New employees who were offered a well structured onboarding program are 69% more likely to remain in the company for up to 3 years. Unfortunately, most retail firms don't have a proper onboarding process in place. Many companies are informal or distant about the way they induct new employees, which results in statistics like these:
• Half of all senior outside hires fail within 18 months in a new position
• Half of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first 120 days
Failures like these can be avoided with a good onboarding system. According the SHRM onboarding research paper, Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success, good onboarding was found to lead to:
- Higher job satisfaction
- Organizational commitment
- Lower turnover
- Higher performance levels
- Career effectiveness
- Lowered stress
Retail employee onboarding is often done en-masse, through training presentations or remotely, through videos. Employee orientation sessions, as they are often called, usually include information about the brand, the values of the company and how/why the company started up in the first place.