Amidst the Great Resignation and ensuing Great Reshuffle, finding and keeping good employees has become one of the top challenges facing organizations. According to a 2021 survey by Willis Towers Watson, 73 percent of employers reported having a hard time attracting employees, and 61 percent said they have difficulty keeping the employees they have. This problem with employee onboarding and talent retention is an expensive and potentially business-crippling problem.
Retention is a complex, ongoing effort. But it starts from day one of onboarding. The way you welcome employees with your new hire onboarding program can help you start out strong, giving employees what they need to feel supported, motivated and connected. This can increase employee engagement.
In fact, Brandon Hall Group found organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent.
How to Assess Your Existing New Hire Onboarding Program
As a first step toward improving your employee onboarding process, take a good look at your current program’s effectiveness. Signs that your new hire onboarding isn’t attracting prospective employees include:
- High employee attrition, especially within the first six months
- Frustration among hiring managers because new employee productivity takes longer than expected
- Employees lack knowledge about institutional knowledge and processes
- Your program lacks measurable results
From here, you can take note of the strengths and weaknesses in your existing program and set up a plan for how to make changes for the better. This starts with better understanding what format your new hire onboarding should take.
Choosing the Right Format for New Hire Onboarding
You might be thinking what does strategic employee onboarding actually look like? Two popular types of onboarding programs are Buddy Programs and Extended Onboarding.
Buddy Programs
pair new hires with a seasoned employee to share knowledge in an informal setting. The “buddy” helps new hires navigate their first days, months and beyond at your organization. This strategy helps to ensure new employees have a fantastic start and that they’re happy with the organization, making them more likely to feel engaged and less likely to leave. Buddy Programs are also an excellent strategy during mergers and acquisitions – pair an employee from the acquired company with a buddy from the acquiring company to make new additions to the team feel welcome and plugged into their new company culture.
Extended Onboarding
focuses on giving new employees an extended window for learning. During this window, learning over time is integrated with on-the-job experience to ensure maximum learning impact. The combination of traditional learning material with informally learning from others varies the types of learning taking place, enabling faster learning. In Extended Onboarding, new employees gain deeper job-related knowledge which speeds up their time-to-productivity. Successful extended onboarding processes make new hires feel more engaged, which increases retention rates.
Once you’ve decided on the right onboarding format, it’s time to update your program to keep up with current best practices, while meeting new hires where they are.
Setting Up Your Program for Success
A solid employee onboarding process doesn’t start on day one—it begins the moment an offer is accepted. When thoughtfully designed, onboarding fosters connection, reduces uncertainty and sets expectations that drive early engagement and performance. Here’s how to build out each stage of onboarding to maximize success from the very start.
Pre-boarding
Pre-boarding is your first opportunity to reinforce that new hires made the right decision. It’s about preparation—not just for them, but for your organization.
- Get Your House in Order: Ensure all internal paperwork, approvals, and access requests are complete before the employee’s start date. This avoids delays and sets a professional tone.
- If They’re In-Office, Set the Scene: Coordinate with facilities to prepare their workspace—desk, chair, keycards, or parking passes. These small steps eliminate first-day friction and send a message: “You belong here.” If onboarding remote employees, determine how these principles would apply to their set up.
- Hardware and Software Ready to Go: Make sure laptops, monitors, phones, and required software accounts are set up and ready to use. Don’t make them spend their first day troubleshooting IT.
- Provide Pre-Day-One Resources: Share a welcome email with a schedule for the first week, links to handbooks or training portals, and introductions to any workplace platforms or tools. This helps reduce anxiety and promotes early self-sufficiency.
First Day
The first day of employee onboarding is about more than orientation; it’s about creating a sense of belonging for new hires. A structured but welcoming day ensures new hires feel seen and supported.
- Offer Orientation if Needed: Walk through your company culture, mission, values, employee handbook and organizational structure. Keep it human, not just procedural.
- IT and System Walkthrough: A clear overview of digital tools, file storage, communication norms, and where to go for help creates early confidence.
- 1:1 Manager Meeting: A direct conversation with their manager should be non-negotiable. This is where alignment begins—talk about team dynamics, priorities, and communication preferences.
- Wrap Up Administrative Items: Ensure any remaining forms or compliance tasks are finalized without letting them take over the day.
- Set Expectations for the Week: Outline the schedule, goals, and what success looks like in the short term. This clarity is grounding during an otherwise overwhelming time.
First Week
Onboarding shouldn’t peak on day one. Sustaining support throughout the first week helps establish rhythms, relationships, and early wins with new hires.
- Team Introductions: Schedule time for the new hire to meet with immediate teammates and key cross-functional partners. These conversations go a long way toward fostering connection.
- Provide Role-Specific Training: Pair learning modules with shadowing opportunities to create a richer, more contextual training experience.
- Daily Check-Ins: For the first week, consistent manager check-ins help reinforce progress, troubleshoot challenges, and deepen the relationship early on.
First Quarter
The first 90 days are where employee onboarding transitions into true integration. This period should help the new hire move beyond task execution and into relationship building, goal setting, and cultural fluency.
- Expand the Network: Encourage engagement beyond the immediate team. Introduce new hires to ERGs, interest-based groups, and mentoring programs. Relationships beyond the core team often influence long-term retention the most.
- Define 30-60-90 Day Goals: Work together to outline what success looks like in the first three months. Setting short-term milestones aligned with larger organizational priorities can give employees a meaningful sense of progress early on.
- Anchor Them in Culture: Invite them into rituals, traditions, and shared language—whether it’s a recurring team lunch, all-hands meeting, or shoutouts in Slack. These are the moments that turn a job into a community.
Best Practices for Employee Onboarding
When looking to improve your program or add new aspects to it, here are some of the top updates you can make in order to set every employee up for success.
Align Onboarding Program with Strategic Business Objectives
Your employee onboarding process should include measurable goals and outcomes that are aligned to business outcomes and can be tracked throughout the employee lifecycle. These can include results such as:
- How many employees leave before the one-year mark
- How long it takes for new hires to become fully productive
- Engagements rates based on factors such as turnover, absenteeism, and ratings on employer review sites
Recognize the Hybrid Workplace
The new normal of the hybrid workplace creates both challenges and opportunities for successful onboarding. On the one hand, online tools, including employee onboarding software, can make onboarding more automated and easier than ever for organizations to administer and new hires to complete.
On the other hand, relationships require more intention to establish in a remote or hybrid environment. Enterprises need to make sure there is a structure and level of accountability in their employee onboarding program so new hires have the chance to connect and get the personal help or interaction they need.
Microsoft, for example, encourages strong management involvement with new hires, as well as an onboarding buddy system that pairs new employees with more experienced peers. This approach has resulted in increased satisfaction among new employees.
Elevate Inclusion & Belonging
Feeling excluded is a major cause of employee dissatisfaction — and a key catalyst for leaving a job. Highlighting belonging in onboarding demonstrates that the organization is there for employees to support them with these issues, as well as establishing inclusion as a non-negotiable, core organizational value. Organizations should make sure that new hires know about their existing belonging efforts and how to access resources in this area.
Customize Learning and Application
Each new employee is unique, with individual backgrounds and learning styles. Onboarding should not be one-size-fits-all. Tailoring learning to each employee offers a much more personal—and effective—way to help employees learn and engage. Whether it’s self-guided resources, quizzes or worksheets, make sure the learning and training component meets the needs and culture of your organization.
Track Outcomes
Once you have clear goals defined for your employee onboarding program, you can measure performance against those objectives with defined metrics. Here are a few examples of end goals and metrics you could use to measure them.
Examples of New Hire Onboarding Outcomes:
- Goal: Improving time to competency for new hires
- Metric: 100% of employees scored 80% or higher on post-assessment tests
- Goal: Improve familiarity with needed skills
- Metric: Time to productivity increased by 15%
Using an automated system or software with progress tracking for program effectiveness makes it easy to calculate your onboarding ROI. But however you’re calculating your employee onboarding outcomes, it’s important to make sure your program is easily scalable across your entire organization.
Why Scalability is Key for Onboarding
Scalability is paramount for three main reasons: to free up time for program administrators, to efficiently onboard employees in different departments, roles, and locations, and to create a consistent, reliable process across the organization.
If the program doesn’t scale, program administrators are left scrambling to keep up. While your efforts only serve a portion of your company. Inconsistent onboarding experiences put goals like retention, engagement, and productivity at risk.
How to Strategically Scale Your New Hire Onboarding Program
The solution isn’t simply to roll out a rigid onboarding process for all new employees. You need balance – scalability with the flexibility to customize when needed.
- Create a framework that can be replicated across your organization. There’s likely some overlap in what all new employees need to learn. Establish these items first, then you can move on to customization.
- Consider other overlapping tasks that may apply to certain employee subgroups. If you have offices in multiple countries, what will employees at each location need to know and learn? Add those steps to the guided process.
- Move to department and seniority. What skills does each department require? Be on the lookout for competencies that make scaling easier – do all managers across departments need to hit similar milestones? Include those organizational and departmental goals in their guided experience.
- Next: role-specific customization. By this point, you will have established a template based on location, department, and seniority. This is great for scalability, but now it’s time to make sure you’re not dropping the ball on flexibility. Identify different employee roles you’ll be filling on a regular basis. What unique on-the-job skills will those roles require? Customize the guided experience to reflect that. This part is easier said than done, but when you already have a good template build on, a little extra attention here and there can make a big difference
- Once you’ve created this framework, your effective onboarding process should be like a living machine, becoming more efficient with each new employee trained.
Building Effective Employee Onboarding with Chronus
Onboarding should be more than just employee orientation; it’s a chance to start building a positive relationship with new hires by giving them the knowledge, support and resources they need to be successful. Updating your onboarding process is key to meeting today’s hiring and retention challenges.
With Chronus, you never go it alone. Chronus software helps to design and build an onboarding process that highlights connection, learning and support. Guided connection plans make it easy to stay on track with onboarding tasks and milestones. The Chronus platform also helps admins track how new hires are doing and where they may need more help or guidance.
Whether you’re a new employee or a growing organization, onboarding should never be a solo experience. Learn how Chronus can help you build a productive employee onboarding process today.
For more information on strategic onboarding, download our full guide, “How to Make Your Employee Onboarding Program Strategic & Effective.”
