How can companies better engage new employees to stay beyond their honeymoon period? Lee Xieli finds out from senior HR practitioners the tricks in implementing an effective onboarding process.

■ Ana C. Castellanos, Vice president, human resources, Oakwood Worldwide

The onboarding of a new hire is critical in many ways. When a candidate accepts an offer of employment, he or she has an expectation that the organisation will provide training, mentoring, the opportunity to assimilate into the corporate culture, and a comfortable and safe work environment. Many studies show that the effective onboarding of a new hire leads to better retention, performance and job satisfaction, among other significant results.

At Oakwood Worldwide, we have developed onboarding learning plans (OLPs) for key positions. These OLPs cover a new hire’s first 365 days of employment and includes a checklist that provides daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks that need to be completed in order for the new hire to fully understand and learn the position’s responsibilities. Through Oakwood’s Corporate University intranet site, Oakwood employees can access OLPs, which include training courses to be completed at specific intervals within the first year of employment, information on mentoring opportunities with co-workers, access to orientation materials, one-on-one training assignments with supervisors and other staff personnel, and various other items that, if completed, will assist the new hire in his or her professional success at Oakwood Worldwide.

■ Roselin Lee, Assistant vice-president, human resource, Tangs

Tangs’ onboarding process starts from the very beginning which is pre-offer. The pre-offer process is important as it sets the “right tone” for a new relationship between the potential employee and Tangs. This is the most important step to a “new beginning” for the new member.

The onboarding process must demonstrate the essence of Tangs’ vision, mission and values in order for the new member to embrace them. The new member must feel welcomed and acknowledges that he or she has made the right choice of employer.

This is very similar to the theory or process of how a couple prepares to welcome their new born baby – the “mental” preparation (job offer), all necessary items eg. crib, baby clothes (orientation and on-the-job induction programme) and parenting (ongoing coaching and developmental programme).

Tangs has a 2-day corporate orientation programme conducted once a month where all new staff are introduced to the vision, mission and values, HR policies, concept awareness, store tour, intranet, work etiquette and retail security. Staff will undergo on-the-job induction in their respective departments and a buddy will be attached to the new employee for a period of time until he or she is comfortable to be independent.

Once every two months, new staff are called back to an orientation with various heads of department (HOD) where the HODs will introduce their organisation structure and department function. This programme is to enable new staff to put a face to the names and better understand the core function of each department.

■ Linda Lim, Senior manager, human resources, Asia, Group RCI

The onboarding process in Group RCI is critical in helping to integrate, engage and retain our new hires. We usually plan for a group orientation. It starts off with welcoming the new hires with an ice-breaker game to know each other better and make friends so that they can feel at home from day one.

After that, the new hires will learn about the company’s vision, core values, business objectives and strategies from the head of organisation. Next, we facilitate dialogue sessions and create opportunities for the new hires to interact and network with the key players in each department. This helps them to have a good understanding of the role each department plays in executing our business strategies towards achieving common organisational objectives.

This helps in enhancing commitment as they see the connection between their individual goals and the entire organisation’s. Each individual is then given a customised one-month onboarding plan complete with weekly goals on what they must know and who/where/how they can get the information from to guide them within the time period. The whole process is designed with “Getting off to a good start leads to an upward spiral of successes in Group RCI!” in mind.