Better onboarding reduces time-to-productivity. Providing adequate time to effectively integrate into the culture, learn the role, and understand how the position fits into the bigger picture supports new hire engagement and long-term retention.
Measuring the number of days until a new hire produces at the expected level for their role indicates onboarding success. Understanding your company’s benchmarking results helps determine whether your onboarding process requires improvement. Partnering with a staffing agency strengthens the onboarding process for long-term success.
How Onboarding Impacts New Hire Productivity and Engagement
The onboarding process impacts time-to-productivity. According to the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), the global authority on benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management, 35 days is the median time companies take to bring new hires up to productivity standards. The fastest organizations take 25 days or fewer, while the slowest take 50 days or more.
Drawn-out onboarding can lead to new hire boredom, increased mistakes, and feelings of inadequacy. Common results include elevated stress, job dissatisfaction, and turnover.
Conversely, onboarding too quickly can result in feelings of overwhelm. Overworked new hires often make increased mistakes and decide to quit. Restarting the recruitment process elevates hiring, onboarding, and training costs.
What Does Time-to-Productivity Mean—and Why Does It Matter?
Your company’s ideal number of days for onboarding depends on the following factors:
- Your industry, which impacts the type of talent needed
- Degree to which employees require institutional knowledge
- Employee background, role, and function
- Budgets and staffing levels
- Your company’s talent management strategy
Metrics such as employee engagement, performance ratings, and retention rates help determine which onboarding areas require improvement. For instance, if onboarding takes 2 weeks and many new hires quit within the first year, the process should be longer.
5 Ways to Optimize Onboarding for Faster Time-to-Productivity
These tips help strengthen onboarding and optimize time-to-productivity:
- Proactively onboard: Integrate onboarding with your workforce planning strategy to understand the volume of new hires and the type of onboarding required.
- Formalize onboarding: Create role-specific onboarding that includes timelines, milestones, assigned roles, and accountabilities. Include stakeholder training and support materials. Offer development programming in diverse formats to support learning preferences. Monitor progress and intervene when needed.
- Include informal onboarding approaches: Match each new hire with a mentor or buddy for networking. Offer diverse learning paths for building institutional knowledge.
- Apply learning technologies: Provide formal and informal programming. Create and maintain a development timeline, training schedules, and accountabilities. Offer diverse self-service capabilities to customize the onboarding journey. Build online learning communities for employees to connect, share knowledge, and receive guidance.
- Continually improve onboarding: Capture key learner data such as usage statistics and the average course completion time to uncover and resolve pain points. Conduct stakeholder surveys and interviews to determine what works well, what could be better, and specific suggestions for improvement. Document the information and implement relevant ideas.
Want to Improve Your Onboarding Process?
Work with HireCall to improve your onboarding process for better time-to-productivity. Learn more today.
