Do your employees feel disconnected? Onboarding is probably what you need to work on. 

A study by airspeed revealed that 67% of employees resign from their position because they feel disconnected from the rest of the team. With the fear of great resignation still continuing, businesses worldwide are trying to figure out how to retain their employees and reduce their turnover.

The time when the low pay became the reason for someone leaving the job has ended. The new employees seek job satisfaction along with good pay. They seek equal respect and opportunities to grow.

Toxic work culture and feeling lonely and not belonging to a team can destroy your employees’ motivation to come and work every day. A report by the MIT Sloan Management review says a bad work culture is 10 times more effective in determining the company’s turnover rate than the salary.

Not to forget the upcoming employee behavior called “quiet quitting.” It is a fairly new term that means the employees will do the bare minimum and nothing more than that. You need a workforce that thinks of the organization as its own and works hard every day to reach higher heights. To achieve such a workforce, you also must ensure that your employees are happy and feel a strong bond with the managers and other team members.

A change in work culture is certainly necessary, but a good onboarding program is probably what you need to work on to help you create a better workforce.

Your employees should feel like they are a part of the team from day one. Introduce them to everybody, make them feel special, and show how much you value them instead of just putting “ we value our employees” on a ppt.

The purpose of your onboarding program should always be to welcome new hires and make them feel proud of their decision. For this obviously, you will have to train your managers as well. A good manager who is patient and friendly can help the new employees to enjoy their work.

Here are a few tips to make your onboarding program more welcoming, helping your employees feel engaged and connected:

• Make the program engaging. You can use onboarding software to aid with better engagement and convenience.
• Train the managers to empathize with the new hires and solve all their minor and major issues.
• Allow new hires to engage with each other. Host team-building activities during the onboarding program.
• Ask for employees’ feedback and let them know you are working on improving yourself based on the feedback.
• To keep them from feeling lonely, encourage the staff to get along with one another.
• You can use LMS’s community feature to help reserved personalities who find face-to-face conversation difficult to start with a chat and become friends with other employees.
• Tell them how you appreciate your employees after successfully completing a project.
• Assign a buddy to help them with “ice-breaking” and adjusting to the new environment.
• Most employees prefer remote training, which will further reduce their chances of meeting in person. Hence use blended learning instead. Ask the employees to visit the workplace and make sure they have fun on that day.
• Encourage open communication among the employees and also with their managers.

This report by Gallup says that only 21% of employees feel engaged at work. Other employees are working just for the sake of their payment. The drive to go beyond the limits and work hard is far less. And the major contributor to this situation is poor work culture and lack of social interaction.

Most employees decide whether they want to continue working for a company or not within the first few months. This means your onboarding plays a very crucial role in determining the turnover, and we just read that the turnover rate is highly influenced by how connected the employee feels to the company.

Ensure your onboarding program is more about making the employees comfortable with the new environment and the work culture and less about “ how great our company is”. If your work culture has some flaws, there is no shame in accepting them and then improving yourself.

Your workforce is one resource that you cannot buy in a market. Treasure them so that you can reach higher heights with your employees.