Onboarding is a crucial time for both employees and the companies that hire them. As your new hire’s first introduction into your organization, it’s important that their onboarding process — and the onboarding documents you provide — is informative, cohesive, and engaging.
A strong onboarding process can increase new hire retention by 82% and improve productivity by 70%. Here, we’ll cover why onboarding documents for new hires are important to the onboarding process, as well as which onboarding documents are essential for a comprehensive onboarding experience.
The Importance of Onboarding Documents
Onboarding documents provide the necessary information required for employees to gain a well-rounded understanding of your company culture, rules and expectations, and overall direction for their new role. When done well, onboarding documents serve as guideposts during the initial weeks of a new hire’s experience, and can be used as reference points throughout their time at your company.
Additionally, onboarding documents provide documentation for HR teams to easily track the training employees have received, as well as reference during performance reviews, 1-on-1 meetings, or in the event of a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP).
8 Onboarding Documents For a Comprehensive Experience
With an average of 41 administrative tasks assigned to incoming employees, there’s seemingly no limit to the number of onboarding documents for new hires. Yet, there are some essential onboarding documents that simply need to be included in your onboarding process in order to adequately prepare your new employees. These 8 onboarding documents will equip employees with the tools and information they need to thrive in their new role.
Onboarding Checklist
A useful tool for both employees and the HR teams conducting the onboarding process, onboarding checklists provide a clear roadmap of what’s to come as well as the tasks needed to complete.
Onboarding checklists help to ensure that your onboarding process is consistent for every new hire, bringing a uniform approach to guarantee every new hire is provided the same onboarding documents and tools to start their journey.
Omni’s free employee onboarding checklist offers 3 checklists, one for new hires, one for HR teams, and one for managers, helping each stakeholder in the onboarding process to stay on track with actionable steps, best practices, and tools to offer a memorable onboarding experience.
Organizational Chart
Organization charts — or org charts — are a great tool among onboarding documents to orient new hires to the structure of your company and their respective team. Not only does this help new hires get acquainted with their colleagues, making it easier to learn new names and faces, but brings clarity when questions of who to report to or ask about certain tasks arise.
Creating a static org chart presents its challenges, as roles and employees change within your organization, an org chart created in say, a PDF form, will require consistent updates and runs the risk of being out of date.
Digital org charts, such as Omni’s automated company directory, helps organizations easily stay up to date as things shift within your growing organization. Built in one centralized location, HR teams needn’t worry about getting the latest version of an organizational chart out to their employees, as updates made will automatically be available to employees. Whatsmore, digital org charts allow for a wide range of information to be available, such as email and Slack contacts, employee time and attendance, and even important dates such as birthdays and work anniversaries for added company culture and engagement.
Try out Omni for a free 14-day trial to see for yourself!
Company Code of Conduct
Your company code of conduct outlines the behaviors and actions that are permissible within your company. These onboarding documents help give employees a sense of what is expected (as well as what to avoid) during their tenure at your company. Codes of conduct also help mitigate any misunderstandings or potential behavioral issues before they arise among employees.
To get your started, here’s a list of information you should include in your company code of conduct:
- workplace behavior
- company values and mission
- dress code
- policies regarding conflicts of interest
- confidentiality
- use of company resources
- industry compliance and regulations
- disciplinary actions
Brand Guidelines
Among onboarding documents, this one may not seem applicable to every department. Brand guidelines may seem more suited for the marketing department than, say, engineering or legal, but brand guidelines can act as a north star to further convey your company’s mission and values. While every department may not directly reference your brand guidelines on a regular basis, these onboarding documents bring a sense of cohesion to your organization. Ensuring each employee and new hire understands the tone and purpose behind your messaging creates a united culture that will benefit your company.
Your brand guidelines should contain the following elements:
- Brand proposition – what is the goal of your company, and what value do you bring to your customers?
- Verbal identity and brand voice – how do you communicate with your customers? What is the feeling and persona your company embodies?
- Core values – what are the guiding principles of your company?
- Logo
- Typefaces
- Color palette
Benefits and Compensation
Employee benefits are a huge driver for attracting and retaining talent, so once you have hired an employee it’s equally important to make their benefits and compensation information readily available to them. Onboarding documents should include clear and easily referenced benefits information such as time off policies, healthcare information, bonus schedules (if applicable), and wellness programs.
Making this information available to your employees not only reduces the burden on HR teams, ending the need for HR to answer questions around employee time off requests and other benefit concerns. It also helps drive home the value your organization adds to employees by virtue of working there.
Benefits administration is a time-consuming process for HR, yet brings immense value to employees. Incorporating an automated benefits management system such as leave management can free up HR and management’s time as well as streamline benefits access for employees. Omni’s all-in-one HR platform allows employees to easily and quickly access their benefits while enabling HR teams to manage and oversee employee benefit and compensation practices like payroll in one centralized location.
Try out Omni for a free 14-day trial to see for yourself!
Looking for additional help in your benefits management? Download Omni’s free Employee Time-off Request Form for an easy to use manual system to help track time off requests.
Employee Handbook
As an integral component of a successful onboarding program with comprehensive onboarding documents, employee handbooks provide essential information and direction to welcome new hires, and serve as an easy-to-reference guide throughout the employee lifecycle.
Employee handbooks are a great way to compile various onboarding documents, from codes of conduct to benefit information, into one central document for easy reference and administration.
Omni’s Ultimate Employee Handbook Template offers a comprehensive overview of what to include in your employee handbook and suggested slides to communicate your employee culture and company values, along with best practices and tips for how to effectively write your handbook and even real-life examples and graphics to inspire your creative process.
Training and Development Materials
Just because you hired someone with a strong skill set doesn’t mean they won’t require training to get acquainted with their role. Whether it be training materials for your company software or development in their respective field, offering onboarding documents that support a new hire training plan promotes continual growth that is essential to their success.
Some common training and development materials to consider offering are:
- presentations
- procedure documents
- handouts and manuals
- training videos
- activity sheets or exercises
- courses
- forms and self-assessments
OKRs
Objectives and key results (OKRs), are a goal-setting framework touted by some of the biggest companies (notably in tech), including Google. OKRs are a simple and effective way to get an entire organization on the same page, and work towards achieving a common set of objectives. OKRs are specifically designed to focus efforts, and generate collective goal achievements so organizations can effectively advance to their most important objectives.
For a roadmap on how to effectively set and track OKRs, read our go-to guide for OKR goal setting, complete with specific examples and formulas for you to follow.
Transform Your Onboarding Experience
The onboarding process can make or break your employee experience. In addition to offering comprehensive onboarding documents for your employees, it’s imperative that you have a consistent and structured onboarding process.
Omni’s fully automated platform is the go-to solution for modern, growing businesses seeking a reliable employee onboarding system. By automating manual onboarding tasks, Omni saves you time and effort, allowing you to focus on more strategic aspects of your business.
With Omni, you can easily collect and manage all the necessary onboarding documents in one secure location, eliminating the hassle of sifting through paperwork. But it doesn’t stop there — Omni goes the extra mile by enabling you to fully personalize the onboarding experience. With our customer care supported implementation process, you can tap into increased engagement levels for your new hires, setting the stage for their long-term success within your organization while receiving world-class support from our attentive support team.
Book a demo with our team today to learn how Omni can help transform your onboarding experience.
For additional tools to support your new hire experience, check out some of our free onboarding documents for new hires such as The Comprehensive 30-60-90 Day Plan or our Onboarding Kit for Company Culture.
