Whether you’re welcoming a senior executive or a class of interns, onboarding is crucial for setting new team members up for success. In fact, effective onboarding can improve employee retention and productivity by 52 percent percent, respectively, according to the Society for Human (SHRM).

However, between tasks like managing membership renewal and completing grant applications, onboarding practices can fall by the wayside. That’s why organizing and standardizing your practices now is valuable for new hires down the line.

In this guide, we’ll cover easy tips for making onboarding effective, efficient, and energizing for new hires. As we review these tips, keep your association’s unique recruiting goals and needs in mind. Let’s dive in!

Define Onboarding Objectives

Each association is unique in terms of size and niche, which both impact onboarding. A great onboarding experience should be structured to align with your resources, company culture, and long-term growth goals.

Set a strong foundation for your onboarding overhaul by answering these questions:

• What materials will we supply during onboarding? What will the new hire be expected to bring?
• How are existing employees expected to participate in the onboarding process?
• When should the new employee be fully integrated into our workflow and independently functional?
• How can we support new hires while they adjust to our company culture?
• What feedback mechanisms will be in place to gather insights from new hires?
• How will we measure the effectiveness of our onboarding process?

In addition to these general questions, each department should come up with items specific to the new hire’s role. For instance, a fundraising coordinator will have different daily tasks than a recruiter, so onboarding should look different for the two roles.

Once you have set your goals, add them to an internal onboarding guide so everyone is on the same page about expectations. Also, establish how often you’ll revisit these goals so they remain aligned with your association as it evolves.

Create an Onboarding Timeline

Like any other association-wide effort, all departments must share a general timeline to stay productive. A standard schedule helps teams set their workflows appropriately so new hires reach the required benchmarks without feeling overwhelmed.

Take a look at this hypothetical onboarding timeline for an association:

• Week 1: introductions. By the end of the first week, new hires should have submitted all of their paperwork, attended a staff welcome lunch, and taken a strengths test with their manager.
• Week 2: partial integration. By the end of Week 2, new hires should have completed all role-specific training, shadowed team members, and started individual work (with manager support).
• Week 3: full integration. By the end of Week 3, new hires should have started working independently, attended a one-on-one meeting with their manager to discuss how training is progressing, and been introduced to staff in other departments.

After you’ve created the first iteration of your onboarding schedule, share it with relevant staff members like managers and department heads so they can make adjustments and provide additional context for their departments. Then, present the schedule to new hires in their onboarding packet.

Assign New Hires a Mentor

Even the most organized onboarding processes on paper can feel unwieldy in practice. Proactively provide mentors who new hires can rely on for guidance, helping them feel more comfortable with onboarding. Plus, building relationships early can promote employee engagement, according to Double the Donation. Here are some tips as you put your mentorship program into place:

• Provide a small activities budget. Get new hires excited for mentorship sessions by providing a stipend for meals and drinks.
• Allocate time appropriately. For each time block, the mentor should plan on presenting or talking for only half the time, leaving ample time for the mentee to ask questions.
• Take a relaxed approach. Mentorship should feel more casual than formal meetings, allowing mentee-mentor pairs to form strong relationships.

Depending on your association’s size, assign a mentor to each new hire or one mentor to manage a group of hires. If possible, allocate mentors based on shared characteristics. For example, if you learned using recruitment data that a new hire and mentor graduated from the same college, you might pair them together.

Collect Feedback

Just as you would send out post-event surveys to attendees, collect feedback from your new hires about onboarding. After all, nobody understands the strengths and weaknesses of your onboarding process like those who have just gone through it. Asking for feedback gives you helpful insights for improvement and shows that you value new hires’ opinions.

Here are some ways you can encourage new hires to provide feedback:

• Ask about it in one-on-one manager meetings. Ensure managers make collecting feedback a priority after onboarding has concluded. Ideally, one-on-one meetings are low-stakes check-ins, and this atmosphere might encourage the new hire to be more candid.
• Streamline the process of submitting feedback. Though collecting as much feedback as possible is tempting, your new hires are less likely to follow through if they need to fill out a long, tedious form. Streamline your feedback form so it only takes a few minutes to complete.
• Offer incentives. Make providing feedback fun by offering small rewards, such as free lunch for employees who fill out the feedback form.

Once you’ve collected the responses, store pertinent information in your database so you can optimize your future talent acquisition and development efforts.

Minimize Stress, Maximize Success

Onboarding is stressful for everyone involved. However, by implementing these tips, you can continually shape your onboarding practices until you find a seamless blend of strategies for your association.