3 Things Your Onboarding Program Should Accomplish

In Customer Success roles at SaaS companies, so much attention is paid to customer onboarding, however many of these companies (especially early-ish stage startups) don’t pay enough attention to their employee onboarding program. This is unfortunate because onboarding is essential to employee retention, in fact having good onboarding has been found to increase 3 year retention rates by 69% (source). There are so many reasons onboarding is an important investment, this blog by Lessonly does a great job of overviewing them if you need to be sold.

But you’re probably reading this blog to learn about what onboarding should accomplish. There are three core outcomes of an onboarding program that we think should be integrated into your strategy.

1. Welcomes & Excites. This has been referred to as having new hires “drink the koolaid”. This is the opportunity for your company to share your excitement with having your new hire(s) on board, and to share your visions, collective goals, and review your culture and values to set their experience expectations. Giving your new hire some company swag won’t hurt here either.

2. Builds Product Engagement. While your company is many things, your product is at its core. Everyone should have a basic understanding of what your product is and how it works. This builds a connection to the company, better informed team, and more excitement to the wonderful things your product does across all areas of the business. This also gives everyone an understanding of your customers’ day to day CX with your company so each person can better understand their perspective and how their roles interprets into that.

3. Provides checkpoints and timelines. Depending on your organization onboarding may be 30, 60, 90 or 365 days. There should be general milestones and checkpoints for everyone after the initial onboarding training, so have functional leaders develop a ramp-up plan and goals for the time period. Setting a company wide onboarding check-in cadence will help ensure consistency.

Do you have an onboarding program at your company? Have you worked with a company that did something awesome to welcome and engage with you? We’d love to hear in the comments!