7 Ways to Automate the Employee Onboarding Process
Onboarding has become an essential process for a company’s successful growth and is closely connected with employees, management, and other HR processes. For instance, new employees are twice as likely to look for another company if onboarding was bad or did not happen at all.
Good onboarding has numerous benefits, such as effective workflow due to better learning, increased motivation, improved employee experience, and clear communication within the team and management. It all results in better company performance. The onboarding process also requires significant investments of human and financial resources. That is why more and more industries are now utilizing the power of modern software to automate onboarding. This means spending fewer resources and getting better results. According to a survey among HR professionals, 36 percent of respondents believe that the inability to automate the onboarding process negatively impacts the new hire experience, especially when it comes to training managers.
In this article, we will take a closer look at onboarding, and how to reap the same benefits while investing fewer resources, and we’ll provide a full guide to establishing onboarding automation in your company.
Employee Onboarding: Definition & Goals
Onboarding is the key HR process that implies the engagement of new employees to a certain company or workplace. It includes the overall information sharing about the company, its values, team, tasks, and schedules. This process is mostly directed by HR professionals, whose task is to become a mentor and help hires to build social bridges with the team and adjust to the working environment.
The well-planned onboarding process requires huge efforts but is still worth considering. An organized, accurately prepared process of adapting new hires may prevent early turnover for as many as one in four new employees. Since it costs as much as 33 percent of the worker’s annual salary to replace him, preventing turnover significantly reduces HR expenses. Furthermore, the companies with a great onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent.
The benefits of onboarding are quite obvious, but only 12 percent of companies do great in onboarding. That is why it’s crucial to analyze the main points on how to help an employee adapt to a new place of employment for the benefit of your company’s growth.
Source: kissflow.com
How to Help an Employee Adapt to a New Place
As we have stated before, employee onboarding can greatly improve your company’s performance. However, this process is very complex and not easy to implement. That is why we decided to review some important recommendations for new hires’ successful engagement. These tips help companies get the most out of the onboarding process.
Start Onboarding on the First Day
Starting the onboarding on the first day helps you make the right first impression. With onboarding automation software, you can give new hires all the passwords, keys, and important files just in time.
Automate the Whole Employee Onboarding Process
Automating employee onboarding simplifies employee adaptation and doesn’t require many resources. That is why around 38 percent of companies have already invested in creating online onboarding platforms.
Track the Employee’s Progress
Every new hire should have a clear understanding of his responsibilities and goals. So, many organizations utilize onboarding software for employees to track the progress themselves and for HR managers to detect individuals who might require additional help.
Modify the Process if Needed
Success is always about readjusting to new demands and working on becoming better constantly. With the onboarding automation software, the HR department can easily measure the success of the onboarding process and readjust the methods that don’t bring expected results.
Benefits of Automating the Employee Onboarding Process
So how exactly can you make great employee onboarding via automation? Automating the employee onboarding process has a vast variety of benefits for the company revenue in general. The following benefits will totally convince you to consider employee onboarding process automation:
Better Employee Retention
One of the core aspects of automated onboarding is that the company is able to keep the hires, so the organization spends much less time, money, and resources on searching for new workers. Additionally, employees who receive effective onboarding are more confident with the corporation. They are also 18 times more likely to feel committed to the company and its long-term goals.
Reduced Operational Cost
The average business spends around $4,000 and more than four workweeks to involve a new hire. If the new employee decides to leave the organization without having worked for even a month, the cost loss doubles at least. With employee onboarding automation, you can automate and structure the onboarding files in a system. This helps you easily find the essential information and forget about the data damage or loss. This will reduce the cost and bring additional revenue to your business. In addition, you will greatly reduce the possibility of error, which is also crucial for business growth.
Elimination of Errors
Every new hire can receive different treatment, depending on how busy the HR team is. If there are too many new people and the HR department is hiring even more at the moment when new hires arrive, the latter won’t get enough attention and support. However, if you automate employee onboarding, everyone is getting the same treatment. So, no one is forgotten in the haste of daily office life.
7 Ways to Automate the Employee Onboarding Process
In fact, it is impossible for a company to make a completely automated onboarding workflow, as there are some key procedures of onboarding that demand the presence of an HR team member to manage and improve the new employee adaptation process. However, we still have plenty of solutions on how to automate an employee onboarding:
#1 Manage Your Data Using a Unified System
Automating the data by creating a personal secured workflow system to minimize the paperwork is a great option. For example, by collecting the employee data in one system, it is easy to make the most of their hard and soft skills, proficiency, experiences, certificates, and education. Moreover, you can use data visualization tools to easily leverage information.
#2 Assign Documents Automatically
No mailing lists, no paper documents on the desk, and no need to control whether you gave all the needed documents for employees. Just create the schedule of assigning files to a new hire and keep track of whether they were opened or not.
#3 Simplify the Account Generation
Setting up multiple accounts on different apps and software is painfully repetitive for the IT department and the new employee themselves. With an automated onboarding process, an HR team member can spare the time of the IT department so that they can focus on more important tasks. The HR member has to put in the information of an employee once, and the tool automatically creates several accounts on different platforms.
#4 Test the New Employees’ Knowledge & Progress
With automated onboarding, it is easy to share essential knowledge and check the new employees’ learning progress. Usually, it takes a lot of time for HR team members to test new workers’ understanding of the company processes and some difficult cases. Instead, they can send the survey and automatically get the results of each member. Thus, you invest in creating one test for a set group of employees that will be used repeatedly.
#5 Automate Benefits Enrollment
Automating benefits enrollment simplifies the entire process. Just send an automated email to new employees with a detailed explanation of the benefits package and instructions on how to complete the enrollment electronically. Scheduling automatic reminders helps employees meet all the important deadlines.
Although commuter benefits, health plans, and retirement plans all have different portals and management systems, automated onboarding software can connect and manage all of them.
#6 Introduce Constant Feedback via a Notification System
Statistics show that 20 percent of new hires leave the company for a better opportunity during the first 45 days in a role. So, collecting the employee’s feedback about his satisfaction with the onboarding process and his new job can help to identify potential problems. Artificial intelligence (AI) significantly simplifies this process and makes it more effective. Automated onboarding software can send out surveys after the first week, first month, or first quarter in the position.
Moreover, AI tools can identify hidden dissatisfaction in survey results and predict flight risks. This allows the company to resolve turnover before it happens. If flight risk is detected, the AI sends alerts to the hiring manager or HR for them to address the issue.
#7 Analyze the Working Performance: Track Employees’ KPIs
This option implies providing an automated checklist of all the tasks and goals that a new hire has to complete within the onboarding, for instance, reading and signing some documents, going through tests, or creating teamwork projects. Also, you can set deadlines in a system and send a notification when the date is coming closer. You can also get some essential metrics about the work completed. In such a way, it is easy to learn about the new employees’ time-management skills and control their KPIs.
Source: automationedge.com
Our Experience
With one of our clients, Langate has worked on developing a custom employee change management system. The company had more than 15,000 of its own and its customers’ employees to manage as part of the HR service. The complexity of the environment was growing. Moreover, they also managed full-cycle employee onboarding and offboarding. So, they contacted Langate to develop custom software that would be able to handle such a massive amount of data. The solution also had to ensure the utmost security, and provide personalized onboarding programs.
To address these needs, Langate developed a custom web-based employee change management software. It works as a plug-in module for an enterprise-wide expandable web platform and includes everything the client needs. The system stores information about each employee, simplifies the account generation process, tracks employees’ progress, automates benefits enrollment, and analyzes work performance.
After implementing the solution developed by Langate, the client was able to minimize employee setup time and the amount of onboarding and offboarding effort and errors. Consequently, the client’s customers and internal departments are more satisfied while using their HR services.
Conclusion
To summarize, employee onboarding optimization is an essential part of a company’s long-term success. And though there are various methods on how to adapt the new employee to a company, automating the employee onboarding process is one of the best options to boost business performance.
In the article, we have described seven effective ways to automate the employee onboarding process, each of them covering a particular area. Creating a custom employee onboarding software that includes all these features would allow the company to provide a high-quality and smooth onboarding experience.
If you’ve realized that an automated onboarding process would help your business, contact Langate! We have deep expertise in developing custom automated employee onboarding solutions that successfully serve companies’ business needs.
Originally published at https://langate.com on January 19, 2021.
