Wake up and smell the ROI : 17 quotes about employee onboarding
It is an unfortunate truth that businesses invest significant amounts of time and money in recruiting and hiring new staff only to see many of them walk out the door within the first 12 months.
In recent years, a number of well known organisations have transformed their onboarding in a bid to wage a war on turnover. Effective onboarding has been proven to reduce turnover with companies experiencing as much as 50% increase in new-hire retention.
And if this doesn’t convince you, read what these business leaders have to say about making onboarding a priority in their business…
1. Lori Goler
“ If we have 10,000 people who work at Facebook, you would have 10,000 people tell you that they own the culture. We hire people who are like that. We express it to them during the hiring process and the recruiting process. We talk about it on their first day and their first week.”
2. Sarah Wetzel
“I truly believe that onboarding is an art. Each new employee brings with them a potential to achieve and succeed. To lose the energy of a new hire through poor onboarding is an opportunity lost.”
3. Laszlo Bock
“At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires."
4. Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh
“The importance of onboarding is significantly increased these days since the average turnover at work is less than four years and lifetime employment strategies are out of date.”
5. Cheryl Hughey
“We want to focus on creating a memorable experience for the new hire in the first year rather than processing them in the first few weeks.”
6. Laurent Reich
“Our objective...is to take our onboarding practices to the next level and to give each and every employee, from the moment they arrive, the keys to succeed in full alignment with company values such as multiculturalism, diversity and inclusion.”
7. Reid Hoffman
“Pay attention to your culture and your hires from the very beginning."
8. Ken Chenault
“Every new senior vice president goes through an onboarding process. It’s very important not only that we impart the strategies and business objectives of the company but also that they understand our culture and our leadership requirements. I always meet with them for several hours and have dinner with them. One of the most constructive parts of the session is a no-holds-barred Q&A.”
9. Bill Conaty
“Oftentimes, the lack of a robust . . . assimilation process leaves the new employee confused and disoriented.”
10. John Chambers
“We focus first on the people and how we incorporate them into our company, and then we focus on how to drive the business."
11. Michael Watkins
“Employee orientation centers around and exists to help the individual employee, but it is the company that ultimately reaps the benefits of this practice.”
12. James Dimon
“We reinforce our culture every chance we get. Our Business Principles are at the forefront of everything we do, and we need to make these principles part of every major conversation at the company – from the hiring, onboarding and training of new recruits to town halls and management meetings to how we reward and incentivize our people.”
13. David Green
“Analytics are increasingly being used to help improve employee experience and well being through personalizing services such as onboarding and learning.“
14. Mark Stein and Lilleth Christiansen
“Beyond the challenges of recruitment and retention, productivity is perhaps the most important reason onboarding has taken on such immense strategic relevance for progressive firms.”
15. Peter Wilson
“The best place to start is with recruitment selection and induction procedures; where an employee’s experience with an organisation begins. Immersion in the organisation’s values, with clear examples of acceptable behaviours, is critical. Having leaders form part of these onboarding processes, with examples of what a working life means in the company, sets a strong and self-reinforcing standard for later ethical challenges that are encountered.”
16. Michael Watkins
“..the biggest reason why people fail or underperform has to do with the culture and politics of the organisation..so I focus a lot on basically three things: how we are going to help this person adapt to the new culture; how are we going to connect them to the right people and help them form the right relationships; and how are we going to be sure that we really align expectations in every direction so that they’re set up for success…”
17. Tawni Cranz
".. Once you get in, then you experience the culture and marinate in it. But now we have these orientation meetings with 10 people and it’s highly likely that six of them are new. If six of them are new, you need to do something to accelerate that feeling of marinating in the culture."
Effective onboarding has a measurable Return on Investment (ROI); not only through decreased turnover costs but by increasing employee productivity and improving customer satisfaction. Furthermore, studies have shown that companies that invest in onboarding experience 2.5 times the revenue growth and 1.9 times the profit margin of companies that don’t.
For more on the ROI of Onboarding, download our whitepaper “The Business Case for an Employee Onboarding System“
