
Alexander Heinle
Alex is a marketer at Zavvy. On this blog, he mainly shares insights gained from discussions with selected experts and from helping our customers set up and improve their onboarding or learning programs.
First impressions matter; so much so that a solid employee onboarding experience can boost the new hire retention rate by 82%. In a time when career moves due to low job satisfaction have become the norm, these numbers are worth noting. However, this poses another, more important question: what goes into a great employee onboarding experience?
For starters, new hires should only worry about how to fulfil their new role duties best, not potential administrative pitfalls. That said, onboarding documentation is an inevitable staple of the employee onboarding process, meaning no onboarding process will be without it. So how can we ensure that new hires get all the information they need to succeed in their new role?
We’re here to explore this question in greater detail today. First, though, let’s discuss what onboarding documentation is, the types of documents you’ll typically come across, and what purpose they serve.
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What distinguishes new hire paperwork from onboarding documentation?
The key difference is that new hire paperwork refers to the actual paperwork new hires fill out upon being hired.
Meanwhile, onboarding documentation represents the company tools, processes, policies, procedures, and other intellectual property that shape the overall culture and departmental duties.
As a result, it’s pretty common to see the two overlap in some shape or form.
Below we have a list of four types of onboarding documents you’ll likely encounter while settling into your new role. Moreover, you’re likely to run into these regardless of whether they’re digitized or on paper.
The purpose of onboarding documents is so that new hires can read and understand the terms and responsibilities of their new role within the company. Usually, they are both legally and contractually required.
Keep in mind that the four kinds of onboarding documents listed below are generalized for demonstration purposes. Don’t forget to double-check with your HR department that you’re not missing any other essential onboarding documents your new hires will need.
Unsurprisingly, different countries have different legal documents for their employees to complete upon being hired.
For example, salaried employees in the United States will need to complete W-4 tax forms for federal and state tax purposes, while Canadians must submit a completed TD1 employment tax form. It’s also worth mentioning that you should include information for legal forms for contractors and other non-permanent or non-salaried employees somewhere in your onboarding documentation.
Although these documents do differ by country, they usually touch on employment essentials, like:
When first starting a new job, there are three essential employment documents your new hires will need:
Think of job offer letters as a brief overview of the new position. They not only formally extend the job offer in writing, but they’ll usually include a welcome message, starting date, and next steps for new hires.
As for the pertinent administrative details surrounding the new position, you’ll find these in an employment contract form. Employment contracts outline working hours, salary, holidays, position duties, company policies, and contract renewal and termination guidelines. If employees have an issue in any of these areas, they can always refer back to their employment contracts.
Lastly, you can share any information not broken down in the job offer letter or employment contract in a written document detailing additional company policies, procedures, and expectations.
Tip: You can help integrate your new hires more effectively by providing as much clarity as possible on policies, procedures and expectations from the outset of the onboarding process.
Internal company documents typically refer to company-specific materials that better help new hires understand the structure, culture, and expectations within the organization.
These documents can include materials like:
Tip: Like employment contracts, it’s not unwise to require new hires to sign some of these documents to ensure they’ve read and understood the details of each.
Most employment contracts will typically include information on compensation. Some companies, though, choose to outline this information elsewhere. Several of the most common documents you’ll see concerning employee pay and compensation are:
You may find that some documents fall into more than one of the categories listed above. Either way, it’s good form to review the above and see if you’re missing anything listed here. But getting all your onboarding documentation in order is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to creating an onboarding process; let’s talk about some other best practices that are worth incorporating into your daily procedures.
For those without much prior experience, the question of how to optimize onboarding documentation can feel daunting. For starters, a business playbook (also known as a company playbook) can help you structure your onboarding documentation in a way that aligns with your organization’s mission and values.
Tip: As for who is best suited to compile these company playbooks, only you can answer that question. While we encourage you to put your playbooks together as a team, the subject owners or subject matter experts within your company will be the best people to consult on this.
Deciding which information your new hires will need to know about your organization–and conversely, what information your organization will need from them–can help you create intuitive and well-structured company playbooks.
As we touched on above, this information varies according to company and country (especially employee healthcare information). However, you can use the following as a starting point when deciding which information to include in your playbook. Namely, new hires will need to:
Once you’re able to organize and edit this information in a digestible format for new hires, share it with other people operations employees, and stakeholders to gauge if you’re on the right track. After you get the green light from them, share the playbook with your new hires and encourage them to refer back to it whenever they have questions. If you are receiving the same question from multiple new hires, you may want to revisit your playbook for areas that lack clarity.
There’s more than one way to create and structure company playbooks depending on your organization’s culture, mission, and values. Different types of playbooks explain specific company policies and procedures more in-depth.
Since a company playbook’s primary purpose is to cover the bases in terms of company values, policies, procedures, and best practices, you’ll always need to include this information somewhere. However, there are other types of playbooks that touch on more specific information in greater detail:
Flexibility, accessibility, and readability are three must-have qualities for all company playbooks. It’s also essential to make them engaging and interactive so that employees will want to read and refer back to them after onboarding ends.
Let’s discuss some other company playbook best practices that are worth following, too:
Now let’s talk about some steps you can take to make your current onboarding process even better.
Companies know how important it is to get onboarding right, as evidenced by the $92 billion spent on new hire training within the past two years. But simply throwing all this documentation at new hires is not enough. More often than not, they need guidance, a world-class user experience, and authentic human connection to navigate the process successfully. Below are some of our favorite recommendations for making this happen.
It may come as no surprise that more than three-quarters of employees think socialization is the most important factor of a job–a number that’s likely to jump even higher as we continue emerging from the pandemic. But on the other hand, employee engagement in the post-COVID business world is a top concern for employers. After all, it can be challenging to engage employees sitting alone in their home offices for eight hours a day.
This makes establishing a genuine human connection meaningful and necessary, especially in a remote setting. Thankfully, there are a few ways to foster closeness and inclusion among new hires, including:
Depending on your organization’s structure and culture, you may be more inclined to hold certain orientation events over others (e.g., product deep-dives vs introductory meetings with company higher-ups). What matters most is that you implement meetings and orientation events that make the most sense for your organization. As you can see, there are plenty of ways to create an unforgettable onboarding experience, and no setup fits two organizations the same.
A buddy system can significantly help new hires within an organization. Studies show that a buddy system boosts employee retention rates and overall job satisfaction in the long run. Plus, having a designated employee to ask questions and address concerns can offer a much-needed sense of psychological safety. This is a vital factor influencing an employee’s decision to stay with or leave a company, as discovered by Google.
Remember: one of the biggest overall goals of onboarding is to make your new hires feel connected and integrated into the company. Little steps like paring new hires with an onboarding buddy can go a long way to realizing this. Considering that it costs about a third of a new hire’s salary to replace them, high turnover rates due to a lack of this psychological safety quickly add up.
Simply put, onboarding can be overwhelming for new hires. This is why streamlining workflows so that information is delivered piece by piece is vital: it demonstrates to new hires that their psychological wellbeing and understanding of their new role’s duties are the two main priorities of the whole process.
It also signals that onboarding isn’t a one-and-done deal. Instead, it’s a guided journey that helps employees transition into the role, feeling confident and fully prepared to assume their new duties.
Take Storyblok, for example. Streamlining their workflows saves 68 hours on their onboarding process every month. This, in turn, gives them more time to focus on what matters: bringing new hires up to speed to succeed in their new positions.
Storyblok could accomplish this by clearly defining each phase of their onboarding process, the objectives of each phase, and the necessary inputs for achieving the desired outputs. Zavvy’s digital onboarding software helps them automate certain aspects of their onboarding process. Automation not only translates into time-saving but also translates to boosted productivity in the end. In short, streamlining workflows saves everyone time, including people operations employees and new hires alike.
The good news is that compiling your onboarding documentation process doesn’t have to be costly or time-consuming. With the right onboarding documentation software, you can easily automate, organize, and provide 24/7 access to employees.
Zavvy’s onboarding documentation solutions allow you to bring new hire paperwork, onboarding documentation, and the much-needed social element that engages employees together on a single, coherent platform. Every employee, from entry-level to C-suite, can benefit from its intuitive approach to helping you manage employee affairs.
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First impressions matter; so much so that a solid employee onboarding experience can boost the new hire retention rate by 82%. In a time when career moves due to low job satisfaction have become the norm, these numbers are worth noting. However, this poses another, more important question: what goes into a great employee onboarding experience?
For starters, new hires should only worry about how to fulfil their new role duties best, not potential administrative pitfalls. That said, onboarding documentation is an inevitable staple of the employee onboarding process, meaning no onboarding process will be without it. So how can we ensure that new hires get all the information they need to succeed in their new role?
We’re here to explore this question in greater detail today. First, though, let’s discuss what onboarding documentation is, the types of documents you’ll typically come across, and what purpose they serve.
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