Want to get new employees work ready before their start date?

Onboarding can be a tricky business. Getting it right first time can make all the difference to morale and staff retention – saving employers and employees time and money.

A recent study featured in Harvard Business Review (July 2023) showed 51% of employees would go “above and beyond” in their work if they had a good on boarding experience. While a “staggering 50% of newly hired employees plan to leave their job soon, with that number skyrocketing to 80% for those feeling undertrained due to poor onboarding.”

So how can Papaya help?

We developed our software to help businesses manage their compliance and learning processes and get audit ready with ease. As you’d expect from any decent partner, listening and learning is a huge part of our work and we’ve constantly evolved our offer to meet client needs. Today Papaya’ learning management software is increasingly used to onboard new employees before their start date with very positive results.

Just recently, the newly recruited Head of Agriculture at Gressingham Foods (one of our long-standing clients) described his induction as one of the most “professional he’d ever had”.

Carrie Barrett Gressingham Foods Learning and Development Manager tells us more about her partnership with Papaya and how it works.

“Gressingham has just celebrated 50 years of producing top quality poultry in East Anglia. We are a family business with over 750 staff across our main factory and farms. You’ll find our award-winning duck meat in supermarkets and restaurants across the UK.

We first start working with Papaya in 2020. They came highly recommended by a training provider and ticked all our boxes around compliance and learning. Initially our partnership was about moving away from paper files and numerous excel spread sheets to help get us audit ready and manage all our information in one central space. Life is so much simpler with their software; the British Retail Consortium (BRC) have confidence with our systems and we are 98% compliant as a company.

Following this success, we then asked Papaya to help us develop an on-line induction process which every member of new staff must complete before they start working with us. It’s a brilliant system with benefits for both employers and employees. It saves time, money and gets everyone on the same page from the get-go.

Convenient, Accessible, Professional

The online convenience Papaya offers means new staff can access from their own location, while we have the added flexibility to run in-person inductions if needed.

Each induction for farms personnel includes a welcome letter and training in four key areas required for our Red Tractor compliance standard. For factory personnel the induction is adapted to include training required by BRC and our customers. This must be completed before an employee’s start date and makes a massive difference to the managers on the shop floor and farms as they know all their guys are ready to work. The data is then centralised so at a push of a button we can see each staff members training requirements.

The training is available in various languages – a key consideration for Gressingham as English is not the first language for over 80% of our factory workforce.

There’s other benefits too. The induction sets the tone of our business and the standards we adhere to. Giving people a feel for our culture and the expectations we have of each other. It’s also a useful indicator to discover how motivated an individual is.

There have been good learnings throughout the project. Papaya have been constantly flexible to help us improve the induction process. The team are always responsive and solution focussed. “

So, there you have it. A case study example of how Papaya’s compliance and learning tool can help with employee onboarding. Empowering individuals with a warm welcome and relevant training, getting businesses audit ready, while a providing a clear evidence trail of training and qualifications.

If you’re looking to make the right kind of impact with your employee induction please get in touch.