Onboarding is simply the process by which those who are newly employed by an organization learn the ins and outs of their job as well as the culture surrounding it. Doing this manually can prove to be too expensive, time-consuming and wasteful according to Langate. As a result many companies want to know how to automate the onboarding process and make the best of it.
Now, you might be wondering, how can organizations streamline this crucial process effortlessly? Let’s dive into the process of automating onboarding, and along the way, you’ll discover the significant benefits it brings.
Understanding onboarding
Onboarding’s purpose is to get employees well-acquainted with an organization and its processes. This requires companies to properly guide employees through the motions and includes taking the following measures:
- Laying out clear definitions and expectations of the job
- Facilitate proper growth of employee skills through effective training
- Provide good communication between employees, human resources and other necessary team members
- Provide proper integration so employees fit well within the culture, mission and values
- Ensure guidance on legal requirements, including policies and safety regulations
- Encourage mentorship and support, allowing team members to share knowledge/suggestions
- Customize training to meet individual needs and help with access to necessary tech tools
- Offer admin assistance and resources for software and equipment access
- Monitor job satisfaction through interactive methods, with a focus on diversity
- Establish educational programs and cultivate a positive learning environment
- Adapt processes to accommodate remote or freelance work arrangements
Main steps for the proper processing
The standard process isn’t exactly straightforward and requires a lot to be done on both the employer’s and the employee’s parts. When you factor in the high costs of hiring an employee, manual onboarding further can complicate matters. So understanding this requires you to know how the standard process goes, which is as follows:
#1. Docs Step
The first step takes sending of documentation such as benefit enrollment and tax forms as well as a look at policies to employees to be reviewed and completed. This process can also occur after orientation.
#2. Welcome Step
Orientation is a further important initial phase, which begins with a warm welcome for the employee. After the welcome, employees focus on understanding their job responsibilities and learning about the company’s culture. So it can involve the welcoming part, looking at the job responsibilities and learning of the mission.
#3. Training Step
The actual training, which may come online, on the job or via mentorship. The employee’s guide through the company’s policies including dress codes, safety protocol would be vital.
#4. Monitoring Step
After teaching employees about the organization’s history and culture as well as the introduction to teammates, you can make additional check-ins with employees after the initial process. This will help to ensure they are well accustomed.
While this process is effective, the management of employee information as well as the individualistic training process can draw things out. This is why it’s important to know how to set up the onboarding process. With this knowledge, companies can maximize their investment, which brings with it several advantages that we’ll get to.
How it’s automated: quick guide
We can now get into how one goes about automating their onboarding process and suffice to say, it involves quite a bit. For starters, you have to understand what is needed as well as what should be done. When it comes to the former, a host of tools can be used to help automate the onboarding process. Some of these include the following:
A learning management system
This tool is especially useful for curbing the often lengthy one-on-one training process. It achieves this by placing all activities regarding training under one central umbrella. Doing this streamlines the training process and makes it more accessible to multiple employees who can keep track of their lessons while employers keep track of their progress.
Human Resource Information System
Abbreviated as HRIS, these tools help their designated teams complete most of the necessary work regarding onboarding. This includes the management of employee data, the completion of paperwork as well and the handling of the training and development process. With this system, employee checklists can also be customized to meet their specific needs, while still maintaining the company’s established culture.
Notification systems
It’s important to have an idea of how morale is in an organization. This is best accomplished by introducing automated notification and feedback systems, which allow employees to give an insight into how the induction process as well as the job is going. Actually Artificial Intelligence is really an amazing tool to use with this particular bit because it can send out surveys, help with creative side according to Harward research, while also using the results to help see that the problem is fixed.
While these tools are useful, implementing them in one form or another should be done correctly. This includes doing the following:
- Planning for the move to automation by understanding the company’s needs
- Designing a platform that employees and personnel will use
- Bringing in some of the above tools to help with specific processes
- Ensuring data security as well as general compliance measures are seen to
- Ensuring that the quality of the software is up to the needed standard
- Integrating the software into the company’s existing human resource systems after the quality is ensured
- Keeping it better after deployment and focusing on management
Why to automate it
Onboarding comes with several benefits as alluded to earlier. Knowing how to automate onboarding and then doing it heightens those benefits. Some of these include the following:
- A lowering of the high expenses of traditional induction
- An elimination of process-related errors that may create inconsistencies regarding employee treatment
- Higher employee retention as a result of the previous benefit
- Better overall handling of compliance matters
- More efficient data management
- More efficient and improved productivity, motivation, and morale due to the streamlined process
Final thoughts
By considering the costs and strengths of hiring new employees, manual onboarding could be less effective than automating one. Knowing how to automate the process of onboarding and then successfully implementing said automation will help reduce many costs while being far more convenient. This can eventually bring profit in the long-run. With the aid of the right helpers, any company can improve this essential process.
Consider automation heavily, because as time goes on, the need for it will only grow. This is especially true when you consider how vast things such as compliance have been and will continue to be, making automation necessary, not optional.
