It’s natural to feel nervous when introducing new processes to your company. But it’s important to remember that you’re not alone in feeling this way. Even the most successful companies struggle with processes that don’t integrate well with their culture.
If your company isn’t already doing onboarding, you’ll understand the importance of this process once you see how it can affect its culture and employee retention rates. Here are five risks you could face if your onboarding process fails.
1. Incompetent New Hires
In addition to providing new hires with the tools they need for success, your onboarding process also helps you identify potential hires who aren’t an excellent fit for your company’s culture. These are people who may not be able to create any good relationships with coworkers or adopt a critical thinking mindset necessary for higher performance in their role. If the process fails or has loopholes, you risk bringing in incompetent new hires.
2. Slow Productivity
New hires who don’t get off to a good start may spend plenty of time training once they start working together. These efforts won’t help them advance their careers as quickly as more experienced colleagues, who already have strong connections with coworkers and managers on the floor.
Even worse, if these employees never learn how to take ownership of their jobs, it can negatively impact the morale and productivity of your entire internal team. All this can be avoided by going through the right onboarding steps.
3. Mistakes with Employment Contracts
You may not have lawyers at your company, but that doesn’t mean you can’t follow the employment laws and not worry about these issues. The law requires you do everything to keep an employee from being lured away from your company by another competing firm during the onboarding process.
It is crucial to have a written employment contract for every new hire. If you don’t have one on file, the fact that you didn’t draft one could come back to bite you.
As a business, don’t skimp on employment contracts, as this could hugely mess you up.
4. Lack of Trust Within Your Company
The health and vitality of your company depend on the ability to trust each other from the beginning. You can’t move forward when people don’t feel safe, even if they feel threatened.
No one likes to feel threatened at work. This is even graver for new employees. If your onboarding process is ineffective, you lose trust within your company.
5. Stressful Processes Stress Employees
Your hiring processes are highly stressful, and your onboarding process is no exception. As a result, it’s very easy for new hires to feel like you’re asking them to take on too much too soon.
They may also be overwhelmed by the amount of information you’re asking them to absorb right away. This creates a culture of ‘shelf-life hirers’, people who don’t stick around long enough to get started on fulfilling your company’s mission.
Before they leave, they feel insecure about their position, and that anxiety impacts their work relationships at their current job and their ability to grow into productive employees at your company.
Thoughts
Implementing an effective onboarding process takes time and effort. It’s one of the best ways to ensure your new hires are comfortable and productive. But, as with anything worth doing, it’s not easy. It can take a lot of time and planning to get it right.
However, if you don’t, you might be risking your company’s growth and success in the long term.
Owner at Be Visible Media
Dale Basilla is a content writer for various niches, SEO (Off-page & On-Page), and lives in a location where there are lots of beaches in the Philippines. He loves to watch anime, TV series (mystery and solving crimes), and movies. In his spare time, he plays chess, plays the guitar, and spend time with his ever busy girlfriend.