Do new employees in your organization spend their first day watching presentations about benefits and policies, filling out forms and signing their name? If your onboarding process is front-end loaded, new employees probably end their first day feeling exhausted instead of engaged.
There is a better way! Stop orientation overload by rethinking how you share information. Here’s how to get started:
| Don’t do this | Do this | Start by | ||
| Try to cover everything employees need to know in one day | Schedule short blocks of time over the employee’s first month of work to share information in small bites | Sitting down with your stack of orientation paperwork and prioritizing information by what’s most important and when employees need to take action | ||
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| Hand new employees a stack of complicated benefit and policy forms to complete on their own | Develop easy-to-follow instructions that tell employees exactly how to fill out forms. (How many times have you set a aside a form “to do later” because it seemed too long or complicated?) | Reviewing forms for difficult jargon and unclear or non-existent instructions | ||
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| Make Human Resources do all the heavy lifting and leave supervisors out of the process | Create a toolkit that explains to supervisors their role in supporting onboarding | Holding a focus group with supervisors to determine what they’re doing now and test your ideas for how they can become more involved | ||
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