For any organization, hiring the best talents and the right people has always been a key focus. But hiring a person is only the beginning stage, after which employee onboarding comes.
A good onboarding experience makes it easier for new people to fit in, keeps employees more interested, and reduces the number of people leaving. To create a good onboarding plan, you just need to figure out what’s working, what needs to get better, and what new things to try. Employee onboarding analytics can really help you with that.
In this article, we will focus on how analytics can help you optimize employee onboarding and get the most out of it. Let’s discover how detailed data can help you with the new employee onboarding process!
Importance of employee onboarding
Right from the start, new employees should know what they’re supposed to do and how they can help. Good employee onboarding helps them get to know the company’s vision, goals, and values. This way, new team members quickly become a part of your company’s way of doing things.
According to Work Institute, around 30% of newly hired employees quit within the first year. That is why it is so crucial to have a streamlined onboarding process, helping newcomers to become a part of the team quickly.
Imperfections in the onboarding and training processes are the main reasons for the high turnover rate for new hires. So, you need to make first impressions powerful.
Successful onboarding leads to revenue growth and more profits. For one thing, new hires feel more confident. And for another, they are more engaged with the needed support during the onboarding.
Having an employee onboarding checklist will help you acclimate new hires and engage them into becoming productive, goal-oriented employees.
Another notable point: new employee onboarding often goes alongside onboarding automation. With employee onboarding automation, you can offer a more personalized experience for new employees, while spending less time and resources. It will help you with asynchronous onboarding as well. You can let new hires adopt training at the most convenient time for them.
What is employee onboarding analytics?
In brief, employee onboarding analytics includes measuring and examining the efficiency of onboarding activities. It is about understanding what makes new hires integrate into a new company successfully.
In terms of new employee data, organizations should focus on the following indicators:
- Onboarding completion rate
- Training and compliance rate
- Time to productivity
- Turnover rate
- Employee satisfaction
- Manager satisfaction
Like any study, checking how onboarding goes involves collecting data, cleaning it up, making charts, and figuring out what it means. Understanding the info gives you insights. These insights help find where onboarding isn’t working well, fix those parts, and highlight what’s going right.
Among other perks, employee onboarding analytics helps you:
- see which departments have higher retention, for example (and determine why it is so)
- uncover insightful figures with a thorough examination of data
- analyze employees’ skills, behavioral patterns, engagement, and performance rates
Companies are now realizing how useful employee analytics can be. It helps them bring in and keep new talents and makes the overall employee experience better.
5 Benefits of analytics in new employee onboarding
The general significance of employee onboarding analytics is apparent. But there are 5 key benefits it brings to the organization.
Let’s dive into details and explore each of the benefits below.
Optimizing employee onboarding process
With all the information about new employees, HR managers can tell if the onboarding process is going well. Analytics show what should be improved for a better start at the company. Use the data to make the right decisions.
Using employee onboarding analytics helps make the onboarding process less confusing and stressful. You’ll find out what information to share and when during onboarding. This way, new hires can quickly understand the company’s culture and their role in the team.
Identify challenges and bottlenecks
Employee analytics helps identify the challenges new employees may be experiencing during the onboarding process, like overwhelming information, lack of clarity, lots of documents and policies, etc.
To deal with it, you can implement onboarding feedback and NPS surveys. You can collect data and then determine the bottlenecks and see which areas need improvement.
Onboarding automation
To make new employee onboarding better, you can use technology to do tasks like sending welcome emails, sharing training materials, and giving assignments. When these tasks are automated, you can get data from emails, training, and surveys.
Looking at this data, you can see how quickly and successfully people finish training, open emails, and other important info needed to make onboarding better.
Experiments
Trying out new things can also help with onboarding. For instance, you collected feedback from past onboardings and found out that people liked having a buddy or talking informally with their team.
Respectively, you should consider it for further onboarding. Try out VR/AR training, virtual team-building activities, online board games, offline gatherings, etc.
Employee analytics gives you important information about your onboarding. Using this, you can make sure that the onboarding process is just as good and interesting for different jobs and people with different backgrounds.
Making data-driven decisions
Bad onboarding can lead to more employees leaving. Like we mentioned earlier, using employee analytics helps find problems you need to fix. The important thing is that you can use these insights to make decisions based on your own data.
Employee onboarding analytics is the key to detecting various employee patterns. It can unveil the hidden reasons behind performance, productivity, training completion rate, and new hire retention rate. Simply speaking, you can easily decide if an employee passes a trial or how to help a newcomer successfully stay with the team.
For example, you believe that higher pay will increase employee retention. In reality, it may not be so. Data helps you uncover what, in fact, influences retention rates for a particular role at your organization. It can be benefits policies, a smooth onboarding process, company culture, etc.
When it comes to decisions, using analytics and data insights can help you understand more about the people you might hire. For instance, if you see that job candidates keep turning down your offers, maybe there are issues with how you hire or you’re looking for the wrong kind of candidates.
Another illustration: you ran LinkedIn Ads campaigns. Analyze the campaigns’ outcomes. Connect LinkedIn Ads to Looker Studio, create a live and shareable dashboard. It’s a visually appealing way to identify the “WHYs.” Also, you can tailor your future campaigns based on data. It improves targeting to advertise your job offers to the right audience and helps select the best future employees.
Using data to hire new employees is helpful during onboarding. You pick the right person, know their background, and keep an eye on their onboarding progress. In the end, you gather enough information to figure out how to support and guide each new person.
Enhancing employee engagement
New hires who feel engaged from the first day are likelier to stay for the long haul. Basically, the better the onboarding experience, the higher the chances for a new employee to commit to a company. In fact, a research proves that commitment may become 18 times bigger.
Employee engagement overall in the U.S. has been dropping in recent years. Nevertheless, some companies managed not only to save the engagement but even double it in some cases. What’s their secret?
Companies spend a lot on making sure new employees have a good experience for a good reason. It’s because happy employees mean fewer people leaving, and the company can grow. If you want to make employees happier, it’s best to start from the beginning.
Companies that use employee engagement analytics can find areas where employees aren’t very engaged and then make changes to fix that.
Employee data analytics helps you avoid problems that come with employees who are not engaged. These problems include issues with keeping them, a drop in how well they do their job, and trouble with communication, among other things.
Also, using employee engagement analytics can help you figure out why new hires might leave. With the right information and decisions, you can change how you onboard employees and try to stop them from leaving.”
Finally, use onboarding analytics to see which engagement initiatives work better – be it an informal team meeting, a welcoming custom t-shirt, or a workshop. Then, customize those activities, abandon some, and prioritize others to improve engagement among newcomers and those joining your organization soon.
Tracking and measuring employee performance
By looking at data from new employee onboarding, you can find different things that might cause problems with how well they work. You can also find data to show how they get things done and stay consistent in their performance.
Analytics allows you to find causes for new hires to be productive, and vice versa. Take, for instance, InVision. They discovered the link between new hire’s expectations/reality and performance. When the company matched the expectations of new employees, such employees were 3.1 times more likely to have high performance within 1 year.
If you have hybrid or remote teams, tracking and measuring employee performance is necessary. Otherwise, one may get lost trying to figure out what’s done and what’s not.
Using data analytics helps you track and measure how well things are going. So this includes how many people finish onboarding, how engaged and satisfied they are, and more. Plus, you can figure out what’s expected for a specific job and set up goals for successful onboarding.
Your data analytics may unveil other surprising insights on employee performance:
- why some employees perform better than others
- traits and behaviors your top performers have
- onboarding plan goals (realistic and optimistic)
- breaking stage (when onboardees churn)
All this data gives you a chance to try out new things and make onboarding better. Also, you can change how employees learn and grow during onboarding. Get feedback on how well they’re doing and share it with them so they can see their progress. Knowing about personal achievements usually makes employees feel stronger and more motivated to do even better.
Personalizing new employee onboarding
Making onboarding personal for each new employee makes a big difference. It makes them more interested and helps them do better. Using analytics helps you customize onboarding activities based on what each person needs, their skills, and their job.
The data insights you got from the existing onboarding process can greatly help you. You can:
- choose a training approach to a particular role,
- apply communication means with newcomers,
- identify onboarding stages and flow
- personalize knowledge sources
- optimize the learning curve
Focus onboarding training on the unique needs, skills, and interests of a new hire. This way it’s easier to keep an employee motivated. New hires feel valued. They’re not pushed too hard or too little ‒ just the right pace.
Making learning paths fit each person better makes training work well, keeps employees happy, and helps them do their job better. Look at what each person already knows. Give them feedback that helps them grow and succeed personally.
Personalizing might sound hard, but if you use automation for employee onboarding, it frees up your time for essential tasks. You can collect data and info to get to know new employees. Then, you can customize their entire training process.
The freed time you can spend on personalizing onboarding processes for each newcomer. Even small aspects filled with a personal touch make a difference.
Why I Wrote This:
In short, using employee onboarding analytics is important to make sure new hires feel successful, engaged, understand the company culture. And they are also more committed to the organization.
Particularly, your company can benefit from using employee analytics:
- Pinpoint the gaps in training, feedback, or support. This way, you will find out more about the needs of new employees and optimize onboarding activities to meet these needs.
- Using information from onboarding analytics helps you make smart decisions during and before onboarding.
- Find out which onboarding activities aren’t getting much interest and need to be improved. When engagement is better, performance improves, and more people stick around.
- Measure the real contribution of a newcomer and understand how to help with their productivity and performance.
- Using onboarding data helps create more personalized onboarding activities. It helps find out what each new hire needs, knows, and likes.
If you enjoyed reading this piece, don’t skip checking other articles on the Ongig blog!
Author bio:
Dmytro Zaichenko is a Marketing Specialist at Coupler.io, an all-in-one data analytics and automation platform. He has over 3 years of experience in digital marketing, particularly in SaaS. Also, he’s been actively involved in hiring and onboarding marketing interns at the company. Apart from experimenting with marketing tactics, he’s a huge NBA fan.
