Employee onboarding and engagement is no different to customer experience. Organisations spend countless dollars on understanding the customer to tailor business solutions to meet the customer’s needs. Employee onboarding and employee relations should be no different and in fact play a significant role in customer satisfaction.

The way your employees feel about your organisation has a massive impact on the way your customers see your organisation. Promoting employee advocacy to your brand and business is essential to building strong customer advocacy. Companies with an employee advocacy program report a 26% increase in year over year revenue¹. At the end of the day it’s your employees who are the face of your business in the eyes of your customer. If your employees don’t vouch for your brand how can you expect your customer to.

Building employee advocacy isn’t easy. It can’t be forced and must be built over time with an honest focus on employee engagement. Lets not forget that your employees have a back stage pass to the warts and all side of your product, brand and organisational culture. In many cases employees get to experience both sides of your organisation.  They live, breath and influence the culture but also get to experience your business through the eyes of the customer.

 

First steps to employee engagement and advocacy

Employee engagement starts well before your new employee even becomes an employee.  It starts with your employee value proposition (EVP). How well do you sell your organisation to potential employees in your job ad?  Engagement is reinforced in your interactions with potential candidates during the recruitment process. Finally, it reaches a peak when you offer the candidate a job and they accept. If your new employee wasn’t highly engaged at the time of hire they wouldn’t have signed the contract and you probably wouldn’t have offered them a job.

So onboarding becomes the first crucial step in engaging your new hire as they transition from candidate to employee . The experience they receive through the pre employment onboarding experience is essentially their first experience with your brand as an employee at a time when their engagement is at its highest. This is a great opportunity to further reinforce their decision to work for you, build further engagement and start their journey to employee advocacy.

 

Employee onboarding – Getting to the good stuff

The start of the onboarding process is paperwork, paperwork and more paperwork. Certainly not something to get excited about and not something that builds employee engagement. This step however can diminish the engagement of your new hire. Unnecessary complexity at this step almost certainly causes your new hire to question their decision to accept the job. Employees expect you to get this step right. In their eyes it gives them insight into what life will be like working for you in the future.  Making this step as easy as possible allows your new hire to get on to the good stuff. The stuff that starts to build engagement. Digital employee forms, electronic employment offers and online policy acceptance speeds up the traditional paperwork and helps the employee move past this as quickly as possible so they can start preparing for their first day.

Find out more about digitalising the onboarding process and taking the hassle out of employee paperwork by visiting myjoboffer.com.au

In our next post we will talk about the good stuff – how to prepare employees for day one of their new job.
1. http://v1.aberdeen.com/launch/report/research_report/13091-RR-Employee-Engagement.asp