Have you heard the expression “start as you mean to go on”? That expression could have been coined specifically for employee onboarding. An employee’s first day at a new job sets the tone for the entirety of their tenure there, and have huge implications for their future job performance, engagement, and general attitude about the company.
Why is Employee Onboarding So Critical?
Imagine you’re a new employee starting your first day with a company. You show up and it seems like no one is expecting you or really knows what to do, there’s no workstation set up for you, no logins or email ready. Maybe the team pulls together and gets everything set up quickly once they realize what’s happening, but the lack of readiness means you have to wait to have different departments set stuff up for you and you really don’t get to start working until the end of the week.
Now imagine another scenario. You show up for your first day and someone is waiting to greet you and show you around, including showing you to your desk. You have a computer all set up with the appropriate accessories and accounts, and you have access to everything you need. Instead of wasting time waiting for things to be set up, you can spend your first week meeting with the team and getting to work!
Don't Lose Time and Money Due to Onboarding Processes
If an employee isn't able to work your business is losing $$
Ensure new employees are ready to work and enable them to hit the ground running. No more manual processes creating bottlenecks, just approvals when necessary so they can start on day one able to showcase their true potential.
The Difference
Maybe by the end of the first week, the employee in each scenario is in roughly the same position. But how does the employee feel? In the first scenario, the employee feels undervalued – there wasn’t even a place for them to sit when they arrived! And probably a little nervous that they’ve accepted an offer with what appears to be a very disorganized, reactive company. Hardly the first impression that most organizations would want to project. On the other hand, the employee in scenario 2 feels valued, welcomed, and immediately like they are part of a well-oiled machine. Which tone would you rather set for a new employee starting with your company?
Mapping the Process
In the image each different colored block represents a different role that’s responsible for a task. Blue is HR, green is the hiring manager, coral is the executive admin, teal is IT, and gold is facilities. As you can see there a lot of different moving parts and people involved, even in this simplified example. And for a lot of our clients, this whole process is conducted by email – HR sends an email to IT and waits for an email back. Maybe they wait a few days without an email back from IT and have to follow up again, or someone misses an email and a task is never completed. And HR is having to do this with multiple people in different departments for each new hire. It’s not surprising this can be a disjointed process, prone to error.
Mapping out this process allows us to see what can be automated:
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Opportunities for automation range from simple tasks to more complex processes. Simple things include capturing necessary information from the new hire, setting up email notifications, simple approvals, and tracking their progress along the onboarding journey. Complex opportunities include multi-step approvals with thresholds, automatic account provisioning, task reminders to ensure requests don’t get lost, and auditing trail activities.
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