The ROI of New Hire Integration. New hire integration should start the minute individuals report for their first day of work. Successfully integrating new hires into your organization helps increase business performance, minimize turnover, and reduce recruiting expense.

With new hire programs, orientation is the easy part. The administration (payroll, benefits, company policies, etc.) of bringing new employees on board is unavoidable. However, many companies never successfully move from orientation to integration of their new workers. New hire integration goes beyond required administration into areas like employee development and cultural assimilation.

Corning Glass Works found that employees who attended a structured orientation and integration program were 69% more likely to remain with the company after three years than those who did not go through such a program. At Texas Instruments, new hires whose integration process was carefully attended to reached “full productivity” two months earlier than those whose orientation process was not. When assessing the quality of your own new hire efforts, ask yourself:

• Is our program fun and interactive? Orientation programs are notoriously boring and can set a troubling precedent for how interesting, or how dull, working at a new company will be. There are plenty of techniques for making learning fun and interactive and avoiding old-fashioned data dumps.
• Do we make effective use of corporate stories? PowerPoint lectures and charts do not always inspire and capture the imagination of new hires. Great companies communicate their greatness through story telling. Collect experiences from your existing employees that speak to the unique personality of your company, and then invest the time for employees and company leaders to relay these stories in new hire training sessions.
• Do we make our process easy for new hires? Learn from great customer-service organizations: design the customer experience from the customer's perspective. In this case, assess your onboarding process from the new hire's perspective and make it more employee-centric and less employer-centric. Offload information to your intranet site, encourage an environment of two-way communication, and provide information on an as-needed basis.
• How are our managers equipped to do their part? Time and time again, studies confirm that new employees’ relationships with their direct supervisors are major factors in increasing their engagement and performance. Manager training should help supervisors understand how to create a productive, positive, and motivating work experience.
• Do we make new hires feel welcome and connected to the company? Analyze each step of new employees’ first days, weeks, or months to see if you are giving the impression that you are glad they are here or just ready for them to get to work and get things done. Simple actions like welcome signs and cards or introductions over lunch to key leaders go a long way. Help new hires understand where they fit in the organization and how their daily tasks help contribute to fulfilling the company’s mission and vision.

These factors are important and pretty common sense, yet rarely done. Even with a solid orientation program in place, better understanding the first few years of new hires’ experiences with your company will help you tailor plans to ensure their long-term integration and success. Monitor your turnover as more than just an annual percentage. Analyze detailed data about your terminations to determine if a tenure threshold exists. For example, if the vast majority of people are leaving your company within the first two years of employment, you can narrow your focus to this timeframe. Also, bring the data to life by using surveys or interviews to uncover why some new hires choose to stay and why some choose to leave. Armed with this information, you will have a much more robust profile of your new hire population.

Tying new hire profile data to performance metrics on the job is a powerful combination. You can justify investment in new hire programs by demonstrating how retaining new employees for longer periods of time increases their performance, and thus positively impacts the bottom line.

If successful in not only orienting new hires, but also integrating them into the fabric of your organization, your company can realize a significant return on investment. Mastering your integration efforts results in more engaged employees, increased performance, less turnover, and less ongoing recruiting costs.