Onboarding a new employee is one of the most important HR activities. Onboarding is important as it increases retention, makes the employee comfortable with the work environment, and gives them an idea about the company culture. While you are developing your onboarding process, you will face a lot of challenges and problems. Here are some challenges in employee onboarding and ways to overcome them.
Challenge 1 - Lack of structure
You have collected all the resources that your employees need to read before they start working in your company. But you will often find that there is no structure in this onboarding process. You will find the content given to them haywire and vague. It becomes impossible for the new employee to find and develop interest while reading content with no structure.
Solution - Create a contextual format of resources. Explain the new joinee why are they are going through this process and what purpose does it solve.
For example, if you are making the employee read about your mission, vision, and values, make them understand that this is important for them to get aligned with the values of the company.
Challenge 2 - No role clarity
One of the most common problems with HR onboarding is that the new employee won’t have any clarity after they have finished the onboarding process. Most of the time, employees don’t know what are their exact responsibilities in the organization.
This happens due to the lack of communication between the HR department and the employee. New employees are out of their comfort zone and mostly won’t ask any questions. This communication gap results into lesser or no role clarity.
Solution - Create a “roles and responsibilities” document for each position. This will clear out the expectation of the new employee by explaining to them their exact day to day responsibilities along with the big picture. This will help them get a better idea of what is their role and will have a better onboarding experience.
Challenge 3 - You don’t know whether your onboarding experience is good or bad
When the HR department has made the onboarding program, they include everything that they can after researching and analyzing the process. It seems to be the most desirable and interesting onboarding program ever. But many times, that’s not the case. HR departments have no idea whether their process is working or not.
Solution - Take honest verbal feedback from the employees after they complete the onboarding program.
Don’t ask them to fill google forms or excel sheet where they rate the employee onboarding out of 1 to 5 where 5 is the best. This might be feasible but it gives you inaccurate feedback on your onboarding process if employees just tick best in everything. Have a habit of taking a 5-minute feedback survey after the onboarding process is completed.
While creating your onboarding process, make sure you implement these solutions beforehand. Your communication gap with the new employee will decrease and you will have a smoother onboarding process where the employee will have more clarity. If you liked these solutions, you can give “
Why is employee onboarding important” for more such best practices.
