How Onboarding Impacts New Employee Productivity

Time-to-productivity is a tricky thing to manage. You want your new employees to get up to speed as quickly as possible, but rushing them is often counterproductive. The secret lies in a better onboarding process. 

It’s hard to overstate the importance of optimal onboarding. Simply having a standardized process leads to 54% higher productivity and 50% greater retention. But why is that? Here are five ways onboarding impacts new employee productivity you should know about. 

How Onboarding Impacts New Employee Productivity

1. Avoiding Burnout 

One of the most significant ways onboarding affects engagement is by preventing stress. Information overload is all too common in modern workplaces. A 2023 survey found that 81% of current employees felt overwhelmed during the onboarding process at their current job. 

Those feelings are a recipe for burnout. Recruits who don’t feel like they understand the job will struggle to get acclimated as they take on projects. Consequently, it may take a while before they can confidently tackle new challenges, resulting in a lengthy time-to-productivity period. Alternatively, the stress could become too much and cause them to leave the company. 

By contrast, an optimized onboarding workflow addresses these concerns and leaves recruits feeling ready for their roles. Higher confidence and understanding from the beginning will lead to better performance in less time. Expensive, time-consuming turnover will be less of an issue, too. 

2. Preventing Mistakes 

Similarly, onboarding is crucial to new employee productivity because it addresses recruits’ ability to do the job well. When recent hires don’t understand their roles fully, they make mistakes — even seasoned veterans err, so you cannot expect an ill-equipped recruit to be perfect. While errors may be expected, they take time to resolve. 

A rushed or uninformative onboarding journey will lead to a higher number of mistakes. As a result, your team will have to spend additional time fixing these errors, which takes time away from other work. Overall productivity, even outside of your recruits, will diminish. 

Consider how 83% of office workers spend one to three hours every day fixing errors. That’s already a considerable time sink, so you want to avoid adding to the mistake-resolving workflow wherever you can. Ensuring everyone is better prepared for their jobs is among the most effective ways to do so. 

3. Connecting New Hires to Help 

Both burnout and errors are related to not knowing how to proceed in a given situation. While that’s a fairly normal part of any job, new hires often have the additional disadvantage of feeling uncomfortable reaching out for help. Addressing this barrier in onboarding can reduce both mistakes and stress. 

Onboarding is a great time to introduce recruits to other team members or department leaders. While such introductions may seem insignificant, making connections will streamline the problem-solving process down the road. Unfamiliar situations are less imposing when workers know who to consult about them. 

Fostering helpful connections must go beyond exchanging names and contact information, though. It’s also a good idea to create a formal, documented process for following the chain of command. Encouraging new hires to reach out when they need help will also go a long way. 

4. Acclimating Recruits to Company Culture 

Along similar lines, onboarding is an ideal opportunity to introduce employees to the broader company culture. A staggering 88% of job candidates say culture is important to the application process. It’s also part of what helped companies like Trader Joe’s and Netflix become so successful. However, a strong culture only works when everyone feels a part of it. 

When onboarding doesn’t reflect company values or the general vibe of the office, it creates disjointedness. Newer workers may not mesh with veterans. People won’t recognize if a job is a good fit for them until later. Barriers like this may be subtle but profoundly affect the team’s overall productivity by influencing engagement. 

By contrast, an introduction that acclimates people into the culture will help the team become a cohesive unit in less time. The organization works better when everyone knows what’s expected of one another, even when it’s not strictly a matter of policy or job descriptions. 

5. Learning About Individual Recruits 

A better onboarding process can also promote higher productivity by helping the broader company. Good managers can ensure everyone works to the best of their ability by assigning tasks based on people’s unique strengths. As beneficial as this strategy is, it’s only possible when management understands their workforce on an individual level. 

Far too many businesses view training as solely a method of developing employees. It should also be a chance for the organization as a whole to develop. Taking the time and effort to learn more about each recruit’s strengths and weaknesses will enable better management down the line. 

As employees grow, their optimal role within the company may change. However, it’s still important to learn where and how everyone works best as early as possible. Doing so will get the team working at peak efficiency in less time before any more significant changes. 

Tips for Promoting Productivity Through Onboarding 

Clearly, a fully productive workforce relies on an optimal onboarding process. Here are a few best practices to follow to foster such a workflow at your organization. 

Survey Your Current Workforce 

Refining the introductory phase starts with recognizing where it must change. New hires likely face obstacles even if you think your hiring process is near perfect. A worrying 85% of employees today aren’t engaged at work, so almost every company can improve. Worker surveys are an excellent way to learn where your opportunities lie. 

Ask your current workforce about their experience as new hires. Note what positives they noticed as well as any obstacles they ran into. Any challenge cited by multiple employees is worth special attention, as future workers will likely find it difficult, too. 

Be sure to ask follow-up questions. Don’t stop at what employees found challenging — dig into why. Along those same lines, be open to suggestions from existing workers, especially regarding things they do every day that they think deserve more attention in training.  

Spread Out Training Sessions 

Regardless of your current strengths and weaknesses, you should extend your training workflow. Considering how common information overload is, it’s often more effective to take a slower approach to integrating someone into the company than rushing them. It may seem counterintuitive at first, as it means a longer onboarding time, but the time-to-productivity will actually shrink. 

A shorter training program may save time upfront, but it leaves employees ill-equipped. Workers forget up to 90% of what they learned in one big session by the end of the month. As a result, they’ll have to re-learn everything on the job, leading to much lower team productivity for their first few months at the company. 

Look at your existing training material to see if any defined groups emerge. Split separate topics into learning units, each with opportunities for recruits to showcase what they learned in firsthand work. Spread these units by days or weeks — depending on how critical each subject is to the job. It’s also best to start with the most important information before diving into less common scenarios or more detailed technicalities. 

Consolidate Software Tools 

Information overload is not the only way your onboarding process can overwhelm new hires. IT bloat is another common issue. You can address it by looking for opportunities to consolidate the software your team regularly uses, leaving you with fewer programs to train employees in. 

The average company has over 254 software-as-a-service apps but regularly uses less than half of them. Those unused tools are ripe for cutting or consolidating. Ask your team about what software they use the most and what they rarely employ. See if you can get rid of any underused apps entirely, or replace them with alternatives that serve the role of multiple smaller programs. 

You may find that some teams need specific tools that the rest of your workforce doesn’t. Marketing departments may rely on keyword research apps or customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, but HR doesn’t need them. In these cases, you should keep the software but adjust who you train to use it. Only teach people to use what’s pertinent to their specific role. 

Facilitate Communication 

The next onboarding issue to address is the ability and willingness to reach out for help. As you train new hires, encourage them to ask questions if they’re unclear about anything. Along the same lines, you can engage them by asking them to talk about their progress or elaborate on their expertise throughout training. 

Take the time to introduce recruits to senior team members they can turn to for help down the line. Remember, though, encouraging communication is only half of the equation. You must also make such communication easy by providing everyone with the right tools. 

Use messaging apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams for time-sensitive issues. Video conferencing platforms like Zoom or Google Meet are better for less time-sensitive but more complicated topics that may require a deeper human connection for each side. Project management tools like Asana or ClickUp are good for task-specific questions for all relevant members to see but aren’t the best for instant communication. 

Personalize the Onboarding Process 

Another way to optimize the onboarding process for long-term productivity is to tailor it to specific recruits. Studies show that personalized learning leads to higher achievement, engagement and a sense of autonomy. While most of that research focuses on students, the same concept applies to learning a new professional role. 

You can start by asking each recruit to set goals according to what they’d like to accomplish. Use this information, role-specific training materials and artificial intelligence (AI) to create user-specific courses and adapt learning workflows to specific needs. Many learning management systems — like WorkRamp, TalentLMS and 360Learning — offer this functionality. 

Outside of AI, you can personalize onboarding by monitoring recruits’ performance. See where they struggle in testing materials and where they succeed. Spend more time revisiting the things they’ve had difficulty with and try explaining them in different ways or providing new experiences. 

Embrace Continuous Improvement 

Finally, recognize that you likely won’t perfect the onboarding experience on your first try. There is always room for improvement, so it takes ongoing review and adjustment to make the most out of your recruiting and training process. 

Ongoing improvement begins the same way your initial optimization did. Ask employees about what they found helpful, what was difficult and what they feel they need that they didn’t get in training. Consider giving recruits a questionnaire immediately after onboarding, too, to rate and give feedback on their experience. 

Review feedback and look for areas to improve at least once a year. Be sure to track your improvements, too. Measure average employee performance in the months after onboarding throughout the year so you can notice any changes after adjusting the onboarding experience. 

Productivity Begins With Onboarding 

Your employees will only be able to achieve their peak performance if you set them up for success from the beginning. Onboarding is central to productivity, and recognizing this relationship is the first step toward capitalizing on it. Once you know how onboarding promotes better efficiency and engagement, you can tailor your process to get more out of it.