September 20th, 2024 | Sterling

Onboarding’s Vital Role in HR’s Foundational “4R” Framework

Reading time: approximately 8 minutes

Onboarding has become a leading focus area in HR in recent years, owing to the difficulties of hiring at scale, retaining top talent, and managing the disruptive technologies of AI and automation. Across industries and regions around the globe, HR teams work to recruit, hire, onboard, and retain skilled candidates, all to help their organizations in the following ways: 

• Fill labor shortages
• Meet employee expectations
• Support organizational transformation
• Enable AI and automation implementation
• Maximize productivity and improve the bottom line 

How can organizations provide a positive onboarding experience to help overcome these core challenges?

HR leaders are weighing in, among them Josh Bersin. His report, HR Predictions for 2024: Imperatives for the Year Ahead, focused strongly on the foundational “4R” organizational model, a widespread concept in talent management and many other fields.

The “4 Rs” of HR are as follows: 

1. Recruit
2. Retain
3. Reskill
4. Redesign 

We offer HR professionals lots of actionable ways to address these business challenges in HR’s Guide to Onboarding. Inside you’ll find best practices to help you design a quality onboarding program and boost employee retention, and we provide a helpful 30/60/90-day onboarding plan.

Now let’s directly address how HR teams can adapt the “4R” model to help their own employees feel part of the team from Day One.

Onboarding Is the Heart of HR

Let’s start with a holistic overview of onboarding’s central importance to HR’s “4R” framework. What’s the #1 way for HR professionals to lead effectively during change management?

Start with the very essence of leadership: strengthening employee connection and commitment.

Onboarding is that first and ideal point in time when you welcome your new employees to your organization and culture. It’s an important celebratory and learning phase in their relationship with the company and colleagues.

As Day One begins, the job finally starts becoming real to your new hires. Yes, this is really happening! Gradually they start taking ownership of their new role.

That’s when your new employees begin to ask themselves the most important question: “Is this role really a good fit for me? Am I going to like working here six months or a year from now?”

Providing your candidates with seamless, technology-enabled and personal hiring and onboarding experiences is important. A positive onboarding experience can make a world of difference, helping your company to hire at scale and stay competitive by driving higher retention, employee engagement, and job satisfaction. 

How can you consistently create that great experience? It’s often not what your candidate thinks, but how they feel about their new position in your organization.

Don’t let onboarding be just a chain of paperwork or a slew of videos which your candidates need to finish by a deadline. Instead, bring out the fully human side of onboarding by taking this early opportunity to build relationships.

Bearing in mind the central importance of onboarding, let’s now consider the 4Rs and how they can drive your organization’s cohesiveness and profitability.

#1: Recruit

Providing your new employees with a good onboarding experience has across-the-board business benefits. Satisfied employees often draw others to work at your company. In this way, onboarding doubles as a valuable “selling feature” of your brand, allowing you to hire better-quality talent.

Sterling’s Shawn Kahle, SVP Employee Experience, Learning & ESG, shares ways you can deliver a quality onboarding experience: 

“Naturally, there are several things everyone needs to know during their first week at their new job. Deadlines for forms, paydays, benefits, and PTO are all important concerns for your new hires. Of course, you’ll also need to make sure they gain full understanding of your policies and expectations.

There’s so much to do in just the first three months, so here are a handful of onboarding “Dos” to follow: 

• Policies and deadlines are the crucial onboarding tools of HR professionals. Your policies must be specific, clear, and accessible. Post your policies on your company intranet so your new hires have an always-available answer as soon as they have a question.
• Set explicit deadlines complete with milestones and potential consequences (forms must be completed by end of week or payroll will be delayed, etc.).
• New hires often learn best together, sharing many of the same typical Day One feelings, questions, and concerns. Introduce teammates to one another and assign everyone a work buddy who can help with any issues.
• HR/People and Culture teams play an equally vital role in onboarding. Incorporate periodic check-ins just to pop in and say, “Hi, how are you doing? Is there anything I can do to help you?” etc. 

Remember, to ensure a quality onboarding experience, you want to combine the best of your technology and your people.”

#2: Retain

Now that your new hire has come aboard, how can you help them feel confident that they’ve made the right choice by joining your organization?

The best way to weld a good fit into a close bond is to make your new employee’s first 90 days as positive and empowering as possible.

First impressions matter, especially when bringing a new hire onto your team. Whether you’re a hiring management professional or involved with employee onboarding, you’ll find plenty of ideas in our Onboarding Checklist. We’ve packaged original research together with proven HR strategies you can use to support your people, from their Day One paperwork to creating their 30/60/90-Day Plan.

Shawn explains, “The 30/60/90-day plan is a detailed roadmap you can give your new hires, showing exactly where and when they’re expected to excel during their first 90 days. By dividing your new hire’s goals into 30-day increments, you’re giving them the direction and guidance they need to learn quickly and effectively.”

Equip your people for success from their first day onward, no matter whether they’re taking care of the fine details or designing their career blueprint. That’s the key to retaining your employees and fostering their loyalty.

#3: Reskill

Reskilling is an “R” with real synergy: it’s a big benefit to your company when you help your people attain their career aspirations. However, you can’t safely assume that each of your employees are sharing their hopes for the role with their managers and co-workers.

Here’s an area in which HR professionals can really get proactive and help employees excel in their roles, starting with the strong relationships and trust built during the onboarding process.

At Sterling, to pursue our mission of putting people first, we refer to reskilling as “Training and Development.” This business area is especially important for organizations seeking ways to successfully implement AI and automation. AI/automation is just one example, but certainly an important one. Providing your employees with strong guidance helps them to gain valuable new skills, forge productive partnerships across teams, and to ensure that tools and processes are deployed strategically.

To help demonstrate this, here’s Sterling CTO Ivneet Kaur advising organizations on how best to implement AI as part of reskilling:

Training, tutorials, and online classes can all be useful to advance peoples’ skillsets, but they can also be overwhelming.

Start the training and development process by taking time to engage deeply with your new hires in ongoing one-on-one meetings. Help your people take the reins of their own careers by asking them about their career aspirations, identify the skillsets required, partner them with relevant mentors and experts, and agree upon the next steps to make those dreams a reality.

At Sterling, we believe that the employee experience should be focused on the individual. What does this look like? Essentially, reskilling and other forms of career development should be strongly personalized.

Ultimately, learning is doing — and doing is learning. You can’t swim until you take that first jump in the water, and your strokes improve with the more laps you complete.

#4: Redesign

Today’s HR professionals are increasingly aware that change management is a make-or-break for employee retention and satisfaction. It’s a complex area, complete with a long list of best practices and meetings with stakeholders.

So much of organizational transformation depends on quality communication. As a common example, companies need to communicate early and often to their employees whenever they’re learning and applying new technologies, including how relevant changes are helping them and your company succeed in tangible ways.

Shawn comments, “Removing any existing ‘silos’ in your organization can be difficult, but needs to be done to identify key stakeholders, subject matter experts, and facilitators. Order your teams and processes so that data and ideas flow freely throughout your business.”

This way, your HR team can help to improve efficiency so you can focus on putting the “human” in HR.

With this in mind, be sure to build in management metrics such as KPIs while also making frequent use of feedback tools to leverage internal data.

Remember throughout that yes, metrics and KPIs are important, but that a major goal of change management is empowering your employees to become even more successful. Once you’ve identified and incorporated new technologies and processes, be sure to then incorporate them into your onboarding plan. This should position your organization to tackle core business challenges with each new hire.

Putting a Ribbon on the 4R Framework

Clearly, HR teams who deliver a quality onboarding experience are in a much better position to facilitate the 4Rs in their organizations. Likewise, HR teams should always keep these 4R fundamentals in mind, while also seeking to fine-tune them in line with changing candidate expectations. After all, each “R” is enhanced by a positive onboarding experience, which in turn helps your company to hire and retain talent, implement effective change, and remain profitable.

Sterling is helping our clients build cultures of authenticity and trust by keeping on top of important HR developments. We’re proud to support our clients in their own hiring and retention efforts, whether they’re hiring locally, regionally, or globally.

Help your new employees find success in your organization by creating a holistic combination of quality onboarding, a strong candidate experience, and considerate HR policy. Download HR’s Guide to Onboarding today.

Download HR’s Guide to Onboarding

Sterling is not a law firm. This publication is for informational purposes only and nothing contained in it should be construed as legal advice. We expressly disclaim any warranty or responsibility for damages arising out this information. We encourage you to consult with legal counsel regarding your specific needs. We do not undertake any duty to update previously posted materials.