How to Write a Case Study that Attracts New Clients
You’ve hired a new employee. Now what?
How will you ensure they’re integrated and adequately welcomed into the company culture? The answer is simple, with a detailed and engaging employee onboarding process.
By using collaborative digital tools like Visme to introduce dedicated learning material to an onboarding process, new employees in any company will adjust quickly and thrive.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to build the most effective onboarding process, using Visme as a supporting tool for templates and design solutions. We’ll also cover the main reasons why it’s crucial to have an onboarding process in the first place.
Let’s get started.
First up, what is onboarding exactly?
Onboarding process is the set of activities involved in integrating and training new hires into the company culture and production processes. In a more holistic sense, it’s the most significant part of a new employee’s experience in their new job after recruitment.
The onboarding process typically begins before the new employee's first day on the job and continues through the first few weeks or months of employment.
The goals of an employee onboarding process are to help the new employee feel welcome and valued, to facilitate a smooth transition into their new role, and to set expectations for job performance and company culture. A well-designed onboarding process can improve employee retention, job satisfaction, and productivity while also reducing turnover and time-to-productivity.
According to a study by The Brandon Hall Group and shared by Sapling HR, "Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.
Companies with weak onboarding programs lose the confidence of their candidates and are more likely to lose these individuals in the first year."
What is it about onboarding that makes such a difference?
Here are a few reasons why onboarding is important:
1. Boosts Employee Engagement and Retention: When employees feel welcomed, supported, and integrated into the company culture, they are more likely to be engaged and committed to their work. This, in turn, leads to better retention rates, as employees feel valued and appreciated.
2. Increases Productivity: An effective onboarding process helps new employees understand their job duties, work processes, and expectations, which leads to a quicker ramp-up time and increased productivity. By providing clear guidelines and resources, new employees can avoid confusion and focus on their work.
3. Reduces Turnover Costs: High turnover costs can be a major expense for organizations. An onboarding process can help reduce turnover rates by providing a positive experience for new employees. More and more positive experiences means employees will likely stay with the company long-term, reducing the need to hire and train new employees.
4. Establishes Company Culture: An effective onboarding process can help new employees understand the company's values, mission, and culture. This understanding helps employees align their goals with the company's objectives, creating a sense of shared purpose and unity.
5. Improves Communication: The onboarding process allows new employees to meet and connect with their colleagues, managers, and other stakeholders. This helps build relationships, establish trust, and improve communication, all of which are essential for a productive and effective workplace.
Creating an engaging and successful onboarding experience is easy when your company has good company culture. Being honest, human and real improves communication and connection between managers and departments.
In some cases, the company culture is laid back and friendly, which doesn’t mean you should have informal onboarding processes. A formal onboarding process can be fun and exciting too.
Imprint your company culture in the way the onboarding works. Be relevant to how you communicate with new hires; the tone you set at the very beginning is what will mark a precedent for the rest of their time with your company. Might as well start on a positive note.
Onboarding processes differ from company to company, but a lot is the same.
We’ve compiled a list of steps in onboarding processes that apply to classic on-site workplaces and hybrid and remote teams. These are the basic overarching levels of an onboarding process; what changes from company to company are only the details.
How can Visme help with your onboarding process?
With Visme, you—and your team—can collaborate and create branded—and interactive— onboarding documents, guides, tutorials, presentations, flowchart infographics and more. All you need is a Visme Business or Enterprise account and a Work OS to integrate it with.
Let’s get started!
Onboarding doesn’t begin with the new hire’s first day; it starts with communication inside your existing team. Let your team know that a new teammate (or two or more) is coming on board soon; share their role and with whom they will be working.
This way, when the new hire starts on their first day, the team will welcome them more openly.
Starting a new job is much like starting at a new school. When you don’t know anyone, it can be uncomfortable and scary. Introductions are indispensable for many reasons.
First, it creates camaraderie right out of the bat. Good company culture is built on honest and open communication; show your new hires that the team they’re joining is there to back them up and help them get settled.
If you want to go all out, create a shareable and reusable document to include the new hire’s name, role, position in the team they’ll be joining, and maybe some extra info from their CV like previous jobs and hobbies.
You can gather key information from a resume template like the one below:
Once the new employee is added to the Work OS or communication platform like Slack, welcome them with a nice message and introduction. Encourage other team members to interact with this first contact.
You can reuse the template and deploy the dynamic fields feature to easily update an employee’s information throughout the document.
When the new employee starts their first day of work, they’ll have to go through a checklist of essential steps for integration into the company. A great way to lay out all the critical onboarding steps is to have a flowchart like below.
This flowchart can serve as a roadmap reference for the Human Resources team and the new employee.
Using the flowchart as a guide, set up a visual roadmap in the company’s Work OS (Monday, Asana, etc.), displaying the essential steps to take with checklists to ensure everything gets done. Give the new employee access to this resource first, as it’ll be the launching pad for everything else.
As the first point of contact, add a presentation that gives an overview of the process.
In the Work OS, separate the sections of the onboarding roadmap into easy-to-follow groups.
In the steps that include a document—handbook or guide—upload the relevant Visme document for easy access. There are two ways to add a guide made with Visme. The first is a downloadable PDF, and the second is our favorite, an interactive experience shared via a link.
For example, with an interactive employee handbook or training manual, you can include videos, hotspots for interactive data visualizations, hyperlinks to further documentation, and lots more.
Here’s an example of one of our interactive presentations about using our hotspot feature. You can create a training manual like this in Visme in no time. Plus, if you need to make changes or edit any content, it's automatically updated for everyone who uses it.
Furthermore, the employee will have the opportunity to download the guide as a PDF if they wish to do so.
Once created, the visual roadmap can be reused for all future new employees.
All you’d have to do is customize the information included in the roadmap to be relevant for the new employee. This will save time and effort for the HR department and other involved departments.
One of the most important onboarding steps is ensuring the new employee has access to all the tools and platforms needed to do their job. In the visual roadmap, create a checklist with all credentials for the new employee to check off as they log in to all platforms.
Add checklist text boxes to your onboarding material so it’s easy for both managers and employees to mark what was been done and see what still needs doing.
Create a document with all the logins and credentials and include it in the visual roadmap as a downloadable PDF. Always give the new employee the contact information for their onboarding buddy or HR team member to help them if they get stuck.
To add a new employee to a Visme workplace, add their email in the team dialog and they’ll receive an invite notification. This is exactly what Helene Dunbar and Amanda Aultman from the HouseCalls team did when they hired a new manager.
They got great results, “Visme gave the new manager a way to create things. She didn’t need to learn PhotoShop or InDesign, and could still design a banner or mailing graphic.” - Helene Dunbar
All new hires will need training sessions to learn to use the company’s software, tools, and processes. The most productive way to do this is with training manuals, both printable and interactive.
Interactive training manuals will give better results because you can include detailed videos, interactive flowcharts and step-by-step instructions that link to more detailed information if required.
For example, when a new employee is going through the steps to learn something and gets stuck, it should be easy to find a solution or a troubleshooting guide.
Creating training documentation is a job in itself inside your company. When you invest in creating branded and engaging training materials for your employee onboarding process flow, new employees will have a more positive experience.
Design SCORM and xAPI-supported e-learning courses for LMS platforms where employees can learn at their own pace.
When developing training guides, ask existing team members for tips on making them the best they can be.
Include printable worksheets in the training documentation for the new employee to take notes and test themselves on the processes.
The best part is that you can produce effective SCORM/xAPI export-ready training content in-house.
This means you don’t need an extensive skillset or outsource to a third-party company. Say hello to a process that not only saves you time and money but also gives your new hires the best start possible and sets them up for success.
In a State of the American Workplace study, Gallup discovered that only 12% of employees strongly agree that the company they work for has a good onboarding process. Such a low positive number means that 88% of companies are bad at onboarding.
How can you know if your onboarding process is helping your new employees feel welcome, appreciated and quickly integrated? You ask them.
There are two ways you can gather feedback about your onboarding process, with self-evaluation performance reviews or with a survey.
Self-evaluation reviews are an excellent opportunity to use a Visme template that you can customize for your brand and company culture communications. Add a survey to any document or project via our SurveyMonkey or Typeform integrations.
Use the answers to keep improving your onboarding process for new employees that join your company in any team or department. Add the results as customized data visualizations in annual reports or performance reports.
Also, when you create training material with Visme, you can track performance analytics for each piece, including who has viewed it, for how long and from where. This information can help prepare better training material every time.
Are you in need of onboarding documents or don’t know where to start creating them? Luckily, Visme has many document templates that will perfectly fit your visual roadmap and training sessions.
Here are the template categories in this section, click on one to navigate there:
An employee handbook is a document that includes all essential information for employees to know the story behind the company, the mission, values, and how important their role in the company is for the team.
These are the main talking points inside an employee handbook:
An employee benefits handbook includes all the information the new employee needs about the benefits they’ll receive under contract in your company. For example:
Training material is the compendium of all detailed knowledge an employee needs to know about a specific process, tool or flow. This includes training manuals, training plans, informative e-books, and visual infographics.
You can make them all with the Visme templates below.
A training manual is a detailed knowledge base of everything the new employee needs to know about a specific process, tool or flow.
You can create one extensive training manual separated into sections or make one manual per learning content. Visme has a large selection of training manuals for your team to use as needed.
The success of a training manual depends on the ease of follow-through. Use interactive tools like video, hotspots in flowcharts, links to further troubleshooting and figuring things out.
Training plans are the link between the onboarding material and performance management. In a training plan, the manager maps out a training journey for the employee and uses it to keep track of progress.
When using a training plan for onboarding and beyond, it helps identify and fill knowledge gaps for the employee, further improving their performance.
Include checklists like the one below to help with visual tracking inside the training plan.
Include informative e-books as part of the training material in our onboarding process. Some E-book ideas perfect for onboarding include:
There are many instances inside your training material where you’ll be teaching a new employee how to do something. For these occasions, use visually rich infographics—in your brand colors and fonts—to explain a process or step-by-step action.
Add an infographic to show how to turn on the coffee machines when opening the cafe in the morning. Create a flowchart infographic to help employees understand the emergency steps for fires and unexpected situations.
Use How-To infographics for all those processes that are difficult for employees to learn quickly. With visual infographics, they can learn the process in two ways, helping with retention.
Employees will need ID cards for use inside and outside the office.
With Visme, you can create branded ID cards with photos and information for every employee, current and new. An ID card can be a simple card on a lanyard or an access card to open doors to different office areas.
Most ID and ID key card printers give an option to send your custom design. You can create this design easily with Visme. All you need to do is have a base template on which you can then simply change the photo, name and credentials for new employees.
Here’s a collection of some of our ID card templates.
Onboarding doesn’t stop on the first day of your employee’s new position; it continues for weeks or a few months. Not until every critical process has been gone through can you say that onboarding is over. In many cases, onboarding and probational periods intersect.
Employees with a positive onboarding experience during their probation period will likely exceed expectations for their role. Therefore, they become a valuable addition to the company.
Here are some of our favorite productivity and project management templates for ongoing teamwork in your company and organization. Train new employees on using the templates of these documents early on; that way, when they have to use them, it’ll be an easy start.
Here are the template categories in this section. Click on one to navigate there:
Performance reviews are important moments of growth for teams and organizations. The thing is, though, that they can backfire when done wrong.
Company culture and values are the basis of a positive performance review. Add an engaging design that brings out the good things in the person being reviewed instead of pinpointing faults.
Use performance reviews throughout probation periods and beyond. Try self-reviews and peer reviews for a more holistic view of the issues that need resolving. Here’s a collection of some of our performance reviews for individuals and teams.
Another type of document your business will need is the creative brief. This document is used for explaining what you require from a designer, developer, illustrator or the like. These branded templates inside your Visme dashboard will make all creative processes run smoothly.
Use the Visme Brand Wizard to generate a set of base templates in your colors and fonts, which you can then customize for any project, including creative briefs.
Many businesses and brands use white papers as part of their content marketing strategies. If you have been considering using this resource for your company, Visme also has many options for creating your own white paper designs.
When creating a white paper (or any document) with Visme, use the integrated collaboration features to ensure everyone involved has access to the project. Leave each other comments with suggestions and edit requirements.
Visme not only supports your improved employee onboarding processes, it also helps you create visual content for every communication level of your business.
Apart from giving you all the tools to develop and design engaging content for employee onboarding processes, you also have the opportunity to collaboratively create training material with your team.
Your Work OS isn’t complete without a Visme account. Onboard, train and retain all employees with the wide gamut of options inside Visme.
Start by creating your first branded training manual with one of our pre-designed templates. Then move on to all other types of visual content to run your business the right way.
Here’s to happier employees and less turnover in your business!
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About the Author
Orana is a multi-faceted creative. She is a content writer, artist, and designer. She travels the world with her family and is currently in Istanbul. Find out more about her work at oranavelarde.com