Essential Guide to Employee Onboarding Success

The Essential Guide to
EMPLOYEE
ONBOARDING
SUCCESS
Build better connected, more engaged and higher performing teams.
SAPLING Delivering Employee Onboarding Success
SHARETHE GUIDE!

SAPLING
This Guide is for HR, People leaders and anyone looking to take their employee success to the next level.
Our Essential Guide to Employee Onboarding Success is a quick but detailed read on how you can use Employee
Onboarding to Amplify your Employee Experience.
Here’s what you’ll learn….
EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING
FOR A NEW GENERATION
WHY INVEST IN ‘EX’?WHAT IS ‘EX’? WHY ONBOARDING? BUILDVS BUY? HOWTO EVALUATE?

W H AT I S ‘E X’
M A N A G E M E NT ?

“
“
An approach to deliver excellent experiences to employees
through their interactions, engagement and connection with
an organization.
It’s the journey of events, activities and development that they
enjoy through their employee life-cycle.
Over the past few years, the corporate world has seen an
emergence of Employee Experience management, which is
now something that managers and leaders need to focus on
to attract, retain and grow their talent base.
AFTERTHREEYEARS OF
STRUGGLINGTO DRIVE
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
… EXECUTIVES SEE A NEED
TO REDESIGNTHE
ORGANIZATION.
WHAT IS ‘EX’ MANAGEMENT?
Deloitte’s Global Human
Capital Trends 2016 (link)
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The world has changed.
Today’s employees have a different outlook on
what they expect from their employer.
Employees are seeking jobs with purpose where
they can co-create with colleagues, feel
connected with the organization’s mission,
embrace flexibility and be exposed to new
development opportunities.
TODAY’S
WORKFORCE -
AGILE, MOBILE
AND CONNECTED
54% 21%92%
….of the U.S. labor
workforce is
comprised of
millennials.1
Millennials are well
educated, skilled in
technology, very self-
confident, able to multi-task,
and have plenty of energy.
They have high expectations
for themselves, and prefer to
work in teams, rather than as
individuals. Millennials seek
challenges, yet work life
balance is of utmost
importance to them.
…. of an employee’s
salary to replace
them after voluntary
turnover.3
Most companies don't have
the systems in place to track
employee turnover costs,
recruiting, interviewing,
hiring, onboarding, training,
lost productivity and
relationship continuity.
Employers need to send a
clear message - “We value
you”.
… of executives see
engagement,
retention and
building a
meaningful culture –
as a critical priority.2
Based on more than 7,000
responses to a Deloitte Global
Human Capital Trends survey
in over 130 countries around
the world.
1. PEW Research Center - http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/11/millennials-surpass-gen-xers-as-the-largest-generation-in-u-s-labor-force/
2. Global Human Capital Trends- http://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/human-capital/articles/introduction-human-capital-trends.html
3. Center for American Progress - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx9p7Pu7rGbUM05BRXJacjVrRzA/view?pref=2&pli=1
A Changing World.. ..And High Stakes...With A New Focus..
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W HY
I NV E ST I N E X ?

Why invest in your Employee Experience?
One reason – sustainable and scalable Return On
Investment.
And not just the ROI that makes the quarterly report to
investors look good - the real ROI that improves the
position of all stakeholders in your company -
customers, employees, managers, suppliers and
investors
SUSTAINABLE AND
SCALABLE RETURN
ON INVESTMENT
INVESTING IN “EX” SUCCESS
MAKES EMPLOYEES MORE
LIKELYTO BE ENGAGED,TO
STAY ANDTO PROSPER, AND
SIMULTANEOUSLY ACHIEVE
GREATER SUCCESS FORTHE
COMPANY

A company is only as good as the people that drive
and implement the day to day game plan to execute
the strategy.
And employee commitment to their employer will
only last as long as the employer is delivering
value to the employee.
Employees are more informed than ever through
online resources - they can quickly find out the
culture, mission, values, leadership, salary levels and
vision by completing a quick Google search.
TODAY’STALENT
MARKET IS
TRANSPARENT
Here’s a quick search of software engineering salaries in San
Francisco from Glassdoor (link).
If your job postings are offering Software Engineers in San Francisco
less than $110,554 –you should be able and ready to justify it.
MORE INFORMEDTHAN EVER
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There are a number of factors an organization should consider in
calculating the real cost of losing an employee including:
 Offboarding the departing employee
 Lost engagement as other employees see employee turnover
and can disengage or get itchy feet
 Hiring a new employee (i.e. advertising, interviewing)
 Onboarding the new employee
 Lost productivity as the new employee ramps up
 Cultural impact when an employee leaves
Unfortunately, companies don't have the accounting systems in place
to track employee turnover costs.
WITH BIG IMPACTS FROM EMPLOYEETURNOVER
EMPLOYEETURNOVER IS
THE #1 CHALLENGE FACED
BY HUMAN RESOURCE
TEAMS….
FOLLOWED CLOSELY BY
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
AND SUCCESSION
PLANNING.1
1. SHRM/ Globoforce Survey - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx9p7Pu7rGbUT1NHT1VBVmhYRTA/view?pref=2&pli=1
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W HY
O N B O A R D I N G ?

CULTURE IS
YOUR MOST
IMPORTANT
ASSET….
12%
….of executives
believes that they
are driving the right
culture.3
Culture describes “the way
things work around here” –
and with only 12% believing
that they are doing it the
right way, this points to
some big opportunities for
executives to step-it-up.
2 / 3
…. Millennials feel
the outlook and
attitudes of
management are
serious barriers to
growth.2
Employees will invest
themselves if they feel aligned
with the organization.
And that starts by
understanding it – the
mission, vision and values
shown through the
onboarding process.
95%
…. of candidates
believe culture is
more important
than compensation.1
Employees are more likely to
invest themselves in company
success if they feel aligned
with the organization.
Rather than paying
employees more, investment
in their ‘EX’ is likely to yield
higher ROI.
1. Global Human Capital Trends- http://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/human-capital/articles/introduction-human-capital-trends.html
2. The Deloitte Millennial Survey - http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/About-Deloitte/gx-dttl-2014-millennial-survey-report.pdf
3. HR Technology Disruptions in 2016 - http://marketing.bersin.com/rs/976-LMP-699/images/12-1-15%20Webinar_final.pdf?
High Priority.. ..And UnclearVision...With A Lack of Support..
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The value of company culture has been
vigorously debated from the Financial Times
to the Rhode Island Herald.
But what’s not debated is that company
culture is mission critical to a company’s
long term success.

… WITH BIG
UPSIDES FROM
INVESTMENT
1. http://appreciate.octanner.com/2015_02_WP_DriversofGreatWork
2. http://www.greatplacetowork.com/our-trust-approach/what-are-the-benefits-great-workplaces
3. Based on employee earnings $100,000 per year (https://www.trysapling.com/resources/real-cost-of-employee-turnover/)
4. http://www.greatplacetowork.com/our-trust-approach/what-are-the-benefits-great-workplaces
Organizations with great culture enjoy
significant benefits versus industry peers.4
• Happier employees
• Better financial performance
• lower turnover and better financial
performance than
SHARETHE GUIDE!
Employees report being recognized for their work
as 20x more important than salary1
Companies that actively invest in workplace
culture yield nearly 2x the return over their
competitors…2
… and also report 65% less voluntary turnover,
saving an average of $21,000 per employee in
turnover costs3

The foundation and continuity of successful
company culture builds on the success of
Human Resources teams in one thing –
They can be anxious, exited and eager to
make a difference, but without an effective
onboarding program – new employees can
end up stagnating and not as productive as
they want to be in the first few months.
Offer
Acceptance
2 – 4 weeks
Start Date
Productive
Employee
• Unknown expectations
• No cultural alignment
• No validation of decision
• Unclear milestones
• Limited structured learning
• No goals or metrics
Pre-start1 Ramp-up3
0 – 12 months
Onboarding Workflows2
• 20 – 60 tasks with no core owner
• Cross department co-ordination
• Lack of process and consistency
1. Harvard Business Review - https://hbr.org/2015/03/technology-can-save-onboarding-from-itself
1 – 4 weeks
AND CULTURE STARTS WITH EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING.
Effective Employee Onboarding (link).

WHERE
COMPANIES
FAIL IN
EMPLOYEE
ONBOARDING?
The biggest failure in employee onboarding is often a lack of clarity around the
process, and a lack of understanding of the way the new employee is experiencing
the world.
Without a clear framework for new employees to understand company history,
brand messaging, core values, career trajectory, training programs or company
policies - they can be overwhelmed, confused, and feel unsupported. Go figure!
1. LACK OF PROCESS
2. NOTIMETO SHARPENTHE SAW,TOO BUSY SAWING
We get it, everyone’s busy. A consistent theme in today’s professional world is ‘So
much to do…. so little time’.
Everyone can get stuck in a time crunch, but that’s a dilemma we are faced with
every day. Everyone is super busy, but that’s no excuse. Be careful not to fall into
making one of the Top Five Employee Onboarding Mistakes (link).
SHARETHE GUIDE!

There are big, easy-wins in onboarding:
 Start early and get paperwork completed before Day 1 -
ideally with an online e-signature solution for compliance
 Provide employees with a deep understanding of company
values, the product and future roadmap
 Teach them about the product, industry and competitors
 Leverage the key social trends to get teams working
together
 Get everyone accountable and owning their goals to hit
them faster
KILLER PROCESS
AROUND SIMPLE GOALS
THE GOAL FOR EMPLOYEE
ONBOARDING SUCCESS
SHOULD BETO DELIVER BEST
PRACTICES AND
INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE
THAT EMPLOYEES CAN
IMMEDIATELY PUTTO USE…
MEANINGYOU’LL ALSO
GENERATE ROI FROMYOUR
HIRING PROGRAMS SOONER.
SHARETHE GUIDE!

Accelerate
Assimilate
Accommodate Orientation + Payroll
Pre-boarding paperwork, Orientation, Payroll & Benefits
Productivity + Development
Onboarding Road-map, Check-ins, Training and Development, Coaching and Career Path
Culture + Engagement
Mission Vision Values, Company culture,, Workflows and Engagement
3
2
1
 Engagement
 Productivity
 Happiness
LEARN MORE ABOUTTHE
HIERARCHYAT
TRYSAPLING.COM
MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEW HIRE NEEDS

B U I L D V S BUY?

But the questions is that given your company is growing fast and everyone is already juggling
multiple responsibilities, how do HR leaders expect build an effective employee onboarding
experience from scratch?
Investing the right resources for getting into the flywheel of employee success early will increase
the chances that staff will continue to invest themselves in these efforts.
Great onboarding experiences for new employees will encourage those hires to extend the same
warm welcome to new teammates who come after them, creating a cycle of warmer staff
engagement.
BUILDINGVS BUYING AN
ONBOARDING SOLUTION
So now that we understand the importance of investing in employee onboarding success, we’re
going to take a look over the options on HR teams can deliver a best-in-class experience for your
employees.
Like most business decisions, you need to decide whether it makes sense to build or buy the
solution you need.
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Building and maintaining internal employee onboarding
systems can be a great way to encourage new employee
success.
By giving staff a native technology solution designed to
help them succeed, this can greatly improve employee
engagement and ultimately, company success.
It typically takes eight months for a newly hired
employee to reach full productivity.1
LEVERAGING
TECHNOLOGY
BALANCING COST, SPEED AND QUALITYPEOPLE MANAGEMENT
LEADERS NEEDTO BALANCE
QUALITY, COST AND SPEED.
QUALITY
COST SPEED
SHARETHE GUIDE!1. Hardvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2015/03/technology-can-save-onboarding-from-itself)

To truly capitalize on the benefits of providing
a best-in-class employee onboarding,
companies should seek to leverage purpose-
built technology into their organizations.
Its not rocket science…. knowledge workers,
such as HR teams, spend an average of 41%
of their time on unimportant tasks!1
That’s an extra 16 hours per week you could
focus on the people, not the process.
WHY PURCHASE
AN EMPLOYEE
ONBOARDING
SOLUTION?
QUALITY: FOCUS RESOURCES ONYOUR CORE OPERATIONS
While your company's competitive advantages may stretch across many domains,
implementing and driving growth in employee experience success is likely not on the list.
Just as engineering teams use ticket tracking software (like Atlassian’s Jira) and marketing
teams use analytics software (like GoogleAnalytics), Human Resources teams should leverage
the best systems in the market.
COST: IN-HOUSE COSTS MORETIME AND MONEY
It’s not just people’s time and effort that you will be using - Employee Experience success
requires resources from nearly every company function to be successful.
Ask yourself - are you ready to invest the time and money in continuing to adopt the best
practices of tomorrow - or could you reduce overhead by leveraging a dedicated 3rd party
solution with continued product development to achieve your EX Goals.
SPEED: PATCHING LEAKS OR CHANGING VESSELS
Leaders can often fall trap to focusing their creative efforts on doing the best with what you
have, doubling down on the old school method of Powerpoints and playbook manuals.
If your boat is sinking, it can be more productive to focus your energy on changing vessels
rater than patching leaks. Quickly adapting an technology based employee onboarding
solution can be the best, most effective and scalable answer.
SHARETHE GUIDE!1. Hardvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2013/09/make-time-for-the-work-that-matters)

H O W T O
EV A L U AT E A
S O L UT I O N ?SAPLING Delivering Employee Onboarding Success

Ready to investigate buying an employee onboarding
solution? Great.
But before we get started - it’s important to know that to get
buy-in from the CEO and other key decision makers, you’ll
need to convince them that an employee onboarding solution
makes sense on ROI basis.
READYTO DELIVER
EMPLOYEE
ONBOARDING
SUCCESS?
1. Determine Needs and Identify Success
2. ResearchVendors
3. Create and
Implement Plan
ROI-DRIVEN DECISION
MAKING PROCESS
4. Manage andTrack ROI

If you aren't clear on what key the needs are - you may end up selecting the wrong
vendor, or even worse - trying to change your definition of success to fit to the
new employee onboarding feature set!
The key questions that you should ask yourself are:
 What problems am I trying to solve?
 Which of these problems hurt the most?
 How immediately do these problems need to be solved?
 What support services will we require for implementation and on-going basis?
 Which features are the deal-makers, and which are deal-breakers?
1. DETERMINE NEEDS
AND KNOW WHAT
SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
THE FOUNDATION OF A
GOOD DECISION MAKING
PROCESS IS CLEAR
VISIBILITY OFYOUR NEEDS.
KNOWYOUR HRTECH
ROADMAP, AND
UNDERSTAND WHATYOUR
‘HRIS’ CAN AND CAN’T DO.
SHARETHE GUIDE!

Once you have a strong idea of what you need from your employee onboarding
solution, start researching online for products that could suit your needs.
In today’s world, it’s easy to scope out different offerings and schedule demos with
companies that align with your business goals, and the needs you have defined.
2. RESEARCH VENDORS INTHE MARKET
3. CREATE AND IMPLEMENTTHE PLAN
SAPLING
So now you’ve decided on the right vendor for your employee onboarding solution; now comes the fun
part - creating and implementing the plan for employee success.
An effective roll-out will come down to getting buy-in from the key stakeholders, confirming the
budget, aligning expectations, understanding if there are any customization requirements and when the
key features are needed to be in action… and most important - ensuring its the right product for your
organization.
SHARETHE GUIDE!

The positive impact of investing in and implementing
an employee onboarding solution can be massive, and
what gets measured, gets improved.
The principal focus on monitoring and tracking ROI
should be to identify trends and opportunities, and use
these to improve the process.
Regardless of how impressive some employee
onboarding solutions appear to be, data rules!
Make sure your Employee Experience success is
measured in quantitative terms.
Identifying the Costs Assessing the Benefits
Background
 Identify and track all the relevant factors that
contribute to program costs
 Understand where, when and how your
organization is incurring employee
experience costs
 Include both explicit and implicit costs
 Take the time to think through the real
opportunity cost.
 Assess the benefits by understanding the
employee experience journey and the influence
on their success
WhattoConsider
 Implementation costs – the costs incurred
getting the organization plugged into the
program
 Maintenance costs - any ongoing salaries,
benefits and equipment involved
 Opportunity costs - cost of time spent away
from the next best alternative
 Onboarding - helping employees get ramped up
with the tools and skills they need to succeed
 Engagement - increasing employee engagement
 Retention - limiting the organizational ROI killer
- employee turnover
 Training - Changes in skill-based outcomes, such
as improvement in quantity and quality of your
team’s output
 Offboarding – the best employee onboarding
solutions have offboarding features
4. MONITOR AND
TRACK ROI
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When assessing the ROI of your employee onboarding
solution, aim high!
Compare your performance to the leaders in the industry and
seek to develop it as a competitive advantage.
Humans can often be complicated, thorny and messy - but
those qualities make the magic happen.
By creating the right process and frameworks for getting
your people confident, happy and productive - you can help
build and support long-term employee success.
WHERETO FROM HERE?
HAVE PATIENCE…
EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
SUCCESS WILL POSITIVELY
IMPACTTHE EFFECTIVENESS
AND PERFORMANCE OF
YOUR EMPLOYEES AND
ORGANIZATION.
MAKETHE INVESTMENT AND
TAKETHETIMETO GET IT
RIGHT.
SHARETHE GUIDE!

Want to See How Sapling’s Onboarding Solution
can Amplify your Employee Experience?
WE HOPETHIS GUIDE HELPSYOU IMPLEMENT
A GREAT EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING PROGRAM.
REQUEST A DEMO

Sapling enables companies to provide a simple, intuitive and consistent EmployeeOnboarding experience.
We’re focused on providing Employee Onboarding experience that amplifies the Employee Experience (EX).
EX is the way people in organizations engage and relate with the organization and each other. It’s the
journey of events, activities and development that an employee experiences through their life-cycle with the
company.
Over the past few years, the corporate world has seen an emergence of EX, which is now something that
managers and leaders need to focus on to attract, retain and grow talent. Decades ago, few companies
invested in the EX, because the power was retained firmly in the hands of employer.
Times have changed.The world has become more agile, more mobile and more connected than ever, and
employees now recognize that their skills and networks provide today's job security, not corporations.The
new frontier of People Management is employee engagement, satisfaction and development, that drives
company success. This all starts with EmployeeOnboarding.
Sapling’s software supports HR teams to build the foundation of scalable EX success, through supporting
better connected, more engaged and higher performing teams.
Learn more at www.trysapling.com
ABOUT SAPLING

Essential Guide to Employee Onboarding Success

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