“Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent.”
–Brandon Hall Group Research
For every organization, new employee onboarding should be a process of high strategic importance. A well-planned onboarding process allows the employees to get well acquainted with an organization’s processes, culture, knowledge insights, and tools. It enables the new employee to know exactly where to find the valuable resources, colleagues who could be of help, and how to navigate the organization efficiently. However, if not planned well, the process can become lengthy, complex, and tedious, presenting challenges to the new employee. Despite its importance, according to Microsoft, only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees.
To make new employee onboarding an interactive and fun process for the organizations, we have come up with this blog that shares how organizations can leverage Microsoft 365’s modern workplace tools to make new employee onboarding a great experience.
How to Plan a New Employee Onboarding Experience?
Step 1: Determine the audience profile and size
Start with conducting comprehensive research to gather details about the onboarding process. It is important to understand the various career backgrounds that employees are coming from, how many new employees are joining, what teams they are joining in, and whether they will join virtually or physically. Answers to all these questions will help identify and select the best platform for new employee onboarding, as well as the resources needed.
Step 2: Establish a timeline for onboarding
According to Gallup, only 29 percent of new hires say they feel fully prepared and supported to excel in their role after their onboarding experience. In fact, new team members typically take around 12 months to reach peak performance potential.
A week-long onboarding process is a common practice at many organizations, but is it enough for the new hires to understand their company, culture, and team? What should be the ideal onboarding timeline for your organization? Therefore, establishing a timeline that is acceptable to both the management and the new hires is essential.
Step 3: Select Microsoft 365 onboarding tools
Microsoft 365 delivers a suite of powerful solutions that can help organizations mitigate existing onboarding challenges and design a seamless process beneficial for both the management and new employees. Organizations can leverage Microsoft 365 solutions such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Lists, Microsoft Planner, and SharePoint Spaces to create an impactful new employee onboarding solution.
How to Deliver an Awesome Onboarding Experience with Microsoft 365?
Once an organization is able to understand the exact needs, identify the lag in the process, and finalize plans for enhancement – it is now time to get into the act and build a new solution. Microsoft 365 solutions can ensure a thorough and connected onboarding journey for the new employee.
Create New Employee Onboarding Site on SharePoint
Organizations can build an internal communication site in SharePoint that serves as a home for every new employee. Such a site would provide useful resources, company information, and job role/expectations in an organized manner. This site should be kept updated to ensure that the new employee has all information needed to be successful. Best internal communication sites of this type are ones that organize action items in terms of priority.
Simplify Virtual Employee Onboarding with Microsoft Teams
Use Microsoft Teams to sail through the challenges of virtual onboarding. Create a Teams channel specially dedicated to the new joiners. Populate the channel with presentations, videos, lectures, etc. to provide training material at a click. Prepare modules that new joiners need to go through and then set small quizzes at the end to test how much they have picked up. Microsoft Teams also helps make virtual employee orientation fun and engaging activity by enabling employees to have some face time and communicate with each other through Teams chat.
Provide Access to Key Information with Viva Connections
Viva Connections is an important module of Microsoft’s Employee Experience Platform (EXP) – Microsoft Viva. It allows organizations to transform employee experiences. Viva Connections can be leveraged to streamline the onboarding process for new employees by providing access to important information, tools, and resources they need to be successful. New employees can gain access to resources on both desktop and mobile devices.
Streamline the Learning Curve with Viva Learning
Viva Learning is another important module of the aforementioned Microsoft Viva. This is an application for Microsoft Teams and enables organizations to recommend and provide new joiners with access to different learning modules. It can help the newbies in the organization gain knowledge specific to their job role within the organization. Viva Learning can be utilized to create learning modules that help new employees understand the organizational and team needs as well as understand the tools that they will be working with daily.
Help Prioritize Tasks with Microsoft Planner or Microsoft Lists
Most employees are not able to understand the order of priority in which certain deliverables should be completed. Microsoft Planner tab integrated into Teams helps the managers assign tasks to the new joiner and set priority labels as well as input expected delivery dates. This helps the new joiners to plan their work better. A similar effect can also be achieved by creating tasks in Microsoft Lists and adding the List app in the Teams channel created for new employees. Additionally, Microsoft Lists can be integrated with the new employee onboarding SharePoint site using the List web part.
Provide Engaging Virtual Campus Tours with SharePoint Spaces
As in-person office visits have been replaced by remote working, during these unprecedented times, it is essential to familiarize the new joiners with the office campus in new ways. SharePoint Spaces helps organizations create a virtual 360-degree tour of the office campus. The Microsoft 365 solution delivers immersive online experiences using 2D and 3D web parts.
According to a Warwick University study, happy employees are 12 percent more productive. And it is common knowledge that high engagement leads to high productivity at workplace. Organizations willing to invest in high employee engagement and satisfaction should start from the initial engagements. This is exactly why organizations need to build the right new employee onboarding solution to match specific needs.
Reimagine New Employee Onboarding with AgreeYa Solutions
As a Microsoft Gold Partner and Cloud Solutions Provider, AgreeYa has been helping organizations transform their business-critical processes by leveraging Microsoft 365. We are best positioned to help organizations to implement a Microsoft 365 based New Employee Onboarding solution.