Onboarding helps new employees fit into your culture and integrate into the work environment. The responsibility for that falls onto a good Onboarding strategy.

A great addition to your strategy is using online tools.

Different tools can help make your onboarding strategy more effective and run smoother for employees who implement it. Further, you’ll find nine examples of such software. But before we get to that, let’s see why new employees need onboarding.

The Importance of Good Onboarding for New Employees

Imagine it’s your first day of work. You get in at 10, go right to the reception desk, and say you’re the new employee. Does the reception worker know who should be expecting you?

Then, you’re finally at your desk. Now, where should you start? Do you have a new work email, your first tasks, what types of collaboration tools does the company use?

New employees have dozens of questions — queue in onboarding.

• Onboarding helps overcome a company’s learning curve. You wouldn’t want to be surprised at every turn and task on a new job in your first few weeks, right? Employees save a lot of valuable time if they know all the particulars of their position from the get-go.
• Understand company expectations and challenges. What are the deliverables of a particular job? How should it be done? Delivering quality work comes from knowing your KPIs and getting clear instructions in tasks.
• Learn about the company culture and communication. What’s the company’s structure, and who can you talk to if any questions or issues arise. A new employee shouldn’t distract just any workers from their tasks or breaks but know exactly who to turn to for help.
• Understand how to navigate through workflows. When your task or part of it is complete, who do you pass it on to? Knowing how you fit into a workflow helps with efficiency and quality.
• Ensure that you don’t scare away new hires. What if the reception worker didn’t know about you — the new employee? Or if your work desk wasn’t ready, and you wasted all day trying to find your boss, your new work email, or your first task? Streamlined onboarding helps upkeep a good impression of a company.

Top Nine Tools for Onboarding Your Next Employee

Sounds like onboarding is a pretty necessary process for any company that benefits new employees and the company alike. Now, let’s get right to the tools that can help make it a more streamlined and efficient process.

1. ProofHub: Best for Project Management

Even in a small company, chances are that several people will be involved in the onboarding process. This means you have a workflow, a set of tasks, a schedule, and documentation to take care of — email communication is not enough to keep everything in order.

What should be enough is an all-in-one project manager like Proof Hub that has features for planning, managing, and storing the documentation for your onboarding strategy. You’ll also get access to reporting features that can help analyze and improve your strategy.

Better yet, you can use it to manage all projects and processes in your company.

Features

• User dashboard. It shows tasks, upcoming events, and projects in progress, giving you a scope of your current work.
• Table and kanban board view for tasks. Depending on what’s more convenient for you, view all tasks as a table with details or as cards on a board grouped by status.
• Gantt charts. This feature helps you visualize and piece together a project, ensure it has no logical gaps, adjust the plan according to changes, and keep up with the deadlines.
• Calendar. It shows all your current tasks and events. You can also integrate it with other calendars to make sure there’s no overlap in your schedule.
• File manager. You can store and alter text documents, images, and PDF files.
• Access control. You can decide how much access each user has to the app.
• Timesheets. You can track time spent doing a task manually or using a timer.
• Reports. You can get project reports to visualize your progress.

Price

• Free trial — 14 days
• Essentials — $45/month for 40 projects and 15GB of storage
• Ultimate control — $89/month for unlimited projects, 100GB of storage, and added features

Looking for a solution to make onboarding easier for your teams and clients? Sign up for ProofHub today and take your onboarding process to the next level.

2. Slack: Best for Team Communication

Online communication is essential in many aspects. It helps save time on quick questions and small requests because you don’t get up and distract a coworker at an inconvenient time. It’s also key to remote work.

Slack enables business communication for teams.

Features

• Channels. This feature helps organize communication by projects, departments, and purpose.
• Direct messaging. While channels work as group chats, you message users directly and keep your exchange private.
• Voice and video calls. Slack allows you to call other users in private messages.
• App integrations. Slack integrates with well over 2K apps, including cloud storage, developer, and sales tools.

Price

• Free limited use
• Pro — $6.67/month for entire message history and group calls, among other benefits
• Business+ — $12.50/month for advanced identity management, among other benefits
• Enterprise Grid — on demand

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3. Mailbird: Best for Managing Emails

A lot of communication services will claim they can fully substitute email. But how do you contact prospective employees with offer details, and where do you get notifications from your project management tool? Exactly, email.

Mailbird is an email management tool that supports virtually any email provider and allows you to unify several email accounts for more effortless operations.

Features

• Unified inbox. View and manage emails from different providers in one inbox with color tags for clarity.
• Email tracking. Find out whether your emails are opened, when, and by whom (for multiple CCs).
• Speed reader. Get on with reading your correspondence faster and improve your speed.
• Snooze. Send emails for a nap until it’s a more convenient time to deal with them.
• Unified calendar. View calendars from different email accounts in one interface.
• Contact manager. Keep all your contacts and information about them in one place.
• Attachment search. View all your attachments or search through them with simple requests.
• App integrations. Boost your productivity with more than thirty applications, including Slack and Google Workspace.

Price

• Personal — $3.25/Month
• Business — $4.92/Month
• One time Payment — $79

4. Google Calendar: Best for Syncing Timelines

Calendars are still the best tool to keep up with your scheduled meetings and events. Better yet, they went online.

Features

• Month/week/day view. Check out your agenda in more detail or see the bigger picture with different layouts.
• Meeting scheduling. Send meeting requests to specific people.
• Automatically adding emailed events from Gmail. Keep up with the dates in your emails.
• Access from any device. Keep up with your schedule anywhere, even if you’re on the go.

Price

Free

5. Google Meet: Best for Team Meetings

If your company is remote, a video conferencing tool is a must for onboarding. Face-to-face communication can clear up more questions than guides and chat messages.

Features

• Call encryption. Calls in Meet are safe from third-party interruption.
• Live streams for up to 100K users. You can give talks to all new staff members at the same time.
• 1-on-1 and group (up to 250 people) video calls. Hold workshops and meetings.
• Cross-platform device support. Call from any device, be it a laptop or a mobile.
• Screen sharing. Give visual examples from your screen when describing something or answering questions.

Price

Free

6. Toggle Track: Best for Time Management

One of the ways to measure effectiveness is recording how much time employees spend on specific tasks. Time tracking is often viewed as something negative. However, it allows identifying seemingly easy tasks that take up too much time — were they lacking resources or clarity in instructions?

Tracking can also show if someone is overworked or lacking in tasks. Boredom at work and stress can both cause burnout.

Features

• Team dashboard. Shows how much time all team members logged in, so you can see their working capacity.
• Reporting. However detailed you want the reports to be, you can get them scheduled and sent to your email.
• Cross-platform device access. Toggle Track works on any device, so users can track time in any circumstance.

Price

• Free — for up to five users
• Starter — $9/month per user for small teams
• Premium — $18/month per user for growing teams
• Enterprise — on-demand, for big and complex organizations

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7. Small Improvements: Best for Managing Goals

Feedback is an essential communication tool — from you to employees about their work and from employees to you about how the company is faring.

Features

• Employee feedback. Send feedback to employees; any coworker can contribute to it.
• Performance reviews. Send performance questionnaires to employees and fill them in yourself — compare your thoughts.
• Pulse surveys. Send surveys to the team and find out what they think about different aspects of your company.
• Objective tracking. Define objectives and see if you’ve reached them

Price

• Performance Starter Pack — $5/month per user
• Feedback and Performance Suite — $7/month per user

8. Donuts: Best for Team Connection

Positive communication within the team affects overall performance. Donuts is a Slack extension that helps connect teammates, especially if you’re all working remotely.

Features

• Intros. Provides templates to help new employees introduce themselves.
• Watercooler topic generation. A virtual watercooler channel in Slack will help coworkers with topic prompts.

Price

• Free for 12 intros and 12 watercooler topics
• Standard — $49/month for up to 24 users
• Premium — $99/month for up to 49 users

9. BambooHR: Best for HR Onboarding

Most departments have software that’s specific to their work, and so does the HR department. BambooHR helps organize HR work and manage all employee contacts.

Features

• Employee records. Keep personal information about coworkers like their birth date or home address and contact numbers for emergency cases.
• Reporting and analytics. If you need to analyze any data stored in and managed by BambooHR, you can generate detailed reports about it.
• Onboarding tasks. Make the onboarding process interactive and straightforward for new employees by preparing step-by-step tasks.
• Onboarding templates. Customize the onboarding experience based on role and department.
• Performance management. This feature helps encourage objective performance evaluation and a continuous rather than an annual review.

Price

• Essentials — $4.95/month per employee for basic features
• Advantage — $8.25/month per employee for advanced features, such as Onboarding

5 Things to Do After an Employee Onboarding

A common mistake that most companies make is that once they’ve onboarded an employee they assume that things should be fine. But that’s a recipe for short term turn over if your new employee feels left in the cold once they’ve signed their contract.

Onboarding should start right from the offer and continue on for some time after hiring to make sure new employees fit in comfortably. Here’s what you can do to improve the after.

1. Give Your Employee an Onboarding Buddy

Match new employees with coworkers who can educate them in day-to-day activities, help meet the rest of the team, and provide timely feedback on their tasks. To ensure things go smoothly ensure that onboarding buddies are in the same department as new employees.

For example if you’ve onboarded a new sales representative provide them with an onboarding buddy with a sales position.

Onboarding buddies help newcomers feel connected with the workplace and integrate more smoothly. They are the best welcome package you could offer because unlike an email or a guide they have a human being who’s already integrated into the company culture they can connect or talk with in real time.

2. Set Up a Follow-Up Meeting

People need ongoing support to feel welcomed. So arrange monthly follow-up meetings to find out how the new workers are integrating into the work environment for the first 3-months of their contract. Make sure these meetings are informal so they don’t feel the need to brush off your questions with generic replies.

3. Send an Anonymous Survey

Surveys are a tried and tested method of collecting information. Especially when they’re anonymous — people feel more inclined to share. Send surveys to gauge how your onboarding strategy is performing. For example, if new employees got all the info they needed or whether they’re getting along with the onboarding buddies.

4. Check-in with their Supervisors

Talk to linear managers and onboarding buddies to determine how their charges are performing and integrating into the work environment. Get honest feedback about how well they’ve integrated into not only not only their role but your company culture.

5. Review & Fine Tune the Process

No onboarding process is perfect. There’s always room for improvement so once you’ve finished any onboarding process be sure to collect performance data, report, surveys, and review.

Create quarterly reports and analyze them to see how effective your onboarding strategy and organizational flow is, don’t forget you can also ask current and new employees to chime in on the process.

Get consolidated and up-to-date information about all your team members, clients and projects in one spot. Switch to ProofHub Today.

Conclusion

With the changes in the workspace keeping new employees can become a challenge, you want to ensure that the first impression they have of your company is a good one that lasts.

With the right digital toolset can always make your work easier and outcomes more productive. You can set up email and chat communication, get your tasks into a project management tool like ProofHub, and collect all possible data throughout the onboarding process.

But most importantly, talk to newcomers and make sure they feel connected to your company.

About Author

Victoria is a Content Marketer at Mailbird, an award winning email management app that allows you to save time managing multiple accounts. Victoria specialises in all things digital and content marketing. When she’s not experimenting with new content, she’s on a podcast or recording on YouTube.

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9 Tools to Help You Better Onboard Your Employees was originally published in ProofHub Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.