Employee Onboarding Trends That Every Employer Should Know In 2020

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Onboarding Trends|Employee Onboarding Trends That Every Employer Should Know In 2020Human resources are undoubtedly the most vital resource for any organization. A talented and dedicated team can drive success for your business, so it definitely makes sense to go the extra mile with your recruitment process.

Having a good onboarding strategy is equally significant because it ensures retention of the resources you choose with a great deal of hard work. While having a robust onboarding process is the best way to get started, you need to follow the latest industry trends to deliver outstanding experiences to the new hires. Here are the employee onboarding trends that every employer should implement in 2020.

Trend #1: Preboarding

A lot goes on for the potential employee after accepting the job offer. There is stress and anxiety of course, in addition to the fact that they may have some competing job offers. These could lead to the new employees changing their minds and not showing up. No wonder, preboarding is emerging as a key trend in the recruitment industry. The objective of this process is to keep the potential employee engaged for the period between the date of offer acceptance and the first day of work. It involves connecting and reconnecting with the hires during this period so that they feel engaged and excited to be a part of your organization.

Trend #2: Personalization

Another onboarding trend that is making it big for recruiters is personalization. A personalized onboarding experience makes new hires feel connected and builds a comfort level right from the start. Though creating such experiences can take some effort, it pays off in the form of accelerated employee productivity right after joining.

Bringing personalization in onboarding workflows involves consideration of factors such as role, location and seniority of the recruits and designing the process accordingly. You can deliver specialized onboarding material and training sessions that are tailored to the needs and expectations of the recruits.

Trend #3: Automation

Onboarding is a humongous task for HR managers as the process has multiple steps and processes involved. The stress of managing them seamlessly is massive and they can end up wasting their precious time as well. Now is the time to look for an HR platform with onboarding features to automate the entire process. Though you will have to make this one time investment, it can translate into extensive savings in the long run. Automation is one trend that no organization should miss on, regardless of its size and scale.

Trend #4: Socialization

The human aspect is undeniably the most important part of onboarding. Positive social relationships at work should be encouraged as they drive employee engagement and the likelihood of staying with the employer. New hires, in particular, are likely to feel more comfortable in the new environment if they make friends with their colleagues.

It becomes important to embed socialization in the onboarding process and you should definitely embrace this trend for 2020 and beyond. The buddy system is one of the approaches you can incorporate within the program to encourage socialization.

Trend #5: Mentorship

New employees often struggle with finding someone they can turn to for good advice on key matters such as company culture, work expectations and initial stress. Mentorship is a trend that most of the organizations have adopted today to resolve this challenge for the new hires. A mentor is essentially a person in a senior position who can guide and advise the new employee to make their initial journey a smooth one. Since this person knows the company inside out, he or she is probably able to help the recruit to blend within the setup and culture of the organization.

Trend #6: Feedback

Businesses often go a long way with employee satisfaction surveys to get feedback on the existing system and find ways to improve it. In the recent time, feedback has become a significant part of the onboarding process as well. After all, you would want to know how satisfied the new employees are with the program and what is their likelihood of staying with the company and recommending it to others as well. Just building a new employee feedback system will not help; you need to understand the issues and address the gaps to improve the system as a whole.

These innovative trends have huge potential when it comes to improving your onboarding process. Not implementing them can put you behind in the race and you may even lose the best talent out there. So you must make all the efforts to align your program according to these trends.

Retain Your Employees for Longer

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Retain your employees|Retain Your Employees for LongerWhen you’ve taken a lot of time and effort to find and recruit the best employees for your business, it can be pretty upsetting when they decide to leave, not least because you’ll have to go through the whole process again and that can cost your business dearly in terms of time and money.

That’s why it’s always a good idea to be proactive and do everything you can to retain your employees for as long as possible. With that in mind, here are some of the best techniques for keeping your employees for longer…

Give them more responsibility

Giving your employees more responsibility is a great way of showing your trust in them. It also gives them more autonomy over their working days, which can lead to a greater level of job satisfaction. If you’ve hired the best people, there’s no reason to loom over them – just leave them to it.

Respect them

Employees are unlikely to stay with a job when they feel disrespected and underappreciated. That’s why it’s so important that you show them respect at all times. Don’t talk down to them, talk with them and make them feel that their opinion matters because actually it does.

Give them development opportunities

Whether you sponsor them to upgrade their contractors license or let them attend college once a week to learn code, for example, investing your time and money in your employees’ learning and development is a great way to keep them engaged. It shows them not only that you care, but also that they will be able to grow and progress within your company instead of having to look elsewhere for career fulfillment.

Share revenue with them

This may not be possible depending on the structure of your business and various other factors, but if you are able, you may want to consider setting up a revenue sharing scheme whereby a percentage of your profits will go back to your employees. There is no better way of showing your appreciation, motivating your staff and keeping them onboard than rewarding them financially for their loyalty, and this is a great way of doing that.

Give them lots of time off

Nobody wants to work for a company that works them to death, and anyway, employees who are forced to work long hard hours don’t exactly perform as well as they could, so be that generous boss. Be the boss who knows how important rest and relaxation is and offer a generous amount of paid time off for vacations, sickness, the birth of a new baby, mental health days. It might sound expensive, but it’ll cost you less than unmotivated employees or having to recruit new staff because your existing employees are burnt out.

If you want your employees to stay with your business for the long haul, you need to put the effort in. No one is going to stay in a place where they are overworked and underappreciated for long, so take you5r commitment to the good staff you have seriously starting now.

Do More, Together: 5 Effective Ways to Improve Collaboration Among Employees

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |collaboration among employees |Do More, Together: 5 Effective Ways to Improve Collaboration Among EmployeesNobody ever said that business was easy.

50% are forced to cease operations within 5 years of starting up. Of course, numerous factors separate the best businesses from the worst. One thing’s for sure though:

Companies with employees that don’t work together face an uphill battle.

Collaboration boosts everything from operational efficiency and effectiveness through to the working environment and company culture. Communication, morale, and teamwork all get better.

In other words, it’s good for business.

Want five tips for improving collaboration among employees? Keep reading.

1. Set Up Post Work Activities

Getting to know each other better is key to collaboration.

After all, employees are more likely to work well together when they’re friends and not just colleagues. Setting up activities outside of the office facilitates that relationship-development.

Being outside of the working environment is important. Without their usual tasks and responsibilities to complete, employees will relax and strike up a conversation; they’ll hear each other’s stories, laugh, and find common ground.

This is a recipe for better communication and relations within the office as well.

2. Run Team-Building Exercises

Team-building is another classic route to better collaboration.

Every aspect of these activities and exercises is intended to bolster relationships and communication. They bring people together around common goals and foster team-work in the process.

More to the point, they’re fun!

Good team-building tasks inevitably make people smile, laugh, and bond. They learn lessons to take back into the office.

3. Ensure Strong Leadership

This one’s a little out of left-field.

However, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of strong leadership in encouraging collaboration. Someone that leads from the front and by example will set the standard of what’s expected from their employees.

Good leaders set their expectations of employees and support their development. They’ll keep people on track with roles and responsibilities, and work to improve their confidence.

All told, employees feel empowered, supported, and valued. Feeling like an important part of the team, they’re more likely to contribute to it and collaborate with it.

4. Create Sharing Opportunities

Employees should feel empowered at work.

They should have the chance to speak up, voice their ideas, and share their thoughts with the group. Everybody should have a turn to talk and to feel part of the discussion.

It’s the job of any manager to make this happen.

Quick-fire morning meetings, scrums, time-outs, and group-thinking opportunities will help.

5. Employ Collaborative Technology

A dynamic team will also benefit from tools specifically designed to improve collaboration.

Software or apps, such as Slack, that enhance communication provide a good example. Employees can share messages with ease, post notifications, share documents, and discuss particular issues.

Utilizing these resources, alongside others such as an appointment scheduler, will keep everybody in sync and on task. Productivity will improve and operations become more streamlined.

Time to Improve Collaboration Among Employees

Businesses are more likely to succeed when staff members work together.

Hopefully, the tips here will help your company improve collaboration among employees and boost your chances of success in the process.

Want more articles like this one? Check out more of our blog today.

How To Keep Your Employees Happy & Driven

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Employees|How To Keep Your Employees Happy & DrivenIf you are a business owner, hopefully, you are one of the people that realizes that the most important part of your business is your employees. Believe it or not, even in modern times, there are still a lot of business owners out there that put their employees at the bottom of the pile and more often than not, this comes back to haunt them.

In modern times, if you want to succeed in business, you have to not only do everything your competition is doing, you have to do it better, and for you to be able to do things better, you need the people on the front line to be working at their most productive.

Today, we are going to be looking at why your employees may not be performing at the height of their abilities, and why you may be doing things that cause this. After that, we are then going to be looking at some of the things you can do if you really want to get so much more from your team.

Why Your Employees May Be Slacking

As a business owner, we understand it’s going to be an annoyance if any of your team is underperforming, but, have you ever stopped to find out why they are doing what they are doing?

The sad truth is, while you may have an employee that is trying to get away with doing as little as possible, the chances are that the employee simply feels wasted and undervalued. While this may be difficult to comprehend, it’s actually one of the most popular reasons for an underperforming team member, and as you will see in the next section, it’s rather easy to fix.

So, if you are looking for a way to increase the overall atmosphere in your office and you also want to see your team perform at an all-time high, then maybe you will want to consider some of the tips below.

Offer A Good Benefits System

The first thing we are going to be looking at today is what you are offering to your team that makes them feel valued.

If you are one of many business owners that simply employs somebody only for them to find out that there are zero benefits and nothing to be gained from working at your company, then now is the time to consider making a change to this.

By offering things like Accuplan Benefits Services on top of medical and dental plans, you will suddenly see a change in the attitudes of your team. By giving your employees something that shows them that they are more than just a number to you, you will find that the productivity rate rises exponentially.

Offer Incentives

While we are on the subject of making the team feel valued, it may fall within your interests to offer your employees incentives for reaching certain targets.

Now, when it comes to incentives, it doesn’t really matter if it’s in monetary form or whether you offer an hour off, you will find that this is enough to increase the productivity of your team tenfold and it also promotes a little healthy competition in the office too.

While some business owners see incentives as bribery, it’s actually far from it. You have to look at things realistically when it comes to your employees and see that while you may bank most of the profits, they are only getting a very small portion of that for a lot of work.

When you offer them an incentive, it’s more a way of saying thank you for everything you do.

Nurture And Promote

The final thing we are going to look at is the opportunities that you give to your team. We understand that for some businesses it won’t be viable, but if there comes a time when you need to hire a member of staff, why not look internally and ask if a current employee would be interested in expanding their horizons.

While you may not have a team member that is qualified, there is nothing stopping you from offering them a route into a different career with you. By doing things this way, you already know how hard working the person will be, and it will also cost you less while the employee is training.

Many companies are now employing this technique, and it has been shown to not only increase productivity, but it also increases employee retention rates massively.

Giving Your Employees All The Resources They Need to Work Better

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Employee Resources|Giving Your Employees All The Resources They Need to Work BetterWhen was the last time you checked that your employees had the right resources to do the job? Supplying them with the right resources is more than just making sure they have the correct equipment, although this is a major part of it too.

For a well-rounded employee to be able to do their job properly, how you treat them and understand their specific job role plays a big part in how they perform for you. No one wants to be paying employees who aren’t doing the job well or even at all. So, what can you do in your role as their employers to make sure they have all the resources they need to do the job?

Equipment

In every single job role you come across, there will, of course, be the need for equipment. This will take many different forms, depending on the sectors and type of business you are in.

Whether this is making sure you have a solid infrastructure in place for employees to do their jobs properly and deliver customer service, making sure you have the best epson drivers in the office for your printing needs or state of the art tech for workers who need to stay connected on the go.

Making sure you have provided staff with the right products, systems, apps and devices to do their job efficiently will play a part in making sure the job is done and done well.

Training

It can be tempting to skip out on making sure training is completed and completed thoroughly. Don’t. If you don’t make sure your team is well trained, then chances are, they won’t be able to perform as competent as you need them too.

Ignore the fact you are against the clock, have time restraints or any other issues and focus on making sure all your staff, new and old, are able and confident to carry out their job role properly.
Neglecting this will end up in sub-par customer service and corners being cut due to gaps in knowledge. So cut the mistakes and make sure everyone is one the same page

Motivation

Are your staff looking forward to the day ahead and today’s workload? Chances are if they don’t have the right support system in place or are over/underwhelmed and lacking in motivation they won’t be doing their best work for you!

Look at how you interact with staff and how you and the job itself comes across. Is there anything you can be doing differently or stop altogether? Staff feel more motivated to work when they know what they are doing is appreciated and their opinions and suggestions are taken on board.

Staff meetings are a great way to get everyone together to discuss new ideas and ways of working together as is one on one meetings. Take anything that is offered onboard and see how you can create a better working environment that fosters creativity and encourages people to work more efficiently and productively.