Improving the Onboarding Experience with Automation

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Onboarding is an opportunity to make an effective first impression on new hires that significantly increases their confidence and likelihood towards the organization which benefits both the employee and the organization.

In general, people think onboarding is the process of filling out multiple forms that describes the terms and policies of the organization.

It is an essential part of the process, but an important aspect to consider is to make sure to describe clearly and make the employee adapt to the organization’s culture.

To ensure that an effective and appealing onboarding process is essential for the organization. To enhance this process, many organizations have started implementing employee onboarding automation.

Some of the best employee onboarding automation combines long-term training with worker support.

Using the advantages of technological development

With the latest developments in the field of technology, you could create interactive media and test that in real-time. This means the automation process has become a bit complex but also more scalable.

When decided to automate your employee’s onboarding experience, you need to identify and engage with two third-party services. One will provide the automation software and the other with the content like training videos and animation graphics.

You could automate all the steps that are involved in the traditional onboarding process including right from the offer letter or letter of acceptance until the form they fill and papers they sign.

All these steps could be automated along with automatic prompts to make sure the employee does not miss any of the steps.

Tasks can be developed in the form of a flowchart so that sending alerts or notifications can be triggered once after the completion of each task. Good automation software enables you to set this up easily even with minimal technical knowledge.

Setting up an admin end of the software could be a little boring and time-consuming process, but saves a lot of effort and time with repetitive work when the initial setup is perfectly completed.

Ways to Improve the Onboarding experience:

There are steps which you could follow to improve the entire onboarding experience such as :

Automating paperwork

Filling out forms is an integral part of onboarding, but should not be the only main focus area. The Human Resource department can automate this repetitive process and could spend that time on areas that are also important such as ensuring that the new hires get a clear idea and feel comfortable in their new position.

RPA software does a great job in extracting the details from the forms and feeding that information to proper channels that help with the payroll, IT clearance, etc. In fact, it is known that the automated process is more accurate than that of a human mind.

Employee journey roadmap

An employee journey roadmap is an imaginary blueprint for the employee marking the various milestones that they want to achieve at an organization. An employee journey is important and similar to that of a customer journey for any business.

The ultimate objective of mapping an employee journey is to understand the career goals of the employees and making sure to define the various steps it takes to reach such a goal. This benefits both the employee and the organization.

Interaction with managers

An effective way to enhance the onboarding experience is to conduct a meeting for new hires to connect with managers. Even though group meetings are a good way for many reasons, conducting a one-to-one meeting with managers would enhance the experience to a greater extent.

Because during a personal meeting with managers, the new hire could open up and also get a clear idea in setting the expectations. Also, it helps the managers to know their teammates better rather than form a group meeting.

Buddy program

The onboarding experience gets better for an employee when they are paired with an already established co-worker as a buddy or mentor to help them adjust and get comfortable with their new role.

Buddies or mentors help the new hire with any clarification that is needed in the beginning stage of their career at the organization. It also helps the employee to get to know about the organization better from an insider’s point of view.

Improving these areas would increase employee retention rate

The ultimate goal of an effective onboarding process is to increase the attention and productivity of the worker and get them to engage more with the organization.

A broader implication of this process will accommodate the new hire with the culture of the organization and help the employee to adapt to the new position and benefit the organization.

All these processes along with employee onboarding automation followed step by step with proper care would eventually make the employee stick to the organization longer than usual and that increases the retention rate for the organization.