5 Signs It’s Time to Revamp Your Onboarding Process
Key Takeaways
- If your new hires aren't sticking around, it's time to look broadly at your onboarding procedures and philosophy. Oftentimes, organizations change and the onboarding process has not caught up.
- Rebuild your onboarding process by considering culture, personalizing the experience for each employee, focusing on the employee-supervisor relationship, getting peers involved, and making sure onboarding continues as long as it needs to.
Even if you’re not losing people at an alarming rate, it could be beneficial to re-evaluate your onboarding process with some of these red flags in mind. Only 12 percent of employees are actually satisfied with the onboarding they received. So it’s likely there’s some room for improvement in yours.
1. Your organizational culture has shifted
Year over year, culture becomes increasingly important for employees. Employees who feel connected to their company's culture are 4.3 times more likely to be engaged at work and 47% less likely to be looking for another job. Many organizations are taking a long, hard look at their cultures and making some changes. It’s critical your onboarding processes keep up with these shifts.
The fix: check for alignment
If your organization has recently revisited their approach to culture, it may be time to revisit your orientation strategies as well. Make sure everything from your handbooks to the overall training experience is designed to immerse new employees in your current mission, vision, and values. Use this time to help them understand why they were hired and where they fit within the big picture so they’re ready to start contributing to the culture you’ve worked so hard to build from day one.
2. Every new hire gets the same training
When making hiring decisions, you consider each candidate’s unique skills, personality, background, and interests. You hire individuals. You should be onboarding individuals, too. If you’re sending the same form email to every hire, pushing them through the exact same training modules, and sending managers into meet and greets completely cold, you’re doing everyone a disservice.
The fix: make it personal
Start by segmenting key components of your onboarding process based on employee seniority, department, job function, etc. There’s no need to waste a customer specialist’s time training them on contract protocol if they aren’t authorized to work with vendors.
If your organization has a DiSC program, review the new employee's style and motivators to tailor the training to engage them.
Read more: Onboarding Using DiSC Assessments
3. Supervisors are struggling to connect
It can take a long time to understand how an individual prefers to receive feedback, what they expect out of their role, and their goals for the future. So it should come as no surprise when managers struggle to know exactly how to connect with a new hire. This disconnect can lead to frustration for the manager and new hire alike.
The fix: give them insights
No matter how involved the supervisor was in selecting the final candidate, chances are they could still use a little help understanding who they’re working with. Put together a dossier breaking down important details about their new team member. Include their resume as a refresher, links to their LinkedIn and other relevant sites, and thoughtful details you learned throughout the hiring process.
If you're using DiSC, share the new hire's DiSC report with the manager, as well as a comparison report of the two of them. Managers can use Everything DiSC® Worksmart to develop an action plan for motivating and developing the new employee.
4. There's no peer involvement
If your new hires spend the onboarding period with HR and have little interaction with their teams, you're missing so many opportunities to make them feel welcome. Involving peers in a new employee's onboarding helps build relationships and introduce team culture (from the team's point of view). When you distribute onboarding across the team, a new hire benefits from a variety of experiences, perspectives, and connections.
The fix: empower coworkers to be part of the process
When team members assist with the onboarding process, that's extra work on their plate. Make sure they and their supervisors know what other work can be put on hold, or what deadlines extended, to be able to prioritize welcoming their new team member. Some ideas:
- Have the team take ownership over a piece of the onboarding, designing it for what they would have found useful when starting.
- Set up a Slack channel or chat space for new employees who start in the same quarter, creating a cohort (idea via SHRM).
- Have team members create a welcome guide.
- Assign an onboarding buddy (different from a mentor or manager).
- Organize or give your blessing to welcome lunches, coffee chats, and other informal gatherings.
- Invite team members to demonstrate the tools and systems they use.
- Involve team members in celebrating milestones throughout the first few months of the employee's tenure.
5. Promising hires start to slip
Those first new days on a new job are exciting. New hires tend to dive into the promise and possibility of the position, ready to lend their talents and expertise. So what if your all-star new hire starts to falter after a few months? It’s possible your onboarding process just isn’t long enough.
The fix: don’t stop short
Most onboarding comes to an end within the first three months of a new hire’s tenure. This is problematic when you consider that it can take six months to a year before an employee feels they’re adding value to the team. It may be beneficial to extend your onboarding beyond those first three months.
In these later months, shift your focus to creating connections between the new hire and your existing team. Help them set goals for 120/150/180 days out, and make sure their managers are available to answer questions and address any concerns they may have.
Posted 11/19/2019, Last Updated 09/15/2026
