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

For K-12 Human Resources offices, the task of staffing the district for another school year needs to be a two-sided coin, one side focused on getting (recruiting and selection), and the other side focused on keeping (onboarding and retention). Finding the top employees for your district is a complex and time-consuming project, but it is only part of the job. It’s just as important to focus on keeping your district’s top employees engaged and satisfied with their position at the district.

In some organizations, employee onboarding is limited to an orientation event that lasts maybe a few hours on the first 3 or 4 days on the job, but it is really more of an afterthought – the formalities that need to take place once the recruiting and hiring process is over. However, your district’s onboarding process can make a huge impact on the district atmosphere and your colleagues’ regular performance.

Whether thoughtfully crafted or simply superficial, your onboarding process affects the quality of your district’s relationship with its staff and the quality of the staff’s performance in a number of areas, including:

1.  Continuity of services
2.  Consistency in delivery
3.  Reliability & dependability
4.  Maintaining the culture
5.  Cost of replacement training, in dollars and time

While a high rate of employee turnover can result from a number of different factors, making an effort to improve your onboarding process in specific ways can drastically improve employee engagement and retention in your district.

What is Onboarding?

Onboarding is the combination of orientation and induction. The Society for Human Resource Management offers definitions for these two terms:

Orientation

“The introduction of employees to their jobs, co-workers and the organization by providing them with information regarding such items as policies, procedures, company history, goals, culture and work rules.”

Induction

“Programs designed to introduce and acclimate newly hired employees into the organization.”

While orientation and induction make up onboarding, onboarding needs to expand beyond the orientation event for it to be effective. An employee’s onboarding should start upon their acceptance of the job offer and continue through much of the first year, adding engaging practices and knowledge of district culture to the standard processes they learned on their first few days. Effective onboarding needs to be a shared experience.

The Productivity of Pride

Author and onboarding expert David Lee says, “The term ‘Onboarding’ refers to the process of integrating new employees into the organization, of preparing them to succeed at their job, and to become fully engaged, productive members of the organization.”

Fully-engaged, productive employees offer tangible benefits to your district’s overall health and recruiting budget. If you can convert your new hires into engaged district stakeholders, your district will enjoy higher employee retention. This means your district will spend less time and money on recruiting and hiring, orientation, travel and compliance-related regulations.

However, converting new hires into district stakeholders is easier said than done. You must learn to see your employees eye-to-eye and convince them to take up responsibility for the district’s cause alongside of the administrative staff.

David Lee offers one excellent sentiment to strive to create during your onboarding process: pride.

“You can be proud to work here.” If you can communicate this notion to your staff, both verbally (with support for your claim) and through the quality of the onboarding experience, you’ll be on your way to converting your new employees into district ambassadors.

In part two of my onboarding series, I’ll offer advice on how to approach the content of your onboarding process in order to better serve both the district’s and the employees’ needs and to further promote employee engagement and retention.