Employee onboarding for better engagement and retention from Day 1

Only 52% of workers felt satisfied with their latest employee onboarding experience, according to a Paychex survey. That means just under half of new hires are dissatisfied and feel unprepared to start their new jobs.

Nearly 40% of survey respondents found onboarding clear, 32% said it was confusing, and 22% said it was disorganized. Four out of five (80%) new hires who feel undertrained due to poor onboarding plan to quit.

Poor onboarding experiences aren’t new for HR teams. At ServiceNow, we wanted to figure out how to change this paradigm in a meaningful and effective way. With an employee satisfaction rate of 92% in 2023 and a retention rate of 161%, we’re making progress.

90 days of ramp-up

Starting a new job can be exciting for new hires as they adjust to a new workplace. ServiceNow strives to deliver a warm welcome that provides all the essential information and reinforces the reasons the person decided to join the company.

A satisfying onboarding experience can foster personal productivity and inclusion from Day 1, whereas a bad experience can leave employees feeling confused, disappointed, and compelled to start looking for a new job.

Since onboarding is all about empowering new hires, we redefined it to span the first 90 days of the employee journey. This gives employees more time to receive the resources and training they need to be effective. Milestones at 30, 60, and 90 days focus on performance feedback and other relevant markers of success, while an onboarding buddy provides a personal touch.

Smooth onboarding for new hires

The secret to our success is an onboarding platform that combines all the relevant new-hire tasks into a single digital experience.

“We introduced our first onboarding experience in 2018 and have been incrementally adding new feature capabilities and processes ever since, even as the company grew from approximately 8,000-plus employees in 2018 to 22,000 today,” says Aparna S., director of HR Service Delivery technology at ServiceNow.
“We are proof of the platform’s scalability as demands increase. Features like Journey designer enable us to create personalized journeys for new hires. We can tailor the experience to the employee’s role, location, function, and work status. Managers can even identify personas and design a personalized journey just for that role,” she adds. “Tasks can be completed wherever the employee is at the time of onboarding—remote, in an office, or on mobile.”

A single system for engagement

As a remote employee, Emese N. wasn’t sure what to expect when she joined ServiceNow in 2023 as an advisory solution consultant. She found the single portal refreshing after experiences with past employers, where onboarding tasks were siloed across multiple forms and systems. Using the Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions app, she easily completed all the tasks assigned to her without additional guidance.

“What was different was the convenience of having a single system for both engagement and action,” she says. “I could go to one place to see everything—forms, training, and policies. The navigation was elegant and logical. It was very clear what I had to do. That helped alleviate the anxiety I felt about starting work in a new environment,” Emese says.

Cross-functional workflows automate the mundane, manual tasks, such as payroll and benefits, and support the tasks that help new hires get to work quickly, such as security training and videos about our culture. We start the onboarding experience after offer acceptance but before the start date to welcome employees as part of the ServiceNow team. My ServiceNow, the centralized, intuitive, customizable, employee-first hub on the Now Platform, ties the experience together.

Designing a complete journey

Creating an engaging, clear, and positive onboarding experience can vastly enhance employee retention and morale. We want to make sure our employees are productive from Day 1. New hires feel prepared and valued in their new roles because they’re engaged, motivated, and included in a team.

“On my first day, I had everything I needed to start my job,” says Sulekha K., senior people partner at ServiceNow. “Everything was at my fingertips. I could do everything in one place.” Sulekha used the mobile app to ramp up in India, where onboarding activities were tailored to her location.

A single source of truth ensures new hires like Emese and Sulekha see the most up-to-date information. The HR, IT, finance, and legal departments can easily refresh their onboarding information as needed to ensure it’s relevant and timely. The platform is flexible enough that ServiceNow can quickly pivot and implement contingency plans, such as virtual onboarding, which was launched during the pandemic.

Investing in employees

For ServiceNow new hires, the combination of technology and a strong commitment to engagement and retention has turned a period of potential confusion into a time of employee empowerment, growth, productivity, and loyalty.

Sulekha attributes her onboarding buddy and the ramp-up experience to helping her assimilate into ServiceNow do her job on her own after just a couple of weeks. “The coherence of the entire process was beautiful,” she says. “I didn’t have conflicting conversations or tools. I got a holistic view of the company and how it works.”

Because of that, Sulekha felt fully integrated into her job well before 90 days had passed and knew where to go if she had questions. “The onboarding process reiterated to me that this was one of the best choices I made in my career,” she says.

Find out more about how ServiceNow uses its own products. Better yet, experience a streamlined onboarding process for yourself. Explore ServiceNow careers.