93% of employers believe that a good employee onboarding experience is crucial for new hires to remain with the company. This means that the majority of employers value a positive onboarding process for new employees. It is important for organizations to prioritize creating a welcoming and effective onboarding experience for new hires. This can help increase employee retention and overall satisfaction within the company.
Companies like Netflix and Twitter provide a solid cultural and leadership-driven onboarding approach to ensure improved engagement, shorter time to competency, and lower turnover. However, this is not a simple task. Why are companies looking towards automated employee onboarding then?
What is Employee Onboarding?
Employee onboarding is the process of integrating and orienting new employees into an organization. This typically involves familiarizing them with company policies, procedures, culture, and their specific roles and responsibilities within the organization. Effective onboarding programs aim to help new hires adjust to their new work environment smoothly, thereby increasing their productivity and engagement while reducing turnover rates.
What is Automated Employee Onboarding?
Automated employee onboarding refers to the use of technology and software to streamline and manage the onboarding process for new hires. This typically involves the automation of various tasks such as paperwork completion, document collection, training module assignment, and communication with relevant stakeholders.
Automated employee onboarding systems often feature digital forms, electronic signatures, task tracking, and integration with other HR systems to ensure a more efficient and seamless onboarding experience for both the new employee and the HR team.
Why Automate Employee Onboarding?
Any onboarding plan necessitates substantial expenditures on both human and financial resources. As a result, many companies are increasingly turning to sophisticated technologies to automate onboarding. This involves using fewer resources to get more significant outcomes.
According to a poll of HR experts, 36% say that the inability to automate the onboarding process negatively influences the new hire experience, particularly for training managers. With that in mind, this blog will focus on helping employers utilize automated employee onboarding by addressing common issues faced within this process.
Creating an organized experience that walks your new hires through every step of your onboarding programme – without any manual effort – is what automated employee onboarding is all about. It necessitates a one-time configuration for procedures such as recruit training, reminders, linking them with colleagues, and more.
This saves time for your human resources department and improves prospective employees’ initial impression of your company. With increasing perks, many recruiters see automation as a more customized, genuine choice for getting assistance with their problems. So how much difference is there between manual and automated employee onboarding?
Manual vs Automated Employee Onboarding
Even today, many firms use manual, document-heavy processes for crucial activities. This drastically reduces the new hire’s productivity and total growth. Here are some of the common issues associated with manual onboarding processes:
- Fragmented onboarding program
- Less control over hiring and recruiting processes
- Confusion in the inter-departmental communication process
- Time-consuming and error-prone process
On the plus side, automated onboarding is equipped with intelligence that promotes self-service assistance. Some of the top benefits of automated employee onboarding are:
- Provides faster resolutions to your employees
- Reduce customer inquiries for your team
- Save time, manual work, and costs
- More opportunities to create human connections
- Track completion of mandatory training
After all, onboarding is an excellent opportunity for businesses to win over new workers’ hearts and minds. Why risk that with an outdated and tedious onboarding process? Let’s see what employees themselves have to say.
Employees’ Perspective on Manual Onboarding
Only 12% of employees believe their company does an excellent job onboarding.
Furthermore, HCI discovered that over half of firms prioritize processes and paperwork during employee onboarding. Moreover, one-third of respondents reported that their onboarding procedure was informal, inconsistent, or reactive.
Employees believe the greatest employee onboarding programmes are structured and strategic and emphasize people rather than paperwork. Most employees think their employer does a poor job of onboarding them due to 3 factors:
The employee onboarding process feels impersonal.
To be effective, your staff must begin engaging with colleagues as soon as feasible. When your HR team performs respective duties manually, employee engagement becomes very difficult to accommodate. It entails introducing recruits to their coworkers, scheduling one-on-one lunches, and planning offsites. All of which demands too much of an HR staff that is already overworked.
The employee experience falters.
When your workers start their new roles, they will have many questions. They are either left in the dark or waste too much time hunting for answers since there is no convenient, automatic way to provide them. Similarly, they may repeatedly ask colleagues (particularly those in IT) the same questions. This can easily consume the latter’s time and hinder them from executing other vital business activities.
Administrative tasks are performed slowly, leaving your team vulnerable to significant mistakes.
Manually granting staff access to facilities, applications, and equipment may be time-consuming and challenging to execute correctly at scale. Resultantly, many of these jobs may be postponed, and even if they are completed, there is a potential that they will be poorly handled.
The consequences can be severe in any instance. For example, new workers may unintentionally acquire access to private employee data, potentially placing your organization in legal hot water. Furthermore, completing each new hire’s Employment Eligibility Verification form may take longer than three days from their start date, exposing your company to hefty penalties.
Now that we’re ready to say goodbye to manual onboarding let’s explore how you could automate it!
How to automate your onboarding processes?
The first step in welcoming new employees into your business is to provide them with a seamless onboarding experience. Organizations nowadays are using automation in their onboarding procedures to ensure a satisfying and informed experience. According to SHRM, companies should adhere to the four Cs of an automated onboarding process:
- Compliance: Educating new staff on legal and policy norms and regulations.
- Clarification: Ensure workers grasp their new positions and any job-specific expectations.
- Culture: Ensuring that employees can relate to the organization’s official and informal culture.
- Connection: Providing opportunities for new and existing workers to form meaningful relationships.
Digitizing your onboarding process is only the beginning. To gain the rewards, you must automate the operations. Let’s look at how to introduce automation into your onboarding process!
Organize Your Data Using an Integrated System
Automating the data by developing a personal protected workflow system is an excellent alternative to reducing paperwork. For example, by consolidating employee data into a single system, maximizing their hard and soft talents, competency, experiences, credentials, and education is simple. Furthermore, you may use data visualization technologies to use information readily.
Assign Documents Automatically
There should be no mailing lists, no paper documents on the desk, and no need to monitor if you provided all necessary documents to staff. Design a plan for allocating files to new hires and track whether they are opened.
Simplify the Account Creation
Setting up several accounts on various applications and software is tedious for the IT staff and the new employee. An automated onboarding procedure allows an HR team member to free up the time of the IT department, allowing them to focus on other vital work. The HR representative must enter an employee’s information once, and the programme will automatically generate accounts anywhere as needed.
Examine the new employees’ knowledge and progress.
Communicating critical knowledge and monitoring new employees’ learning progress with automated onboarding is simple. Typically, it takes significant time for HR team members to assess new employees’ comprehension of corporate processes and specific challenging issues. Instead, they may send the survey and receive the responses for each member automatically. As a result, you develop a single exam for a specific group of employees that will be utilized frequently.
Automate Enrollment of Benefits
Enrolling in benefits automatically streamlines the entire procedure. Send an automated email to prospective workers outlining the benefits package and instructing them on how to enrol electronically. Setting up automated reminders assists staff in meeting all critical deadlines.
Although commuter benefits, health plans, and retirement plans have their portals and administration systems, automated onboarding software can integrate and manage them.
Introduce Constant Feedback via a Notification System
According to a report from Jobvite, 20% of new workers leave the organization for a better opportunity within the first 45 days. Collecting the employee’s comments on their satisfaction with the onboarding process and recent work might therefore aid in the identification of possible issues. Artificial intelligence (AI) considerably simplifies and improves this procedure. After the first week, month, or quarter in employment, automated onboarding software might send out questionnaires.
Furthermore, artificial intelligence technologies may detect concealed unhappiness in survey findings and anticipate flight risks. This enables the firm to prevent turnover from occurring. If a flight risk is recognized, the AI notifies the recruiting manager or HR so that they may resolve the issue.
Analyze Work Performance: Monitor Employee Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Building an automated onboarding checklist of all the actions and goals a recruit must accomplish during onboarding, such as reading and signing paperwork, taking tests, or initiating collaborative projects is essential for success. You should also establish deadlines in a system and receive notifications as the date approaches. You can also get some essential metrics about the work completed. It is therefore simple to learn about and regulate the new employees’ time management abilities.
Employee onboarding has the potential to boost your company’s success significantly. However, this method is highly complicated and challenging to implement. Celayix provides some critical guidelines for successful new recruit engagement to utilize automated employee onboarding properly. These pointers assist businesses in making the most of the onboarding process.
Begin Onboarding the First Day
Starting onboarding on the first day allows you to make an excellent first impression. With onboarding automation software, you can provide all passwords, keys, and crucial files to recruits on time.
Monitor the Employee’s Progress
Every recruit should be aware of their tasks and objectives. As a result, many firms use onboarding software to enable workers to track their progress and HR managers to identify people who may want more assistance.
If necessary, modify the procedure.
Success is all about adapting to new challenges and continuously striving to improve. The HR staff can monitor the performance of the onboarding process with onboarding automation software and alter tactics that aren’t producing the desired outcomes.
Will you be Automating your Employee Onboarding?
Regardless of whether you still prefer to onboard employees manually or with automation, it’s essential that you don’t underestimate the benefits of strong employee onboarding. Organizations must put more thought and effort into converting attractive job applicants into effective long-term workers. This can be done by:
- Persuade managers of the benefits of an inclusive onboarding process and prepare them to participate.
- Focus on the Experience rather than the paperwork!
- Concentrate on Culture and Connection: Share the company’s history, values, people and big-picture vision for the future.
- Invest in Career Development: Growth of Employees = Growth of Organization
Would automation take away human interaction? Unlikely! Automation liberates your team’s time from repetitive administrative tasks, allowing you to concentrate your valuable time on genuine dialogues rather than repeating presentations or manual invitations. Finally, a tailored employee onboarding software like Celayix that contains all the capabilities would allow the organization to yield a positive and easy onboarding experience.
