Onboarding and offboarding for beginners: start off on the right foot!

Multiple studies have shown that quality onboarding and offboarding can increase goodwill, retention and productivity.

Retain employees with effective onboarding

Your organization's onboarding process is the first thing a new employee learns about you — it can set the tone for the new hire's entire experience with your company.

According to Gallup's State of the American Workplace study, "employees make judgments and form opinions about their organization every single day — from the first day. Initial impressions matter." In fact, those who feel their onboarding experience was less than optimal feel and show less engagement with their employers.

Effective onboarding increases productivity and retention

Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by an astonishing 82% and productivity by more than 70%. Companies with weak onboarding programs,lose the confidence of their candidates and are more likely to lose these individuals in the first year.

Paying close attention to the onboarding experience has the potential to give your organization a competitive edge.

Offboarding offersw a safe, clean exit and increased goodwill

Often neglected by organizations, careful and smooth offboarding is crucial for keeping your organization and its data safe, encouraging your current employees' productivity and fostering goodwill with the exiting employee.

Effective, respectful offboarding helps your organization's reputation

Prospective hires search review sites to gain information on how a company operates and view to comments from former employees. Those with an unpleasant experience could be more likely to leave a bad review, and those with solid experiences are more likely to feel goodwill toward their former employer -- which will be reflect in reviews and even in their decisions later down the road to recommend your organization as a good place to work or to return.

Effective offboarding is crucial for security

A shocking 50% of ex-employees still have access to corporate applications after leaving an organization. And these failures to deprovision have caused a data breach at 20% of companies surveyed. A hasty and neglected offboarding process also affects the bottom line, not only in the risk of costly breach cleanup but also in wasted spending through unused application licenses.

How do I onboard and offboard employees effectively?

Our beginner's guide to onboarding and offboarding offers workflows, tools and checklists even for those employees who are onboarding or offboarding entirely remotely.