Onboarding of new employees takes up a large amount of time of an HR department. It has many aspects to consider; paperwork to process, approvals to set up, documents to gather, training to provide, appraisal meetings to organise and so on. Tasks to be carried out involve not only HR department but also other departments; HR deals with compliance, IT deals with how to get equipment up and running and managers with expectations. Sometimes tasks need to be carried in parallel, sometimes one after another.
Most of these tasks are repeated for each new hire over and over again. This gets more complicated and worrisome when bulk employee onboarding is required in a short period of time and when you don’t have an easy solution available to automate these repetitive tasks.
The employee onboarding process should be smooth and simple, not time-consuming. With some of our customer’s feedback, and some research of our own, we’ve put together a list of ways to automate employee onboarding process so that you have more time to deal with other more important matters in the business:
1- Get paperwork out of the way
To keep the process quick and to avoid making a new employee spend long hours filling out forms, consider using a paperless solution not only for efficiency but also to support the environment. This can be done using a Business Process Management (BPM) software that enables your organisation to create online forms easily. New hires could fill these forms out on a computer on their first day or even before they start.
2- Give easy access to everyone involved in the process
You may have an international organisation where departments that are involved in this process are spread across the globe. A smart BPM software should provide a single place where everyone can access and complete their tasks one after another or in parallel. Starting a new hire process triggers an email thread to allow team members to collaborate, and leave room for feedback if a correction is needed.
3- Seamless bulk employee onboarding
Let’s assume after going through interviewing process, you have a list of new hires in your data source ready to onboard. This may be a spreadsheet, a list in SharePoint or a data list somewhere else. Having the ability to import this list and start onboarding workflow of each listed employee and set them up in other data sources automatically cuts down a lot of time and costs. Anyone in your organisation with no coding knowledge being able to build necessary forms to automate this process would give you a big advantage. You can then sit back and watch how your onboarding operation moves smoother and faster.
4- Use the most of your data no matter where it is located
Connection to multiple systems such as SharePoint, Active Directory, SQLServer, SAP or any other systems you may use in your organisation is crucial in the automation process. And more importantly, ability to connect to all these data sources in one single workflow, no matter where they are hosted on cloud or on-premise will speed up the entire process seamlessly and will avoid going through the pain of additional implementations and costs.
5- Go paperless with your inductions
Making sure a list of policy documents is read by the new hires before they start their job is not straightforward as by nature it is something not very appealing. What could help you save a significant amount of time and cut down the risks is automating this process. Starting with digitalising these documents, making sure employees read one after another in the right order, and track if they read the documents, request their digital signature are all going to help you to go paperless and speed up this process.
6- Think long-term
Another thing to consider is that onboarding process is not a process that only should be looked at when a new hire starts a job and then put aside and forget about it. It is an ongoing process that will need your attention for edits, updates on the existing employee’s positions, starting an offboarding, re-onboarding processes and so forth. A good BPM solution should be able to accommodate all these dynamic changes without you re-creating the work and should be flexible to adapt to your business’ unique changes to avoid unnecessary work down the line.
7-Don’t be limited to what’s available
There are many solutions out there with limited capabilities. Don’t get stuck in these limitations, your business may have specific requirements depending on what industry you are in, how your operations work and where your teams are based. Digital Transformation solutions should not lock your operations up in boundaries, but be flexible to adapt to your business, expand with it and allow you move further easier and more profitable.
Automating employee onboarding tasks will certainly pay off in the long-run
Onboarding process can be costly and time-consuming. Streamlining these processes now will certainly pay off in the long-run if these repetitive tasks are automated and manual work is reduced.
If you’re a business owner or manager and aware of how expensive and time-consuming onboarding employees can be, we have a solution that is specialised in workflow automation. Giving you the power to easily automate your employee onboarding process and overcome the inefficiency in your business.
Author:
Derya Sousa – Commercial Director/Co-Founder @Kianda