Pre-boarding is about preparing your new employees for the first day of their job and making them feel a part of the company’s culture right from day one.
The pre-boarding phase begins once an individual accepts the offer-letter and ends on their first day at a job. Their pre-boarding participation encourages them to perform efficiently and productively even before the commencement of their jobs.
It is also about getting your employees to speed up the knowledge transfer process and shorten the time to productivity.
Every organization based on its need and setup should create a dedicated flow of pre-boarding, which suits its employee’s needs and requirements effectively.
Through a well-designed pre-boarding system, company’s policies, standards, laws, code of conduct, employee benefits, leaves, holidays can be clearly outlined and shared way before, reducing the onboarding cost and time.
Step 1 – A usual pre-boarding phase begins when a company sends the first welcome message to a new hire, either via email or a text message, and shares the employees’ excitement about being hired.
Step 2 – A great step would be to introduce the new hires to their team even before joining. A new job involves meeting a lot of new people. Shoot a welcome video where everybody in the team introduces themselves to the new hire. This will help make people comfortable with known faces on the first day at work.
Step 3 – A third point to consider is equipping your new hires with some practical information before the first day. Assigning them a buddy that could help them get around and get to know the new place, fill out the important paperwork, and inform them about your company operations.
Provide them a schedule so that they know when to meet and who will greet them.
The reason most employees can progress quickly and develop is when there is an efficient structure in place for them to grow.
An efficient pre-boarding plan is all about getting vital information for an employee right from the day they signed the joining contract. Which effectively results in them being job-ready right from day one. Pre-boarding allows them to join the company confidently.
Followed by an efficient Onboarding program for a couple of days or weeks works remarkably for the new hires—a perfect introduction to the company.
Blended learning, especially when incorporated with Pre-boarding & Onboarding, allows the new hires to understand and retain far more information than they would be able to have without pre-boarding.
Due to blended learning, new joiners are able to create a dialogue about every essential aspect that concerns them about the work-related capability that they feel like could be improved. A great pre-boarding platform gives employees a perfect place to communicate with their managers both in the office and outside.
Another aspect that helps the new hires is transparency. Through an engaging and exemplary pre-boarding system, new employees can be vocal about their goals and the direction they want to move in. And their manager/supervisor can guide them towards achieving those goals.
From a unique perspective, starting at a company that genuinely helped the new hires to perform successfully at their job tasks and understanding their job description from the beginning creates determination and loyalty in employees towards their company, and also helps them find their strengths. It puts them in the best position of moving forward in the right direction.
Every organization has employees coming in, with new experiences; they learn new things, meet new people at the workplace.
It is essential to identify whether the experiences they have or the things they learn are helping them to engage with the organization in a positive way.
Pre-boarding and Onboarding is a strategic system designed to decrease staff turnover by increasing staff engagement.
Retention could have a direct impact on a business’s ability to achieve its strategic objectives. If a company is always in the cycle of hire, lose, and hire, that means it is unnecessarily draining staff’s energy and the company’s monetary resources.
At times there are some legitimate reasons that some people leave, but when you have put so much time and effort into recruiting employees, you wish to retain them.
If a company wants to retain its brightest and compatible new hires for an extended period, then they put maximum effort into making employees understand their jobs in the early stages.
The motivation of having a job is not enough; most employees, especially the most compatible ones that you want to keep around, need to have some sort of purpose about the work that they are doing.
And to give them that purpose, you have to be around and talk to them and train them right after hiring them for the job.
When a new employee, lateral or entry-level, joins an organization, they tend to consume the most valuable resource of an organization. It’s time; staff-time, training time, productivity time.
On average, a new joiner takes about 6 months to reach a breakeven point in terms of resource consumption and starts directly contributing to an organization’s growth.
So, if an employee decides to move on from a job within the first six months of their joining, they ideally contribute to negative cash burn to an organization.
Hence, it becomes more than essential to address the confusion and dilemma of an employee way before they hamper productivity in the long run.
Structured pre-boarding and onboarding practices can increase employee motivation and lower staff turnover, and they can also increase supervisor/managers’ satisfaction with new hire’s performance.
A commendable pre-boarding and onboarding system improves employee’s job description clarity, and that ultimately leads to higher productivity from the initial stage of the job.
This initial effort is significant because a company spends their valuable time in recruiting and selecting staff after going through multiple crucial steps.
The two essential phases of the pre-boarding and Onboarding process are – First is how an employee feels about the company, and second is to make new hires productive fast in his/her performance.
Remember presentation is the key, you might include other items in the package as well depending upon the budget you have set for pre-boarding and onboarding phase.
At the end of the pre-boarding and onboarding phase, take the new hires’ feedback, which will help to make the system more efficient. Coming back home, the new hire is assured that he has joined a great organization and is looking forward to a long journey ahead
Suhail Ameen