Has your library been experiencing high employee turnover or are you experiencing an influx of new hires? Are you interested in learning about a way to increase employee retention? Then you may be interested in learning about how you can improve your employee onboarding process.
What is Onboarding?
Onboarding refers to the process in which new hires are integrated into the library. It includes the entire hiring process (applying and interviewing), orientation (which may include new-hire paperwork and reviewing of policies), and learning about the library, its structure, daily operations, culture, strategic goals, and more.
When we go through the process of hiring new people we hope to keep them as long as possible, but employee retention is complex. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has noted that “newly hired employees are 58 percent more likely to still be at the company three years later if they had completed a structured onboarding process.” This means that while there will always be situations where employees need to quit for reasons beyond the library’s control, many resignations can be prevented with effective onboarding that ensures employees have a clear understanding of their job responsibilities, are in possession of the right tools for the job, receive ongoing training, and feel connected to management and their coworkers.
But therein lies a problem common to many libraries. How do you provide great onboarding experiences when time and staffing are already tight? You may not have time to recreate the onboarding wheel or make sure the new employee gets enough training. That’s where CALL can help.
CALL has developed a new customizable Onboarding Template in CALL Academy, available to all California Libraries. The simple framework provides suggestions for topics to include in your onboarding such as your Ethics Statement, Mission, Strategic Goals, Policies, and Procedures. Within each topic you’ll find tips to help you fill in your own customized information and links to relevant CALL Academy tutorials in case you and your staff need to learn more about a topic.
How to Use This Template As:
Niche Academy Administrator
If you’re a library that currently uses Niche Academy for staff development you’ll have the option to copy CALL’s Onboarding Template into your own academy. From there your academy administrator can customize the template by following the suggestions provided within the framework.
Users Without Niche Academy in Their Library and/or Regular Users
What if you don’t have Niche Academy at your library, or you’re not an academy administrator? Is this template still useful to you? Absolutely. Many of the sections within the template provide links to “Relevant Tutorials in CALL Academy.” Think of these as curated lists of tutorials to provide you with training on specific topics such as ethics, conducting community assessments, incident reporting, and so much more. You may want to review them yourself, or share them with your colleagues who are responsible for onboarding new staff.
Don’t have a staff academy? Feel free to use CALL’s Onboarding Template as inspiration for your onboarding process. Recreate the suggested sections within your own Content Management System such as Microsoft Teams or Google Drive, and share relevant tutorial links with staff.
More Information and Live Q&A
Are you interested in learning more about CALL’s new Onboarding Template? Join us for a live informational webinar on Tuesday, October 18th at 1:00 pm PST. CALL’s Senior Project Coordinator of Technology, Gina Robinson, will give you a first-look at the template and provide suggestions for implementation. Niche Academy’s Customer Success team will also join the webinar to answer all of your more technical questions.
This session will be recorded and added to CALL Academy.