How Efficient Is Your Company’s Employee Onboarding Process?

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HARNESS EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING (AND OFFBOARDING) PROCESS TECHNOLOGY TO ENHANCE SERVICE & EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCES.

Remove roadblocks to employee success and productivity with seamless onboarding, transition, and offboarding processes.

Employee onboarding, transition, and offboarding processes can easily fall through the cracks at busy companies. When these critical employee experience pathways are managed poorly or overlooked entirely, the effects on your business can be negative and far reaching. Shortfalls in these critical processes can lead to:

High employee churn and turnover rates.
Reduced employee morale and engagement.
Higher stress and workloads for remaining employees.
Downstream business impacts from slowed projects and poor customer experiences.

Read on to learn where to focus your attention for the greatest impact, and how leveraging human resources (HR) technology enables positive experiences through the full employee journey.

Develop Welcoming, Supportive, and Seamless Employee Experiences.

More than 27 out of every 100 US employees voluntarily left their jobs in 2019, and approximately one-third of them left within the first year of employment, according to research by the Work Institute. This voluntary turnover is costly for companies, with employee replacement costs ranging from one-half to double the former employees salary, according to Gallup.

When you get a new job, you’re an outsider entering a new community. It’s natural to want and expect a warm welcome, but in busy organizations, the welcome too often feels perfunctory or rushed. Your new company’s onboarding process needs to include all associated service organization tasks necessary to get you onboarded.

Further, the process should include increased personalization for new hires such as a welcome basket delivered to their house or a request for polo shirt sizes. Send the message to new employees that they did indeed make the right choice in joining your company.

Processes streamlined by ServiceNow software include:

Pre-onboarding. This is the administrative preparation that happens after applicants accept a job offer and before their first day of work. The Pre-Onboarding phase of the process gets the new employee engaged immediately. Use software to trigger important steps, such as signing a contract, performing compliance homework, linking to a welcome video from the executive team, and inputting bank information for direct deposits. The IT team will assist with setting up email addresses, accesses and workstations, and sending laptops to remote workers.

Onboarding, orientation, and training. During this phase, new team members meet colleagues (in person or over video conference), begin learning their role and the roles of those they’ll work with, and learn the key platforms and processes necessary to do their job well. EchoStor can set up ServiceNow to ensure that these processes take place in a timely manner and are tracked throughout this phase—with prompts for HR, various department leaders, the hiring manager, and new hires. It will also send notifications when important trainings and meetings haven’t occurred yet.

Ongoing transitions. Ideally, employment is an evolution. From new hire to established employee. Getting a promotion or increased responsibilities. Adding new skills. Employees want to know they are being supported in their career growth and through any changes in work expectations or acquisitions. EchoStor has significant experience in coupling ServiceNow with enhanced processes, so organizations can create customized workforce training and development timelines (based on best practices), frequent new hire check-ins, and ongoing discussions for employees to share concerns and goals for their current role and career.

Transitions also include the process of an employee having a baby, adding them to insurance, or a company “onesie” or welcome basket being sent to the employee’s family. Employee and manager feedback sets the improvement agenda for the entire onboarding, transition, and offboarding process.

Prioritize Security During Onboarding and Offboarding.

Protecting your organization’s data is essential. The process of onboarding new employees and offboarding employees who are exiting (voluntarily or involuntarily) can introduce risk of cyber attacks and sensitive data theft.

With technology that schedules onboarding and offboarding processes, critical IT and HR security tasks are prioritized and tracked to meet established timelines.

At onboarding, this will include assigning and configuring devices, providing necessary software and application access, creating company emails, and training employees on cybersecurity policies and practices.

At offboarding, this will mean disabling email and platform logins, disconnecting remote desktop access, updating shared account passwords for remaining employees, and clarifying next steps for company-owned IT devices.

Automate Repeatable Processes to Streamline the Employee Experience.

Most of the fundamental onboarding and offboarding tasks of the full employee journey are repeatable. Finding areas to automate can free up time for authentic workplace connections, learning, and impactful collaboration. It can also ensure that your organization meets security milestones and compliance requirements.

Automatable tasks include:

Onboarding

Sending:

–   Welcome emails
–   Benefit enrollment deadline notifications
–   Digital documents for signatures

Providing access to necessary platforms
Sending training and security policy videos and tracking completion
Scheduling orientation and training for first few weeks of employment
Sending welcome baskets, polo shirts, and company-customized swag

Transitions

Sending clarification of new role expectations
Providing access to new platforms and applications
Informing everyone impacted by the employee transition or promotion

Offboarding

Scheduling exit interviews
Sending farewell/retirement gifts and emails
Removing access to platforms, remote desktops, and applications

When considering which tasks to automate for your organization, begin with a focus on processes that are most time consuming and introduce the most risk when not completed with urgency (or get skipped altogether).