No one plants a seed expecting a tree to grow overnight. Trees need water, sun, soil and time to grow.

Yet some companies expect new employees to grow without giving them the time or resources they need. More than a third of companies do not have a structured onboarding process. Without realizing it, these companies ensure their employees will never become more than saplings.

Companies that invest in comprehensive, thorough onboarding, however, reap long-term rewards. Proper onboarding techniques can have a huge impact on key HR metrics like retention rates and employee engagement.

Good onboarding has a lasting impact. Here’s what we know about what good onboarding does for companies and its employees, and how you can use this knowledge as benchmarks to evaluate your own onboarding program.

Three Ways Onboarding Benefits Your Company in the Long-Term

There are so many benefits to onboarding, from employee retention and engagement to satisfaction and productivity. Here are a few of the lesser-known long-term effects.

Better Employee Retention

A 2015 Equifax study found that more than half of people who left a job in the previous year left that job within their first year of employment. That means that if your onboarding process lasts long enough to shepherd new employees through that tough first year, you could see your employee turnover reduce dramatically.

Indeed, organizations with an onboarding process have 50% greater new employee retention. As the average cost of replacing an employee is between 16-20% of that employee’s salary, that translates into huge savings for your company. And those savings multiply over time.

Consider: if a foreman earns $50,000, it costs roughly $9,000 to replace him if he leaves. If your company requires 10 foremen, and lose half of your foremen in their first year of work, over 10 years that’s $45,000 spent simply on replacing foremen. That’s enough to pay for the entire salary of another employee–and think of the added productivity of another staff member.

Better Integration Into the Company’s Culture

If you think it’s nice but not crucial that a new employee quickly become part of the social life of your company, think again. One meta-study of 70 separate studies found that feeling socially accepted at work was an important factor in a new hire’s success.

Onboarding programs that emphasize a new hire’s integration into a company’s culture will see many benefits, including:

  • Better employee access to information and resources. When an employee doesn’t know something, you want them to feel comfortable turning to their colleagues who may have the information or tools they need. Ultimately, this makes them more productive employees.

 

  • Greater engagement at work. People who have a best friend at work are 7 times more likely to be engaged in their job, and engaged employees are better employees.

 

Keep Your Company On Top of Employee Trends

A comprehensive onboarding process that goes deeper than introducing new employees to the people in the office and providing them with forms has an unexpected benefit: it allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of what new employees really need.

Over time, as you conduct onboarding as a continual, two-way process where employees provide feedback on the support and training they receive, you will observe trends. Different employee types will have different strengths; for instance, entry-level employees may have stronger soft skills but need assistance building their technical skills, while new employees in management positions may have better technical skills but need assistance adapting to current processes.

Identifying the difference in needs helps you adapt your onboarding process to better meet new employee needs, and it also helps you prepare managers for what to expect from their new employees. In this way, onboarding gives you valuable intel on employee trends that may be difficult to come by without a proper onboarding process.

How to Evaluate Your Onboarding Program

There are numerous ways to evaluate your onboarding program. These include:

 

  • Surveying new employees on your onboarding process. Many companies survey their new employees upon completion of the onboarding process to learn what worked, what didn’t, and what is missing from the process entirely.
  • Making the most of stay and exit interviews. The reasons employees give for staying at an organization provides valuable insight into things that are working in your onboarding process or things that could be integrated into the process to make it stronger. Similarly, exit interviews can tell you what’s not working.

 

With regular evaluation of your onboarding process, your company will be able to strengthen the process for even better results and longer impact. Think of it like watering and fertilizing new employees until you have a forest of healthy and strong trees that will continue growing for years to come.