Many companies are transitioning to remote or hybrid work cultures. Such a work culture is more likely to increase employee retention. In the time, when we are facing great resignation, retaining the employees has become a task.
Flexible hours and working from home were rated by 78% of respondents in Crain’s Future of Work poll as the most effective non-financial means for employee retention. Hybrid culture is here to stay and you have to adapt yourself to this major change.
With remote or hybrid work culture, having good employee engagement becomes a task. Be it IT onboarding or onboarding for any other job function, it has become uniquely challenging.
With the work from home culture, encouraging employee engagement becomes difficult and hence, you have to upgrade your onboarding process to work according to this new culture.
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How to upgrade your onboarding process for hybrid work culture?
Adjusting onboarding for hybrid work culture means bringing the interaction, fun, and learning process to life on a virtual platform.
Get onboarding software
The workload on HRs is always a bit too much but with a hybrid system, it is going to increase. This is where onboarding software helps. It will streamline the process of onboarding. Management of the program and tracking progress becomes fairly easy with onboarding software.
Boosting engagement on virtual platforms is a task, but with gamification features and multiple communication channels, this problem can be tackled. Moreover, the software gives you an added advantage of automation and analytics. Using people analytics is so crucial for assessing the effectiveness of your onboarding program and finding the challenges faced by employees. Data-driven analytics does the same for you without wasting your time and effort.
The software will also help you reduce your paperwork and the time taken to complete all of that. It can send papers via email to all new employees. It will even send reminders if the work is not done before the deadline, so you can sit back and relax for a while.
Plan an online orientation program
Creating a virtual orientation program is different from just repeating the same offline orientation stuff on a virtual meet. With virtual calls, there are challenges of engagement and attention.
Make sure to divide the program into parts and extend it to a week or more if required. Give all the information the new employees need, in smaller parts, for better retention. You can even create communication channels for the new employees to interact and get to know each other.
Deliver welcome gifts and necessary hardware
Even though they are not being present offline, they do deserve a nice welcome package from the company. The first few weeks or months are really important because that is the time when people decide if they want to stay in the company or not. Don’t reduce your efforts to impress your employees and create a good image for your company.
Make sure you deliver the required hardware to your new hire. Not everyone has a good laptop that will run smoothly so provide them with one.
Ask your managers to participate actively
Building a good relationship between your new employee and their managers is very important in the hybrid work culture. New recruits are more likely to express satisfaction when their managers participate actively. Ask your managers to respond to their queries, appreciate them for the good work, and give them appropriate feedback whenever required.
Relay company’s vision and values consistently
Though this is important in the offline mode too, in a virtual environment it becomes more important. All your employees should know the company’s core values and its vision. It is not just about communicating core values through words but also about communicating them consistently through your actions.
Conclusion
Hybrid work culture is here to stay. It gives employees flexibility and ease. You as an organization have to adapt yourself to this changing environment. The onboarding process is very important and exciting but virtually it becomes difficult to have good engagement among the employees. Little tweaks to your onboarding plan are required to survive in this changing world.
