Employee Onboarding: Improve First Impressions & Lasting Retention | Part Four

If you’ve read parts one, two, and three of this series, you understand the impact the onboarding experience has on your district’s health and employee retention. You understand the value of instilling in your employees pride for their roles within your district, and you have some tips on how to improve the interaction and relationships built through the onboarding experience.

In the final part of this series, I want to show you how you can use time and technology to enhance the onboarding experience.

Expand Your Onboarding Process

In “Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success,” Tayla Bauer offers the “Four C’s” that should be present in all successful onboarding processes:

• “Compliance is the lowest level and includes teaching employees basic legal and policy-related rules and regulations.”
• “Clarification refers to ensuring that employees understand their new jobs and all related expectations.”
• “Culture is a broad category that includes providing employees with a sense of organizational norms-both formal and informal.”
• “Connection refers to the vital interpersonal relationships and information networks that new employees must establish.”

If your district’s onboarding process only lasts the first day or two on the job, do you believe you’ll have enough time to truly express the culture of the district? Will you have enough time to establish legitimate connections between new employees and their peers, supervisors and the district administration?

Probably not. But unfortunately, that’s what happens in many school districts. However, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, approximately 46% of those surveyed began their onboarding between accepting the employment offer and day 1 on the job.

With only a day or two slated for onboarding procedures, many employers would only find time for the first two C’s necessary for successful onboarding. Expanding the onboarding process before day one can help give you the time you need to cover all areas pertinent to your employees’ assimilation into the district.

SilkRoad Technology
Creating an Onboarding Process 

“The first few days on the job can be crammed full of information, but if you’ve been able to take advantage of starting prior to day one, the amount of information you need to cover during this period will be relatively less. . . . This provides you the opportunity to go more in depth into certain topics than you would with programs of shorter duration.”

In addition to starting the onboarding process before your employees’ first day on the job, you should extend your onboarding practices after the first day as well. In fact, you should make an effort to deliberately onboard your new hires throughout their whole first semester or year. The same SHRM survey indicated 32% of employers surveyed extended their onboarding activities from 8 days on the job up to during the first 6 months.

SilkRoad Technology
Creating an Onboarding Process 

“Studies have shown that extending onboarding beyond the first day, preferably from 3 months to one year, can significantly improve the overall experience and the resulting engagement and retention of your employee base.”

Here are some examples of extended onboarding activities that enable you to focus on before and throughout an employee’s first school year:

• Additional job-specific training in smaller chunks
• Benefit decision-making, enrollment resources and tools
• Confirmation of compliance notifications and training
• Initial evaluation event and document tracking
• Connecting with mentors and other employees
• Other performance goal documentation
• Providing feedback to the employer on the new employee’s onboarding experience

Common Barriers to Expanding

If better onboarding and an emphasis on culture are so important, why don’t more employers take steps to implement these changes in their districts? Districts often cite the following obstacles:

• Time – can’t spare workers from their jobs
• Insufficient HR or other staff to implement
• Finances
• Lack of Senior Admin support
• Not enough annual new hires to emphasize new practices

While these barriers do pose problems for districts, onboarding technology with pricing scalable to the size of your district can actually relieve most of these challenges.

Using Technology to Automate Onboarding Processes

By using recruiting and onboarding tools, you can automatically gather information as your new hires pre-board online. Automating these basic onboarding steps can save a great deal of time and paperwork management, allowing your HR team to focus on the rest of their duties, even during recruiting and onboarding season.

Then, by getting the more tedious parts of the process out of the way ahead of time, you can spend your employees’ first few days giving tours, conducting group exercises and building relationships that will strengthen your individual employees’ engagement in your district.

And by improving engagement and thereby increasing employee retention, your district could see a significant decrease in your annual recruiting costs. In “Fully on-board: Getting the most from your talent in the first year,” Martin and Lombardi offer the five key functions that “best in class” employers utilize in their onboarding processes:

• Reporting tools that monitor which employees have completed what forms and tasks
• Tools that leverage data collected in the recruiting process
• Tools that track progress against development/career plans
• Tools that automatically trigger emails when status changes from applicant to employee
• “Smart forms” that pre-populate fields with built-in routing/workflow Using Technology to Promote Your Culture

The advantages of technology for accomplishing the “paperwork” side of onboarding are obvious. But could your district also use technology to transmit culture?

SilkRoad Technology
Creating an Onboarding Process 

 “Employees who know what to expect from their company’s culture and work environment make better decisions that are more aligned with the accepted practices of the company.”

Creating an awareness of your culture will help new hires, current staff, students and parents understand what to expect and how to identify with your district.

Consider content, such as a video, on your district website or social media channels to welcome newcomers and communicate what the district culture is really like.

Several districts, including Dallas ISD, Atlanta Public Schools, Goshen Central School District and Des Moines Public Schools use Pinterest to share resources and communicate the culture people can expect to find in their schools. Efforts like this to produce engaging content and to utilize media channels relevant to the people in your district shows that your district cares about its culture and the people within it.

Better Onboarding = Greater Student Success

Time and attention opens opportunities for recognition. Recognition increases employee motivation. Higher motivation increases employee engagement. Higher engagement increases commitment. Higher commitment increases discretionary effort, loyalty and retention. Higher discretionary effort, loyalty and retention increases employee productivity and performance achievement. Higher employee productivity and performance achievement increases student success. It’s all related.

Self-Evaluation Worksheet

Want to see how you’re doing in your district? Try this onboarding self-evaluation checklist and scoresheet to document possible next steps for your district as you work to enhance your district’s onboarding process.

We recommend completing the Self Evaluation Checklist first and filling out the “Doing this currently” column. Then review the Scoresheet to see if your answers rate as “basic,” “advanced” or “enhanced” on the scoresheet afterward.

What steps are you taking to improve first impressions and lasting retention in your district?