Don’t rush staff onboarding. Here’s why.

In this climate, we want to onboard staff quickly – but there are consequences for rushing it.

Australia’s unemployment rate is at a record low 3.4 per. cent – meaning job applicants are greatly in demand.

This puts pressure on businesses to get onboarding perfect before we risk losing employees who become dissatisfied during their first 90 days.

Why? Because data coming through most years – and particularly in this jobseekers’ market – shows:

One-third of new employees begin searching for a new job before they have been with their employer for six months.
25 per cent leave before they have been there a year, giving them little to no time at peak productivity.
Companies tend to spend around 20 per cent of an employee’s salary to replace them.
The total cost of turnover is 100-300 per cent of a typical employee’s salary.

Meanwhile, according to a new Reserve Bank of Australia report,

Job mobility has increased as workers have caught up on planned job changes or been encouraged by the strong labour market to change jobs, particularly in high-skilled roles experiencing strong labour demand.
As economic activity has rebounded 2020-2022, job mobility appears to be around its highest level in over a decade, returning to levels last seen prior to the GFC.
The average job mobility rate over the past decade was 2.8 per cent; in February 2022, it was 3.3 per cent and nearly 440,000 people switched jobs in the three months to February 2022.
Both full-time and part-time workers are enjoying record job mobility.

What it all means is, we’re seeing businesses work harder than ever to retain and attract talent – talent which has the power to shop around for a role which suits them. Small and medium businesses can have difficulty hiring the right people to keep their business growing as quickly as they want, which is why every part of the employee lifecycle should be designed to make the employee feel disinclined to jump ship.

Make a strong impression during onboarding for better – or worse

enableHR’s National Business Development Manager, Andrew Feehan describes onboarding as an opportunity for you as an employer to give a successful first impression of how professional your organisation is. Feehan adds that skipping onboarding steps which seem trivial can result in significant complications.

“Onboarding is the final stage for the candidate’s experience. If done right, it aligns the new employee with the company’s objectives. If onboarding is rushed, you get the opposite result. Clumsy onboarding creates more work for people, creates frustration around the business – and makes your business look incompetent.”

A few of the consequences of bad onboarding enableHR has come across include:

Potential loss of right to work on a site or with a particular client if accreditation is lost due to onboarding without following employment laws.
Potential death or serious injury on site if safety training isn’t part of onboarding
Managers forced to manually collect employees’ data when the employer realises that it’s missing.
Higher employee turnover, lowering the company’s productivity.

As Workplace Relations Team Leader Tiarne Mitchell adds, “By failing to demonstrate where policies are located or not having policies which are accessible, the company may find themselves in a difficult position when carrying out disciplinary action for breaches of such policies.

“Should a claim be made by an employee as a result, a company would struggle to defend the employees knowledge of the policy.”

When onboarding, try and ensure these aspects are followed:

Require employees to sign acknowledgement of policies and procedures as part of their induction.
Show new staff where the suite of documents are kept during their induction for ease of access.
Set reminders around probation period reviews.
Create touch points so the employee regularly interfaces with their manager and isn’t neglected.
Issue a Fair Work Information statement for staff or casuals.
Be as paperless as possible and record everything on a digital HR management system such as enableHR.
Ensure probation review points are noted in your calendar.
Complete a Working From Home safety checklist if the newly onboarded staff member is one of the increasing numbers of staff working from home.
Ensure new staff have read policies and procedures. This is best achieved by sending out the policy with enableHR’s employee self-service.

How to record that a newly onboarded employee has been adequately briefed about what’s expected of them? enableHR is the answer.

enableHR has hundreds of ready-to-use workflows, checklists, guides, policies, contracts and letters – each one checked on a regular basis by an employment expert at FCB Workplace Law, enableHR’s sister company – easing the burden on you and your business for total HR compliance and peace of mind.

On enableHR you can upload nearly any onboarding document you desire, such as social media use policies, alcohol use policies, code of conduct, restraint of trade, confidential information classification/handling and more.

Take a demonstration of the onboarding software and see how enableHR allows you to easily manage your people through every stage of the employment lifecycle: from recruitment to termination for employees, casuals, contractors and volunteers.