Onboarding symbolizes the beginning of every new employee’s journey. This process can make all the difference in helping employees quickly succeed in their roles and encourage them to stay at the company. In fact, companies with a strong business onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by 70%.
Successful onboarding introduces an employee to the company, the culture and their new position, and lays a strong foundation for a better employer-employee relationship.
So, how can your organization create a seamless onboarding process that properly prepares a new employee without adding unnecessary burden to your current staff?
How to Manage Onboarding for Your Business
One area where many companies struggle to manage successful onboarding is time and resources. How do current employees manage their current workload when they are also asked to devote time to onboarding new employees? How much is too much time?
To simplify the onboarding process and reduce the schedule pressures, look at where you can automate it. Consider what tasks can be handled using an automation tool rather than an employee. Automating your business onboarding also shows that you value the time of your Human Resources and reduces the need to complete repetitive tasks. It mitigates friction and will allow your HR to allocate time toward impactful work that will grow the business. With automation, you can set up a process that can easily be reused each time you need to onboard a new employee.
By providing employees with the opportunity to complete much of the onboarding process with a single tool, you are making the process faster and easier. Moreover, since you are using a standardized process, you can continue to refine and improve it.
As powerful as automating your onboarding can be, you need to find the right tool to automate your onboarding processes.
Onboarding with HubSpot
HubSpot’s automation software smooths out and reduces many companies' friction with onboarding. It can greatly increase productivity by automating simple tasks such as sending emails and new hire paperwork. Moreover, it centralizes all the onboarding data so stakeholders can easily access it when needed.
Here are eight ways you can utilize HubSpot to streamline your business onboarding.
1. Create an Onboarding Workflow
HubSpot’s Workflows make the task of welcoming new hires faster and easier. It will save your Human Resources department time and effort preparing the necessary materials, centralizing all paperwork and ensuring accuracy.
Create HubSpot workflows to automatically send important documentation such as welcome videos, emails, job descriptions, first-week itineraries, links to training materials and a list of onboarding tasks to complete. You can also see when the new employees access the email and what links they use, to give you a better idea of the success of your onboarding process and where you may need to adjust the process.
2. Use Forms to Collect Employee Data
HubSpot forms can collect information from new employees, such as non-personal or private information, process feedback, questions and more. They can capture data that can then be accessed throughout the HubSpot platform, which can be linked to the user’s contact profile in HubSpot. These forms are available for all subscription levels and can be shared directly with users via the API and embedded on your web pages.
3. Implement a New Hire Knowledge Base
HubSpot’s knowledge base is a self-serve online platform with information you can collect and store about products, services, departments and other topics. For onboarding, you can store training materials, policy documents and step-by-step tutorials for employees during their onboarding journey.
By setting up a new hire knowledge base in HubSpot, employees can access the information they need as often as they need and get comfortable using HubSpot. This will save them the hassle of sorting through emails, reviewing tutorials or searching for answers.
4. Assign and Track Tasks
With HubSpot’s task management features, you can assign tasks to the new hire and the entire team managing the process, including HR, IT and the employee's manager. This will make it clear to all involved in the onboarding process who should complete each task, so no critical items slip through the cracks. It provides a record of what activities were done and additional information about the activity. With task management, you can also assign due dates and times and set reminders for all tasks to ensure everything is completed in a timely manner.
5. Track Employee Training
With the automation and task lists, you have a digital record of the onboarding. You can keep track of all completed training and help your new hire stay on track with HubSpot. This will ensure that all employees complete the necessary training procedures and meet company onboarding and training regulations. Using the HubSpot records, you can also determine when it’s time for additional training by setting follow-ups in the HubSpot contact.
6. Segment for Personalization
With HubSpot’s segmentation features, you can personalize all communication and content depending on the employee’s job or department. You can customize the email templates, create specific training tracks for each department, and set up a job-specific knowledge base. This personalization will help the new employee feel more engaged and supported.
7. Set Up Feedback Surveys
Improve your onboarding process by gathering actionable feedback from new employees. With this feedback, you can better understand how effective the training was and if there are opportunities for improvement, and evaluate the company brand after the training. These surveys are not only important for optimizing the training but also for understanding the company culture and how it impacts the working environment.
8. Measure Effectiveness with Analytics
HubSpot’s analytics will help you recognize gaps between your onboarding goals and the process. Along with utilizing surveys, you can measure the effectiveness of your onboarding process by looking at how much time an employee spends on each training, how quickly they complete training and how it impacts productivity. For example, look at how well an employee follows a procedure after the training. If they aren’t following it well, the training may change, or the procedure needs to be overhauled. You can also track important metrics such as productivity and employee satisfaction.
Discover whether your new hires feel properly equipped for the job and if they receive enough support. In addition, you may find that some departments have higher employee retention rates and engagement than others, which is an excellent way to identify best practices.
Perfect Your Business Onboarding with GO2 Partners
At GO2 Partners, we understand the importance of a strong first impression. Helping a new hire ease into their role and get off to a strong start is critical for employee retention, increased productivity and customer satisfaction.
If you want help setting up business onboarding automation or would like to enhance the onboarding experience for your employees, contact us today.
