The HR industry is abuzz with new technologies like automation and remote work models, especially since the COVID-19 storm has hit the world.
The need to fire up productivity and focus on impactful initiatives has never been more critical for HR teams. Since March 2020, most organizations across the U.S. moved to a remote work model and because of the pandemic, many businesses even shuttered or even cut down their operations.
The COVID-19 global humanitarian and health crisis has left an indelible mark on the world economy. For businesses to recover from the devastating effects of this pandemic, the need for automation is increasingly becoming more apparent by the day.
HR teams no longer enjoy the privilege of in-person meetings to get the contracts signed or seek help from functional heads for recruitment purposes. So how do you go about managing your HR task list now? The key to solve this problem is: automated HR processes.
You can now use HR automation technology to create automated workflows and streamline employee onboarding and offboarding processes and build memorable employee experiences.
Employee Onboarding and Offboarding Workflows
Onboarding and offboarding processes form an integral part of an HR professional’s role. From sifting through the mountains of resumes to screen candidates for many rounds of interviews and finally onboarding them, HR team needs to be conscious of the strategic cues they send to new hires in the first month or so.
Successfully onboarding new hires means much more than a mere good first impression. It’s an experience that needs to be delivered until a new hire fully settles in the role and delivers to his/her optimum potential.
The demand for organizations to retain best talent is intensifying. And yet, organizations often spend little time onboarding new hires. It’s not a smart approach to underestimate the power of an excellent onboarding process. It can deter the culture and business growth of the company later. In fact, according to Gartner, if the onboarding strategy is streamlined, it can see a productivity spike of up to 70%.
Onboarding impacts the complete employee lifecycle within the organization. According to an O.C. Tanner, 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for at least three years after a great onboarding experience. According to Recruiting data, 1 in 4 new hires will leave within 180 days. Millennials in the workforce switched jobs three times more than their older peers, representing a loss of $30.5 billion in turnover costs annually. According to the workflow mobility survey, 22% of companies do not have a formal onboarding process. Offboarding processes are equally important too.
A negative first impression can not only derail the rest of the onboarding process, but also the new employee’s further interactions with the organization. Some adverse impacts are:
- A negative impact on cultivating the psychological bond between the employee and the employer.
- A general low enthusiasm or participation from the new employee.
- A negative impact on productivity.
- A negative impact on the company culture.
Many hiring companies manage employee onboarding and offboarding using a traditional approach that relies primarily on paperwork, emails, and phone calls.
Challenges with Paper-based Onboarding Process
Paper-based processes are redundant, overwhelmingly tedious and time wasters. These create extra steps, increase the onboarding time, and provide plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong.
• Impersonal feel. The traditional paper-based employee onboarding includes additional steps. It’s common for the new hires losing up to 7 days, while struggling with attending piles of forms. It also removes peers and managers from the system, thus making the complete experience feel too impersonal.
• Intimidating Experience. The stacks of papers and manuals that need to be completed or read by the new hires might intimidate and overwhelm them on day one, which may have an adverse effect on employee turnover rate.
Your employees on their exits are either your brand advocates or detractors. They reflect your brand image. Hence, exit interviews are significant in detecting the gaps in the organization’s strategy to address and foster a positive work culture. As an HR pro, securing your company from compliance and security perspective too is a part of your job responsibility.
To build a structured onboarding program, you need to streamline your onboarding checklist. As it involves multiple checkpoints and approvals, it’s important to ensure that no step is missed. And, it’s not feasible to maintain such a checklist manually. Automation is the solution here.
- Send a virtual offer letter and other details.
- Collect and collate all the required personal details to set them up in the employee cycle.
- Upload work authorization documents.
- Finish payroll information collection.
- Send over benefits information.
- First-day welcome announcement to the organization with relevant information about the new hire – name, title, team, education, hobbies, etc.
- Prepare their workstation with computer/laptop, phone, email, office supplies, some welcome accessories – a handwritten welcome note (preferably signed by all team members), balloons, gifts, etc.
- An employee directory with pictures, official contact details, social media handles, etc.
- Orientation plan more focused on the employee, less on your organization.
- Mentor details.
- Cafetaria, coffee machines, pool table, nice eateries, and other related information.
- Team lunch, if possible.
- Physical office tour.
- Have them shadow a current employee.
- Let the functional heads/managers define a clear set of roles and responsibilities fot every new hire.
These HR onboarding and offboarding processes are labor intensive, time consuming and cumbersome. Though you may have many more points to add to the above checklist, it does give you a fair amount of idea as to what it entails.
Employee onboarding and offboarding are multi-step processes that have many critical risks involved and the stakeholders. Manual HR processes can have negative impacts such as probability of errors, loss of paper forms, dissatisfied employees, and an awful employee experience. Hours of productivity can be saved by moving the onboarding process online.
Automation technology puts all the pieces together and organizes the information to make it easily accessible to all the new and current employees. It can enhance the employee experience significantly by reducing human errors and providing complete transparency into the status of different tasks assigned.
Global crises such as COVID-19 have shot up this stress manifold. Burnout can easily seep in. This heightens the risk of manual errors in pen-and-paper based employee onboarding and offboarding processes. Hence, automation has emerged as the need of the hour for businesses of all sizes to stay afloat in this global financial crisis.
Using manual onboarding processes, you need to store and organize your employee documents in a filing cabinet and pray that those do not get misplaced or lost over time.
Now that you know you must leverage HR automation technology for competitive advantage, it’s time for us to uncover a few of its benefits.
- It saves time. The complete employee onboarding process may last well over a few days to months if it’s manual. You can expedite this process with an HR automation platform integrated with employee onboarding software that takes off the burden of the entire HR department. When you recruit a new talent and enter the details into the HR software, that’s where automation does the magic. It automates a series of actions and drives the whole onboarding process in a few clicks.
- It saves money. Did you know that employee turnover is three times higher for new employees boarded using manual processes as compared to new hires onboarded on automation processes? Also, if an HR automation solution is used, the amount of cost involved in recruiting, training and onboarding can be significantly reduced.
- It ensures more accuracy. Manual processes are more prone to errors. A good HR automation platform makes onboarding and offboarding a breeze and cuts down erroneous and mundane tasks.
- It promotes collaboration. Automated workflows facilitate cross-team collaboration. It helps teams easily assign and manage tasks.
- It enhances the employee experience. A self-service HR automation platform doesn’t scare the new hires with stacks of paper forms and manual processes. It makes the information collected sync easily with payroll and benefits and improves the employee experience manifold.
Automating the employee onboarding process gives every new hire the most delightful onboarding and old employees smoothest offboarding experience possible. Such an experience gives new hires the confidence on their first day on the job. Offboarding employees with the help of workflow automation software makes it easy for HR to manage parting agreements easily and removes the requirement for IT to manually delete accounts. Such an HR software for businesses of all sizes also ensures that new hires can hit their job milestones as they begin their stint at the company.
There are many good HR onboarding software available in the market such as UZIO that automates HR onboarding and offboarding workflows that come along with setting up the new hires for success through HR administration, benefits, and payroll. Assign tasks for each employee induction workflow you have. It saves your time and money that will help you focus on more strategic initiatives, while delivering a delightful employee experience.
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