Every new hire in the food industry plays a critical role in three essential workplace challenges: safety, compliance, and quality assurance. All three require a learning curve, and effective employee onboarding is essential if you want new hires to hit the ground running.
However, no matter how difficult and at times frustrating it can be, developing efficient and effective onboarding is an essential demand of your HR department—and can pay huge dividends.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), effective onboarding plays a key role in employee retention, and poor onboarding can send the message that a new hire might need to look for greener pastures elsewhere.
“Rather than setting new employees up for success, organizations with poor onboarding processes are setting the stage for an early exit.”
The article continues, “to staunch the flow of new hires prematurely heading for the exits, organizations have to give more thought and attention to how they convert attractive job candidates into successful, longer-term employees. Otherwise, they are wasting the time and energy they spend on recruitment and selection.”
The article also quotes a study from Click Boarding, an onboarding software company in Eden Prairie, Minn., that found that:
Arguably, a more striking figure was published in a report by the research and analysis firm Brandon Hall Group, which found that effective onboarding programs boost the retention of new hires by as much as 82%.
The high cost of recruiting and training employees makes it imperative that onboarding is as efficient and beneficial as possible.
As was covered in the most recent Rootwurks blog post, businesses spend, on average 20% of an employee’s annual salary to replace them after they’ve left.
The length of time it takes to onboard an employee is a central component of this cost.
Oklahoma-based Homeland Baking produces packaged, pre-cooked sausage rolls, which are sold in convenience stores and grocery stores across the state. In an interview with Rootwurks last year, Brooke Rehberg, the company’s Director of Administration and Quality Assurance, described the company’s rapid growth over the past year and its plans to double the staff.
Rehberg told Rootwurks about the challenges of onboarding new employees, which too often falls on the HR department.
“As a small company, we are all required to fill our day to the fullest and utilize our skills and abilities to the best of our ability, so our HR director has more than just one job.”
The ability to effectively onboard these employees has been crucial for the company, enabling it to reduce the costs incurred by lengthy and repetitive food safety training. Additionally, it has enabled the small company’s HR department to devote more time to tasks related to growth, company culture, and business strategy development.
When a new employee joins the company, it’s essential that they understand not only what needs to be done but also the rationale behind it. They must be taught that their job is not only an essential part of the production process, but also that they play a key role in ensuring the safety of the workplace and the company’s products.
This helps clarify the employee’s position at the company and understand their daily expectations moving forward. Effective onboarding must also instill the confidence that the employee is part of the company's safety culture and the overall workplace culture.
Once employees are confident that they are part of a company’s safety culture and have learned the safety and compliance expectations associated with their job, they are much better equipped to contribute to risk mitigation.
This means a reduced risk of workplace accidents, reduced odds of foodborne contamination, and more streamlined and successful compliance training and adherence.
For HR professionals, risk mitigation comes down to two main goals: protecting employees and protecting the products. Both goals begin during onboarding.
The right onboarding can help employees grasp how they can directly impact the threat posed by hazards specific to their job. This can range from knowing how to avoid slips, trips, and falls to the requirements of allergen contamination prevention and critical personal hygiene guidelines.
But deploying new and improved food safety training requires new and improved tools.
The Rootwurks LMS: How the Right Tools Elevate Onboarding
When it comes to developing streamlined onboarding, pen and paper won’t suffice, and an English-only curriculum is ineffective for diverse workforces. And if you plan on shoving all the new hires into a room and flipping on a PowerPoint presentation, you might want to think again.
With the Rootwurks learning management system (LMS), companies can develop custom, mobile-optimized, bilingual learning plans that expedite and elevate onboarding.
The LMS centers front-line employees at the heart of their workplace's food safety culture, empowering them to take the lead on safety, enhancing onboarding, and reducing employee turnover.
Northern California-based Maggiora Baking Company joined Rootwurks as a client, primarily to address the challenges of onboarding.
As a rapidly scaling, family-owned business, they sought to modernize their onboarding process and replace their manual system, which had been based on pen and paper and DVDs.
Immediately, the company was able to speed up onboarding by more than 30%. In addition, within only 14 days, the company was able to train its team members in more than 200 critical safety courses in both English and Spanish.
The new approach has freed up the company’s QA manager to focus on quality assurance tasks, which have become especially important as the company scales up.
“Our time is more valued now. The employees are paying attention, listening, and staying focused. We get better results with training,” Maggiora Baking Company Plant Manager John Hinojosa told Rootwurks.
Ready to build onboarding that mitigates risk and cuts employee turnover? Reach out to the Rootwurks team, and we’ll provide a custom demo of how our LMS can help expedite onboarding, reduce costs, enhance your safety culture, and make life easier for your HR team: