Want to Measure Onboarding Success? Use These 5 Simple Metrics

Measuring employee engagement is as important as ever.

Since the pandemic began in early 2020, businesses have struggled to predict what the job market will do next. In the pandemic’s earliest days, widespread shutdowns resulted in staggering job losses—followed by economic stimulus that ushered in the Great Resignation, a mass exodus as workers fled their old jobs for greener pastures.

In 2024, businesses are facing record inflation, continuing supply chain stumbles, and a wave of layoffs in many sectors, even as job growth remains on the rise in certain industries.

That’s why good performance management for HR is paramount. New employees need onboarding that gets them up to speed, working productively, and feeling positive about their choice of employer. And for employees hired more recently, there’s even more pressure to drive immediate impact.

In this article, we’ll look at five critical onboarding metrics that’ll help you measure how well your onboarding process is preparing new hires—and where you might need to make changes.

Key Takeaways: Effective Onboarding Creates Better First Days

A strong onboarding process will help new hires have a successful impact quickly  and  persuade them to stay long-term. But unless you’re regularly tracking onboarding KPIs, you won’t know whether your strategy is working.

If you want to track onboarding metrics, here are our top recommendations:

• Keep it consistent.  Use the same onboarding process for all new hires. If you’re inconsistent, it will be difficult to extract anything meaningful from your results.
• Think of onboarding as a long-term relationship.  Choose job metrics you can track through an employee’s entire tenure, such as employee engagement and satisfaction.
• Assess manager effectiveness. Most of an new hire’s onboarding experience happens in their new team, not just with HR. So how are your frontline managers doing?

Why Is Onboarding Important?

Onboarding is important because it speeds up new hires’ time-to-productivity and reduces the number of employees who quit within their first three to six months.

In a BambooHR onboarding survey, 70% of new hires said they know whether a job is the right fit within the first month—including 29% who know within the first week. Unfortunately, 44% of employees also said they’ve had regrets or second thoughts about starting their job offer within that first week.

HR is under pressure to maximize investment in new hires and prevent costly turnover. The average tenure of a US employee is 3.9 years as of 2024, down from 4.1 years in 2022. That means employers need to do more to keep their talent. Effective onboarding helps you retain your best employees, reduce churn, avoid disruption in the workplace, and save time.

Onboarding Technology Makes It Simple to Track Metrics

Onboarding metrics are critical. What gets measured gets managed, especially if you want onboarding success. Modern businesses rely on onboarding technology that automates tasks and compiles critical data, making it simple to measure effectiveness.

Onboarding technology can streamline paperwork and manual processes, including:

• E-signatures
• New hire paperwork
• Personalized welcome emails
• IT checklists
• Welcome packets
• Policy training
• Automated deadline reminders
• Secure employee data management

Don’t waste time printing out paperwork or crafting reminder emails. Then you’ll have the bandwidth to help new hires forge a deeper connection with the company, its people, and its mission.

If you don’t have employee retention metrics—or simply don’t know how to measure them—you’ll risk losing time and money. But even worse, you’ll risk making a poor impression with new hires. This can hurt employee retention and morale over time.

5 Vital Onboarding Metrics to Start Tracking

1. Survey New Hires on Job Satisfaction

Along with regular check-ins with managers, measuring employee engagement through targeted surveys will help you track new hires’ satisfaction levels.

Satisfied employees are more than simply happy—in Slack’s 2023 State of Work survey, 82% of respondents said that feeling happy and engaged at work was the key driver of their productivity.

For example, if new hires are dissatisfied with compensation opportunities, you could cover your company’s approach to pay and pay increases during onboarding. Or you could improve explanations of your benefits package to better communicate your total compensation strategy.

Pro Tip: Use employee journey mapping to find opportunities to boost the employee experience and increase overall satisfaction and engagement.

2. Track Time to Productivity

Time to productivity (TTP) measures how long it takes a new employee to become fully integrated with their team and functional in their job. An effective onboarding process will help new hires contribute to their team and overall company goals in a timely manner.

Measuring TTP usually involves a combination of objective benchmarks and a subjective assessment of how well your new hire is acclimating to the workplace. For example, you might expect a new sales team member to not only hit their monthly goals but also work independently within their first three months on the job.

But a shorter onboarding won’t necessarily equal a faster TTP. Managers also play a crucial role in the onboarding process. In fact, they’re responsible for 70% of the team’s engagement. Too often, however, managers aren’t involved as much as they should be.

Pro Tip: Instead of focusing on speed, create an effective onboarding program that helps new employees achieve their full potential, including:

• Clear guidelines for managers to follow when assessing the criteria for managing new employees
• Role-specific training
• Activities that integrate new hires into your team

3. Keep a Pulse on Overall Morale

As new hires join your team, it’s critical to track your employees’ morale, particularly during periods of rapid growth. To measure morale, we recommend using anonymous surveys or interviews. If you find problems that are making employees unhappy, it’s important to get back on track  before  it impacts employee retention.

For example, BambooHR^® Employee Satisfaction with eNPS^® allows you to collect anonymous survey data and open-ended feedback about how your employees are feeling. From there, you get instant access to a research-backed employee engagement score.

Pro Tip: Employees with friends at work are not only happied but more productive, innovative, collaborative, and engaged. Host regular team activities and encourage recognition to foster those relationships between coworkers.

4. Measure Voluntary (and Involuntary) Turnover

Turnover rates are critical metrics to track as your company grows, and employee’s onboarding experiences are reliable indicators of their long-term relationship with a company.

An unexpected spike in voluntary turnover is a clear sign of trouble. But it’s also one you may be able to avoid by regularly tracking metrics around employee job satisfaction, engagement, and morale.

By contrast, involuntary turnover may indicate a recruiting problem. You might be hiring candidates who are unqualified for your needs or a poor culture fit. In both cases, effective onboarding can help reduce employee turnover by up to 42%.

Pro Tip: Even with a strong onboarding program, you’ll inevitably face employee departures. When employees leave, be sure to transition them through an offboarding process. Exit interviews and surveys can reveal critical insights that can help you improve your workplace in the long-run.

5. Provide Performance Management for Managers

Finally, HR needs to track the performance of each manager responsible for onboarding new hires.

If one manager has a higher employee turnover rate than other managers in your organization, it may be something that needs investigating. Identifying and improving manager performance issues is time and effort well spent.

Pro Tip: One way to find a solution is to analyze what other managers with low turnover rates are doing to maintain strong, positive ties with their employees. Not only could those best practices help improve onboarding success factors, but if you incorporate them into a broader initiative for all managers, they could help reduce turnover throughout your organization.

FAQs About Onboarding Metrics

Why is onboarding important?

To put it simply: The stakes are high. Effective onboarding speeds new hires’ time-to-productivity and reduces the number of employees who quit within their first three to six months. By comparison, lackluster onboarding can result in costly turnover and subpar work.

How do you know if onboarding was successful?

To know whether your onboarding process was successful, tracking metrics is critical. The five best ways to measure onboarding success are: New hires’ job satisfaction, time to productivity, overall morale, employee turnover, and hiring managers’ performance.