New employee onboarding is the process of integrating new employee with the company and its culture, as well as getting new hire the tools and information needed to become a productive member of the team. On-boarding new hires at an organization is a strategic process that impacts employee experience of the first few days and months and are crucial to ensure high retention.
For successful onboarding, it is important to design a comprehensive process from start to finish.
Such a process will include not only necessary & sufficient documentation to complete but also will look at other factors that will help the new employee assimilate while ensuring they get necessary tools for success on their job. This involves multiple stakeholders and different activities. When this has to be done at multiple locations the complexity of the on-boarding process increases multi folds.
A technology solution which is flexible and wraps around nicely with your overall onboarding process and various elements of the same can help you streamline the process & ensure the employee experience is consistent across locations.
A workflow approach to onboarding ensures that tasks can be assigned to individuals and completion of such tasks is tracked. New employees can complete certain activities in a self-service manner even before they have joined the organization, thus ensuring a lot of the paperwork is taken care of during the “pre-boarding” period, this reduces the time to productivity once the employee is on board.
Simple Checklists can be created ensuring that critical aspects of the process are not missed by various stakeholders and all necessary tools are made available to the new employee on his or her day of joining. Such checklists can also be assigned to managers to ensure that critical actions within first 30, 60, and 90 days of joining are being completed by the manager.
With a digitized tool, you can include various aspects like orientation to company history, culture, vision, & mission statements for effective presentation to the new employees. A digitized process allows new employees to interact with each other virtually. They can also participate in digitized pulse surveys and quizzes which indicate the level of engagement they have with the overall onboarding process. This is a very valuable insight that companies can get as overall feedback on the design of the on-boarding process. Such real-time feedback based on specific action/s taken by the new employees is invaluable data which can help management to redesign the process for more effectiveness more frequently than earlier.
If one had to summarize key benefits of digitized orientation process they would be:
- The digitized process helps ensure a unified experience across multiple locations
- The digitized process ensures that all stakeholders understand their tasks and are routinely reminded to complete the same, thus ensuring that on-boarding is consistent across locations and individuals.
- The digitized process can help curate content over a period of time & evaluate which type of content works for new hires.
- Continuous feedback through various methods during the digitized orientation process helps measure the engagement and effectiveness of the process
- It enables better tracking and reporting of various tasks by multiple stakeholders thus enabling a consistent, efficient & effective process
Both research and common sense tell us we should invest time and effort into preparing employees to be successful in their jobs. In spite of this, many organizations still fall short when it comes to effective onboarding. A top-notch on-boarding solution requires commitment and creativity to move beyond solving transactional needs. Leveraging technology can help ensure consistency, automate processes, and free up time for other activities
