Importance of Onboarding
Onboarding is an important HR process in all organizations. It involves helping a new employee integrate into the organization. New employees need to be introduced to the organizations, the people, the culture, the processes, and their work. Onboarding is the process that ensures all this is done. The process of onboarding varies from one organization to another. However, it is advisable that organizations should use a standard process for onboarding to ensure that the process is done comprehensively.
One of the ways of doing this is to have a standardized checklist. This will ensure that all possible activities to be covered in onboarding are listed. The checklist can be customized depending on the job role in the organization, division, and other factors. Once a comprehensive checklist is available, it can be used through the onboarding process. The checklist would ensure that all activities that are a part of the onboarding are completed seamlessly.
Training on Onboarding
Since onboarding is a vital HR process, it is essential that HR staff in organizations be trained on it. Human resource training courses can be offered on onboarding. The benefits of such courses are:
- It allows HR staff to be comprehensively trained on onboarding with the training being conducted by professionals who have experience and expertise in different aspects of HR. Such a training course would ensure that HR personnel understand the onboarding process and can create the best process for their organization.
- Onboarding training would allow HR personnel to understand industry-wide best practices so that the same can be implemented in their organizations. They can develop outcomes for each of the activities so that they can monitor if the onboarding has gone on successfully.
- Training ensures that new employees learn all there is to know about onboarding. It allows existing employees to hone their skills.
- Since HR professional training on onboarding would be comprehensive, the HR personnel will be able to use the training to create a valuable onboarding checklist. The complete knowledge of the processes that they pick up during the training will help them create a checklist, which can be implemented in their organization.
HR Training and Onboarding Checklist
HR training can help the HR team in an organization to develop the best onboarding checklist. During the training process, the creation of checklists can be taken as an activity that can be completed. The trainer can guide the participants in the same. The training would be very helpful in creating a general checklist for onboarding.
This checklist once created can be customized for other areas. This is how it can be done:
- A general onboarding checklist is created based on standard processes for onboarding, including best practices.
- This kind of checklist covers all aspects of the onboarding from the initial orientation to defining roles, completing paperwork, understanding job roles, and reviewing goal achievement.
- This checklist can be used in an organization for employees belonging to any department. It would be ideal for general employees who belong to the administration, HR, purchase, and other such functions.
- For the key processes in the organization, like Sales, Production, Technical, IT, etc there would need to be checklists specific to the job function.
- These customized checklists can be very easily developed once the initial general checklist is prepared. The general checklist would be comprehensive since it has been developed as a result of extensive training. The checklist would even cover all aspects of technical functions. However, some amount of customization would be required for specific areas.
- The HR personnel can use the training as an opportunity to understand how to customize a general checklist for different functions. While customizing, care must be ensured to cover all onboarding aspects related to that area.
- The HR personnel can work with the concerned function to create such a customized checklist. This consultation and a joint review by HR and the department/function would ensure that the checklist is comprehensive and nothing is missed out.
- After the checklist is ready, it is important to periodically review the checklist. This ensures that any new process or new requirement can be included so that any changes in the onboarding process are duly captured in the checklist.
There is no doubt that training adds value to every organization. HR training can be used to effectively add value to the onboarding process. The training can be used to create a valuable checklist that could be used to make the onboarding process more effective and produce the desired results.
