different kind of HR beast - it takes equal parts personality and digital engagement; it needs to be engaging enough to retain the best in class, and reactive enough to help any and every employee feel welcome and empowered in sometimes remote, often hybrid working teams. 

It isn’t easy. As the working world continues to adapt to the rise of remote communications in the wake of COVID-19, onboarding has gone the way of the team meeting and interview process - almost (but not exclusively) screen-based and online. 

However, here at Sloane Staffing, we buck the trend by feeling that an overreliance on any one platform or piece of software to mitigate the changes to onboarding are, in and of itself, not massively important. We don’t see any online platform as necessarily integral to onboarding at all - they are simply tools, and a means to an end. They should be considered platforms to leverage more important, holistic elements of your working culture and company purpose.

What we want executive leaders and business owners to understand is that onboarding requires your input in targeted ways to communicate what candidates want - purpose-led companies, and empathetic leadership.

What we also urge leaders to do is find a way of extending their onboarding process by leveraging your specific place within the company. You need to use your position as the final cherry on the recruitment cake, focusing on top-line goals, achievements, and most importantly, the future of your new hire and your company together.

Here’s how we envisage leaders creating a more engaging onboarding process:

Regular check-ins with your HR/Hiring Team.

Trusting your HR team to operate with confidence and independence is a sign of an empowered recruitment culture and executive leadership style. But that doesn’t mean you need to be fully hands-off. 

We like to think of the procedural and attitudinal elements of onboarding to be a mix of horizontal and vertical inputs: 

• The horizontal is lateral movements of labor, advice, personalities, and training (teammates, line managers, and HR); 

• While the vertical is top-down advice and guidance (managerial, executive).

There are certain aspects of onboarding that need to have a little vertical leadership input, and none more so than managing and assessing the performance of your HR team.

Regular check-ins with your recruitment team help steady the ship - and recruitment is a candidate-driven storm. You need to provide structure, advice, an open door, and a place to air ideas. If anything, you need to be an objective partner in the process, assuring your teams that their voices can be heard, and their labor appreciated. 

While this may seem like a distant effort from the nuts and bolts of recruitment, that holistic overview breeds confidence, and that seeps down to your HR team’s relationships with your new employees. 

Create an onboarding check-in structure with your new employee.

Every new employee deserves your time, regardless of your schedule or your professional distance from their role. Creating a check-in structure does not mean you’re a perennial presence in your new hire’s inbox. It means at set times, when appropriate, you become more than a figurehead - you personify your company brand. 

In a disrupted world upset by COVID-19, employees of all stripes deserve to have their labor and skills appreciated. After all, your new employees are part of a system of revenue creation that will ensure your company's health and prosperity in 2022 and beyond - and they deserve to know whom they’re working for and why they’re working for you.

Whether it’s a simple check-in on day one, or a more consistent check-in system month by month, be the face of the company and put the effort into becoming a compassionate, human-first leader. Empathic leadership is a highly desired trait in modern leaders, and embodying this during onboarding can do wonders for your EVP and employee advocacy.

Be a leader in word and deed. You will find your teams feel more welcomed, more settled, and more connected to their leader’s goals and overall company ideals. 

Make it personal.

An employee’s motivation is a direct result of the sum of interactions with his or her manager.

Bob Nelson

Motivation, eagerness, and excitement are all sides of the same New Job coin - and are easily lost without a guiding hand that understands the person behind the professional. 

It’s your HR team’s job to source, highlight, engage and interview your new hire. It’s your job to create the motivation to stay there and fight for common goals and company success. 

If you aren’t making a new employee feel personally involved in that process you are failing at the first hurdle - you will find your teams are wayward, misunderstood, misaligned with your company brand, and unsure of their purpose. 

There are infinite ways to offer personal management, many of which are unique to your company’s size and industry. But personal also means bespoke - it means applying your guiding principles and leadership where it matters to different people based on their relationship with you, your company, their ways of working, and their state of mind. 

This means understanding your Leadership Style and understanding your new hire’s motives for joining your company. 

This is why you need to keep your management team close and your onboarding structured, otherwise you will be blind to how your people feel and to how you impact your new hire’s attitude.

Set expectations.

Your line managers and direct hands-on leadership team that surround your new hire will set the workload expectations and day-to-day responsibilities. You need to be the guiding light for two other elements: behavioral expectations; and potential expectations. 

Behavioral: your team’s behaviors are the bedrock of your company culture. More than anything else, this culture becomes a barometer of sorts for the type of people that will excel in your company and will be one of the driving forces behind your EVP and employer branding strategy. It’s often a top-down influence, with managers setting the tone and expectations for how they want their teams to work and interact. This is no different during the onboarding process - think of your new hire like a sponge, soaking up cues on how to act, work and succeed. 

Potential: this is slightly less generalist, and much more personal - you need to be able to distill the entire recruitment and onboarding process into a clear message: this is what we want from you, and here’s what we want to do for you. Potential, in this regard, is a clear acknowledgment of your stewarding of your new hire’s career and future. 

What happens when onboarding ends?

What next for your new hire? We don’t consider onboarding to be a fixed routine every company needs to work to, despite advice often hinting at onboarding lasting approx. 6 months. 

It has to be fluid and expansive enough to make sure your new hire understands the needs and expectations of your company or service, and you need to make sure you give your HR teams the time to establish the relationships to meet them. 

But a good sign of when “onboarding” is coming to an end is when your team member starts taking responsibility. Although this shouldn’t signal the end of your onboarding strategy, it’s a sure sign it’s working. When your new hire is making your company their company you know the process has worked.