Why Your Onboarding Workflow Might Be Failing—and How to Fix It

Bringing on a new hire is an exciting time for your business, but it comes with a lot of to-dos. During the flurry of ordering laptops and requesting software licenses, it can be tough remembering to roll out the welcome wagon to your new team members. 

Human resources is already under a lot of pressure to boost morale, build a thriving culture, and ensure employee engagement. Still, onboarding new hires presents you with a time-sensitive opportunity to set the tone for their experience working for your company, allowing you to build lasting employee engagement from the start. 

Don’t ask new hires to “just figure it out.” A clear, consistent, and personalized onboarding workflow provides the necessary structure to help new employees get up to speed quickly and help them feel like they’re part of the team. In this guide, you’ll learn why an onboarding workflow is key to employee retention and the best practices for creating effective onboarding processes that won’t overwhelm your HR team. 

Why Do Businesses Need an Onboarding Workflow?

The way you welcome and support new employees sets the tone for everything that follows, from employee engagement to long-term retention. Making the time to properly welcome new employees doesn’t always make it to the top of HR’s priority list, but this is a must so you can: 

• Prevent confusion on the employee’s first day.
• Ensure you share critical information, like company policies or instructions on setting up their workspace.
• Make a positive first impression.

The best onboarding workflows also take manual tasks off HR managers’ plates, cleverly leveraging automation at the right time to boost new hire engagement without burdening hiring managers with more stuff to do. 

Ultimately, a solid onboarding workflow ensures every new hire—whether remote or in-person—gets the right information, tools, and support to excel in their new job. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that onboarding can even facilitate connections between team members, encouraging one-on-one conversations that give new employees a sense of belonging and confidence in their new role. 

5 Best Practices for Effective Onboarding Workflows

Designing an effective onboarding workflow means creating a repeatable, scalable process that helps every new hire feel confident and connected from day one. But that also means using the right processes and technology to personalize the process without overwhelming the good folks in HR. Follow these best practices to simplify onboarding with time-saving tools like Pulpstream’s RapidBee platform.

1. Start With a Solid Preboarding Experience

The new employee experience starts long before they sign an offer. In fact, the time between a job offer and the new hire’s first day gives you a great opportunity to prime them for interaction. 

Instead of waiting until their first day, use preboarding to start building trust and setting expectations. That can look like: 

• Sending the offer letter, along with the next steps and an introduction to the HR manager or point of contact.
• Sharing a welcome video or guide that outlines the work environment and company culture.
• Providing early access to your onboarding software, where new hires can complete forms and read more in-depth policies.
• Sending a digital employee handbook and FAQs to answer common new employee questions.

Preboarding requires multiple touchpoints. Don’t forget a single step in the process: Use RapidBee to schedule emails and messages to go out immediately after the employee accepts your job offer. This automation keeps the conversation flowing without asking HR to remember yet another task. 

2. Create a Structured Onboarding Checklist

There’s a dizzying number of tasks HR must remember every time they onboard a new employee. Add that to their normal duties, and it’s a lot to take on!

Fortunately, there’s no need to start from scratch every time you hire someone new. Create a standardized onboarding checklist to provide clarity, consistency, and accountability at every stage of the process. Your checklist should include:

• Pre-start date activities like sending the offer letter, logging system access, and preparing a welcome kit.
• Administrative tasks such as paperwork, benefits enrollment, and employee handbook review.
• Culture-focused steps like team introductions, assigning a mentor, and sharing company policies.
• Regular check-ins during the first week, first month, and first year to ensure consistent support and gather feedback.
• Clear milestones that track the employee onboarding journey, including training completions and early performance reviews.

Use RapidBee’s ready-to-go onboarding templates to streamline this process or build your own custom checklists for different departments or roles. You can even plug this checklist into RapidBee’s task management solution, which will automatically alert employees about pending onboarding tasks. 

3. Manage Paperwork Completion

One of the most time-consuming parts of the employee onboarding journey is the mountain of required documents. From signing the offer letter to acknowledging company policies, the paperwork can quickly overwhelm both new hires and HR teams.

That’s where a strong onboarding workflow comes into play.

By digitizing and automating document collection, you can ensure every new employee completes necessary onboarding documents, like tax paperwork, benefits enrollment, and policy acknowledgments, before their first day. This not only improves the new hire experience but also sets the tone for a smooth first week and beyond.

RapidBee makes it a cinch to manage paperwork without the hassle. Use pre-built document templates to avoid recreating the same forms over and over again. E-signature integrations also ensure fast, easy submissions, while real-time status tracking allows HR managers to quickly follow up on missing paperwork.

4. Take Cultural Integration Seriously

Culture and belonging might sound like secondary considerations, but they’re no joke. While tasks like setting up a workspace or completing forms are important, true employee engagement begins when a new hire feels like they belong at your company. That’s why cultural integration should be a core part of your onboarding process, not an afterthought.

Values, communication styles, and rituals all shape your company culture. The better new hires understand these parts of your culture, the stronger their sense of belonging will be from the start. 

Make sure your onboarding workflow includes tasks that boost a sense of belonging, including: 

• Setting up informal meet-and-greets with other team members.
• Sharing stories, wins, and challenges that showcase what your culture looks like in action.
• Scheduling virtual or in-person welcome sessions.
• Encouraging participation in company channels, events, or social groups.

Don’t worry if you forget these important but easy-to-miss tasks. RapidBee’s onboarding checklists make it easy to automate reminders for check-ins and team introductions. 

5. Monitor Performance

One of the most overlooked elements of a truly effective onboarding process is setting clear goals and tracking progress. Without tangible metrics, it’s difficult for HR professionals, hiring managers, and other stakeholders to understand what’s working—or where the onboarding program needs improvement.

Defining milestones creates structure for the new hire while offering clarity to HR teams about whether the employee onboarding journey is on track. Every role will have different success metrics, but in general, this looks like: 

• Mastering key tasks by the end of their first month.
• Participating in a set number of social events or activities in their first year.
• Achieving a particular percentage on their first employee review.

You don’t have to fuss over pages of metrics for each employee. Lean on RapidBee to pull employee performance metrics into a simplified dashboard, where you can visualize progress and gather performance and engagement data. RapidBee also makes it a breeze to compare data across departments or roles to evaluate consistency and identify trends in retention rates.

Automate the Employee Onboarding Process

Onboarding is a critical time when you can make a solid first impression on new employees. Not only that, but it also tells them exactly what’s expected and how the company really works. When you take the time to create a structured, thoughtful, and personalized onboarding workflow, you do more than make a good first impression: You lay the groundwork for long-term employee engagement, stronger retention, and a more connected company culture.

Onboarding workflows help this process run more smoothly, although you still might need a helping hand from technology to stay on top of everything without dropping the ball. 

With tools like RapidBee, you can reduce manual work, automate key steps, and ensure every new hire gets the best possible onboarding experience. Build better beginnings for everyone: See how RapidBee simplifies and personalizes every stage of new employee onboarding.