5 Common Onboarding Mistakes to Avoid

New hires are a major investment. Canadian businesses spend almost $30,000 annually on costs related to employees leaving, so how do you prevent losing good people and paying the cost for turnover? It all starts with onboarding.

Effective onboarding makes a big difference to new employees: they feel welcome and valued (76%) and they get up to speed more quickly (69%).

The opposite is also true—32% of employees said their onboarding experience left them disappointed about their new company. That makes an effective onboarding process critical to retention.

To turn your onboarding process from a liability into an asset, there are a few simple fixes you can start with. Read on to learn about the most common onboarding mistakes and how you can make changes for the better.

The 5 most common onboarding mistakes

1. Wasting the first day on paperwork

A lacklustre first day on the job often starts with a thick folder of paperwork and a company-branded pen. For some organizations, onboarding is synonymous with filling out forms. And while those forms are necessary, they don’t need to consume the entire onboarding process.

If you wait to begin onboarding until your new hire’s start date, you’ll be spending most of the first day on paperwork, and your new hire won’t have much time to get acquainted with their role.

Not only does this stretch out the length of onboarding for new employees—one in three new hires express frustration over long onboarding processes—but it’s also an administrative headache. Tracking down signatures, searching for documents and uploading important information last-minute puts an excessive burden on your HR team and increases the risk of costly errors.

Try this instead:
Preboarding is an easier and more efficient way to deal with the paperwork. Once a new hire has officially accepted their position, send them digital versions of all the onboarding forms you need them to fill out, and request that they complete the forms before their start date.

This helps you stay organized and allows new hires to spend their first day on more meaningful onboarding experiences.

2. Information overload

As bad as it is to miss important details during onboarding, it can be just as bad to try to cram too much in. If you attempt to cover an excessive amount of content within just one day, your new hires can suffer from cognitive overload.

In fact, close to a third of new employees report feeling overwhelmed by all the information they get during onboarding. If you make new hires sit through an entire day of presentations, they’ll eventually stop absorbing the content.

The challenges of cognitive load put onboarding leaders in a tricky position. You want to share information at a pace people can actually process, but a lengthy onboarding programme draws on time and resources, making it a burden on both new employees and your HR team.

Try this instead:
Most new hires like a bit of ramp-up time, but they also want their onboarding to be efficient—56% of new hires prefer onboarding to take one to two days. With that in mind, aim for about two days of structured onboarding, with the densest topics evenly distributed between the days.

Beyond the structured all-day onboarding, give new hires an onboarding roadmap (a schedule of training and check-ins) for at least their first week, so they have a clear plan for getting up to speed on information not covered in the first few days.

3. No clear goals

If your onboarding doesn’t include any goal setting or a discussion of expectations, you’re essentially throwing new hires into the deep end, expecting them to figure out their jobs through trial and error.

You’re also missing out on the chance to align new hires with your company mission. A majority (75%) of employees say onboarding helps them understand company goals and their role in supporting them. However, a quarter also say their manager doesn’t communicate expectations or give them useful, timely feedback.

Unclear expectations are bound to hurt engagement and productivity in the long-run, with employees never fully understanding their roles and responsibilities.

Try this instead:
During onboarding, ask managers to work with their new hires to set goals for the first 30, 60 and 90 days. These milestones will help a new hire gradually ramp up to meet the typical KPIs for their role.

For effective goal setting, encourage managers to identify goals that are realistic for the timeframe and align with a new hire’s responsibilities.

For example, if a role is more project-based, a new hire’s 30-day goal should be to finish a project independently, rather than to finish a certain number of projects within the first month.

4. Neglecting company culture

You might think you’ve checked all the onboarding boxes: you’ve done the paperwork, finished the required training and given the new hire your employee handbook. But while you’ve done everything you need to do, your onboarding is missing a crucial factor that determines employee success: company culture.

Employees’ biggest onboarding challenge is adjusting to a new organisation’s culture and values. It’s not surprising, then, that almost all (96%) new employees want to hear about an organisation’s mission and values.

On the other hand, if your onboarding doesn’t introduce new hires to your company’s culture and values, they may feel apathetic to their roles and disconnected from the workplace community.

Try this instead:
Welcoming new hires into your company culture is worth the time and effort. Talk to new hires about your core values. If you’re hiring large groups of people at once, this may look like a monthly or quarterly presentation. If you’re onboarding one-on-one, this could be an informal conversation on what makes your company culture special.

Aside from educating new hires on values, an easy way to introduce culture is through peer connections, such as assigning onboarding buddies or hosting a welcome lunch. Connecting employees with their co-workers allows new hires to experience company culture first-hand.

5. Missing opportunities for feedback

Even with a well-organised, thorough onboarding programme, you could still be falling short if you aren’t taking advantage of feedback opportunities. Giving and receiving feedback ensures that onboarding is having the intended impact.

For new hires, receiving feedback helps them know how they’re doing early on. If that initial check-in isn’t part of a new hire’s onboarding plan, their supervisor might not take the time to give feedback until much later, leaving new hires on their own for those first few months.

While onboarding might seem a little premature for giving feedback, it’s never too early to promote employee engagement with some praise and constructive advice. One Gallup study found that 80% of employees who had received meaningful feedback within the past week were highly engaged in their work.

Feedback is also essential for measuring the success of your onboarding programme. New hires could be loving—or hating—onboarding, and you’ll never know if you don’t ask.

Try this instead:
Incorporate feedback practices throughout onboarding. To make sure new hires are getting performance feedback, ask managers to schedule a check-in as part of the onboarding roadmap.

This check-in should take place a week or two past the start date, and it can be an opportunity to discuss goals, see how the new hire is adjusting to their role and give feedback on their work so far.

To collect feedback from new hires, send out an anonymous survey at the end of onboarding. If you want to get a higher response rate, consider offering an incentive for filling it out, like a small gift card.

You should also gather informal feedback throughout onboarding—asking if things make sense or checking on how new hires feel is a great way to open up communication and make the onboarding process more dynamic.

Fixing your onboarding problems: Where to start

Gather feedback

If you feel like your onboarding process isn’t working, you need to ask why. If you aren’t already collecting feedback on onboarding, now’s the time to start.

Send out an anonymous survey to recent hires to get feedback on what they did or didn’t like about their experiences. You can also reach out to stakeholders such as supervisors, HR, and IT to find out what they need from onboarding.

After you review survey results and anecdotal feedback from colleagues, you should be able to identify the biggest pain points that need to be addressed with a new onboarding programme.

Balance formal and informal onboarding

Onboarding happens in formal ways, such as in workshops, scheduled milestones, and assigned onboarding buddies. But onboarding can also take place informally, with new hires learning on the job and asking questions as issues arise.

If your onboarding process is taking too long, or on the other hand, has a lot of gaps, consider how you can balance formal and informal onboarding. Formal onboarding is necessary for tracking important paperwork and making sure new hires have a consistent time to productivity.

However, not every detail of a job can be explained through formal onboarding, and it makes sense to leave some room for organic learning experiences. Categorizing your onboarding needs as either formal or informal will give you a better sense of how you should allocate time and resources in your new onboarding strategy.

Get the right tools

A lot of your onboarding outcomes will come down to the tools you use. If your current HR tech is slow or difficult to use, consider looking for a comprehensive HRIS. An all-in-one HRIS brings all your HR tools into one platform, allowing you to streamline onboarding and avoid any double data entry.

As you shop for a new HRIS, look for a platform with comprehensive, easy-to-use onboarding tools, such as preboarding templates, automated emails, document management, and task tracking.

How AI is changing onboarding

AI has arrived in the world of HR, and in the case of onboarding, it’s making a significant difference. AI can automate the more tedious aspects of onboarding and make the process more accessible to new hires.

As AI becomes more and more prevalent in HR, it’s essential to know how to leverage these tools while keeping a human touch. Here’s some examples on how you might effectively use AI in onboarding.

Automated messages and document management

AI tools simplify preboarding. With automated messaging tools and document management, most preboarding tasks can happen without you lifting a finger. And when your day isn’t filled with manually sending reminder emails, you get to give more complex onboarding issues the attention they deserve.

Translation

Do you have a multilingual workforce? AI translation tools can help ensure your new hires receive important onboarding materials (such as safety training or legal forms) in their preferred written language.

Just remember: AI can’t replace the value of human communication. Any translations of particularly sensitive information should be checked by a real person, and if verbal communication is an important element of your workplace, you may benefit from using an in-person translator in addition to AI tools.

Chatbots for FAQs

With an AI chatbot connected to your HRIS, you can provide new hires with instant answers to their most common questions about pay, company policies, and more. By empowering new hires to access information for themselves, they can become more confident and productive, and you get extra time to focus on the bigger HR picture—it’s a win-win!

Analyze your onboarding data

By leveraging AI, the onboarding data you never had time to look at can finally be put to use. AI can conduct in-depth data analytics and offer you actionable insights. For example, you can use AI to generate qualitative summaries of large batches of open-response feedback, so you can get an accurate picture of how new hires feel about onboarding.