Is engaged onboarding important for engaged work?

The paper explores the relationship between the structured onboarding process and the resulting employee engagement, as most onboarding studies focus on other onboarding outcomes. The proposed hypothesis was: “A structured onboarding process is positively related to employee engagement.”, while the research question was: ‘Is a structured onboarding process more relevant for some employee engagement dimensions than others?’ To assess the onboarding process, the ‘Onboarding Assessment Survey’ developed by Baker and DiPiro (2019) was used, and to assess employee engagement the ‘Utrecht Work Engagement Scale’, more specifically UWES-17, developed by Schaufeli and Bakker (2004b) was used. Using a sample of 622 respondents and applying correlation and multiple regression analyses, we revealed that a structured onboarding process is statistically significantly positively related to employee engagement in total and by dimensions. In terms of employee engagement dimensions, we also found that a structured onboarding process is more strongly related to employee dedication and less related to employee absorption in their work.