5 Trends to Boost Your Onboarding for Recent Grads

5 Trends to Boost Your Onboarding for Recent Grads
Resources

July 17, 2023

Resource: Blog Industry: Multiple Industries
Tags: Learning & Development, Online Training, Professional Development

How do you cultivate a healthy and productive relationship with your employees? It all starts at the very beginning. That’s why having a clear and strategic onboarding plan is a vital tool for your business. Gone are the days of simply handing new hires some paperwork, tossing them a copy of the company handbook, and giving them a quick rundown of where they’ll be sitting and what they’ll be doing. Gone too are the days of letting a couple of unengaging Zoom recordings do all the heavy lifting for you - and that’s a good thing!

Taking a more deliberate approach to onboarding is increasingly important when it comes to recent graduates and young professionals. There are many reasons that the turnover rates for Gen Z are so high, but low job satisfaction is chief among them. If you prioritize your onboarding experience, however, you can effectively welcome and retain these new employees, connect them to the rest of the team, set the tone for workplace culture, instill a sense of your company’s mission and values, clarify important policies and procedures, and outline critical job tasks and responsibilities. Whether done haphazardly or with careful intention, your onboarding process will set the stage for everything else that is to follow.

So, how exactly do you do it? These onboarding trends will help your employees acclimate to their new role and connect to your company - particularly recent graduates who are just entering the workforce - making your company and team stronger in the process.

5 Ways to Optimize Onboarding to Set Your Employees Up for Success

 

1. Clarify Basic Professional Etiquette & Standards for Your Company

For new graduates and young professionals, this type of training can be an especially important area of clarification to prevent uncomfortable bumps along the road. Some of these topics may seem obvious or unnecessary if you’ve been in the workforce or at your company for a while, but no matter the age or cultural or professional background of your new hire, this type of training will help ensure that everyone is starting out on the same page with a clear understanding of expectations.

Basic professional etiquette and company standards training may include clarifying arrival time (or login time if they are working remotely), expectations for professional attire, words and phrases to use or avoid in meetings, how to develop a productive agenda, meeting deadlines or requesting extensions, appropriate professional manners for meeting with clients or other company stakeholders, basic email etiquette, social media professionalism, cell phone usage at work or during meetings, and preferred communication channels, among other things. All of these should be based on the specific needs and requirements of your company and industry, rather than on a generic sense of what professionalism means.

 

2. Create Opportunities for Connection

One of the most important parts of your onboarding plan is helping your new employees to build connections with one another. Typically, this process will include one-on-ones with important leaders and supervisors, team introductions, group lunches, company tours, and clear mentorship support for when your new hire runs into issues or has questions.

If your employees are remote workers and new to the workforce, however, this process can be even more challenging. Your onboarding plan must be intentional about providing new employees with clear opportunities to connect with others. This may mean providing them with a greater number of one-on-ones with supervisors or regular check-ins, support for technology issues, and virtual get-to-know-you activities with the whole team.

3. Demonstrate Your Commitment to Social Good

People want to do meaningful work and young professionals in particular want to work for a company that cares about doing social good. In fact, according to a study by Cone Communications, 94% of Gen Z respondents believe that companies should help to address critical issues in our society.

As a part of your onboarding plan for new hires, you should share the driving force behind the work that your company does and why that work matters. You should also invite your new employees to be a part of your company’s social good initiatives - this is an important way to demonstrate your workplace culture in action, helping the young professionals new to your industry feel more connected to your company’s mission and making it clear why they should be excited to be a member of your team. This way, while you are working to improve your employee satisfaction, you’re also helping to make our world a better place.

4. Foster a Culture that Values Inclusivity

From making teams stronger to boosting the bottom line, investing in diversity, equity, and inclusion training with your new employees will have lasting, positive impacts on your company, for your valuable team members, and for their careers - contributing to a culture where everyone who is a part of your team can learn, grow, and thrive. And the best time to begin to do this is from day one.

Gen Z is leading the way in transforming how companies approach and prioritize DEI. In fact, in a 2020 Monster survey, 83% of Gen Z candidates said that a company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion plays an important role in their choosing an employer. By making DEI a critical component of your onboarding plan, you will foster a culture that values inclusivity, differing funds of knowledge, protecting and honoring those from diverse backgrounds - and, as an important bonus, you will optimize your onboarding process for employee retention.

5. Boost Engagement by Integrating Technology

No one wants to listen to a dry recitation of important and detailed information for hours at a time - and it is much harder to retain knowledge that isn’t engaging. That’s why it’s important to utilize a variety of technological tools to make the onboarding process one that is engaging and interactive for all new hires.

For digital natives like Gen Z, technology is an important component of their everyday lives, and that includes how they learn. This may mean that your onboarding plan includes many small microlearning bursts, three-dimensional training modules, in-person discussion groups, hands-on experiences, and more.

Develop a Strategic Onboarding Plan to Keep Your Team Connected & Strong

An effective onboarding plan with a new employee should stretch beyond just the first couple of days, or even weeks, of them working for your company and continue to resonate throughout their career with you. The process should be ongoing and mutually beneficial, with information that goes both ways, allowing your employee to share their goals and help set benchmarks for their progress.

By investing in their learning and development, you demonstrate to recent grads and young professionals that you are committed to them and their growth. This will help to give them the confidence to know that, although they are new to the workforce, they will be given the time, space, and professional support they need to become valuable, thriving members of your team.

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