Only 12 percent of all businesses globally have a great onboarding experience.

Most other organizations have a manual onboarding process approach, so they struggle with poor onboarding experiences. Their new hires have a terrible experience integrating with the company and its culture. These businesses struggle with low employee retention and engagement.

To combat these challenges, your company should invest in onboarding automation.

So, how do you do it?

To help you out, here’s how to automate the employee onboarding process.

What Is Employee Onboarding Automation?

Onboarding automation refers to using software to carry out different onboarding activities. You want to leverage technology to effectively undertake repetitive tasks such as sending emails to the new hires. The goal is to undertake these onboarding tasks with little or no help from the HR team.

Why Should You Automate the Employee Onboarding Process?

As a savvy small business owner, you’re right to wonder why you should invest in employee onboarding automation. You need to find out the returns this investment offers.

Here are the key benefits of automating the employee onboarding process.

Reduce Onboarding Costs

Automating the onboarding process eliminates costly manual tasks. Things that used to take days to complete can be done with a click of a button. Also, it reduces employee recruitment costs by improving the employee retention rate.

Increase Productivity

Employee onboarding automation gets rid of time-wasting mundane tasks. It frees up time for the HR team to focus on important tasks. The goal is to work on issues that have a significant impact on the onboarding process of new hires.

You want to ensure your HR team has enough time to guide the new hires on the company’s culture. The goal is to make the new employees quickly learn how your business operates.

Streamline Communication

Poor communication is one of the leading causes of a terrible onboarding process. New hires struggle to access information about the company’s cultures. Also, poor communication makes it hard for the HR team to coordinate different onboarding activities.

Automating the onboarding process will help your business overcome these communication challenges. The objective is to automate things such as sending emails to streamline communication. Your objective is to facilitate information sharing between HR and new hires.

Communication automation will make it easy to start interacting with the new hires before their starting day. The goal is to start the onboarding process ASAP to ensure the new hires have an incredible experience.

Increase Accuracy

Undertaking onboarding activities manually increases the risk of making costly errors. The HR team might fail to send out important onboarding documents on time. They might also misplace hard copies of sensitive onboarding forms.

Automating the onboarding process will help you avoid these errors. The goal is to increase accuracy and ensure HR compliance.

Simplify and Centralize Paperwork

Companies with a huge HR team usually struggle with decentralized paperwork. Some HR managers store new employee records in hard copies, while others keep soft copies. So, it’s a nightmare trying to access all these records.

Also, if another person takes over the HR position, they’ll have difficulty tracking employee records. Your business should invest in employee onboarding automation to overcome this struggle. The idea is to leverage technology to simplify and centralize employees’ paperwork.

Generate Insightful Reports

Automating the onboarding process makes tracking the new hires’ progress easy. The idea is to have HR software that generates insightful onboarding reports. These reports will help you know when things are not going according to plan.

With this information, you’ll decide how to get the onboarding activities back on track. You want to make certain that all key training activities are completed by the new hires. The goal is to equip them with the skills they need to perform the assigned roles.

To enjoy these amazing benefits, here’s how to automate your onboarding process.

Map Your Current Onboarding Process

You must map out your entire onboarding process to decide the best way to automate it. You decide when its starts, all integral activities, and when it ends.

To simplify this task, break the onboarding process into these phases.

1. Pre-Onboarding

In a survey involving 4000 job seekers, 20% of applicants who accepted the job offer didn’t show up for the first day.

Failing to hear from the employing company is one of the reasons why these applicants didn’t show up. Your business should invest in pre-onboarding to avoid this pitfall. The goal is to start the onboarding process as soon as a candidate accepts the job offer.

So, list all pre-onboarding activities and look for ways to automate them.

2. Welcoming New Employees

The next onboarding phase involves welcoming the new hires to your company. A huge part of this stage involves the new hires’ orientation. The idea is to educate the new employees on how your company operates.

Also, during this phase, you’ll introduce the new hires to current employees in different departments. These are individuals they’ll be working together when undertaking their day-to-day roles.

3. Role-Specific Training

Role-specific training is the most essential onboarding phase as it’ll directly affect the new hires’ performance. When done correctly, the training will help the new hires understand their roles and duties. Also, they’ll learn the tools to use when executing these roles.

You should leverage smart management and automate this phase to get positive results. So, design and develop training courses for the new hires. Also, automate workflows and reporting.

You want to make it simple for the new employees and HR department to access the training materials.

4. Transitioning the New Hire to Their New Roles

The final onboarding task involves helping the new hire transition to a fully pledged employee. You want to help them set clear goals and objectives. Also, you need to direct them on who to reach whenever they need assistance.

Carefully review how long each of the above phases takes and how to automate the entire process.

Also, when mapping your onboarding process, identify all the departments. You want to know how these departments relate to each other and how to improve their collaboration. Also, you need to understand the specific roles each of these departments plays in the onboarding process.

Finally, check how these departments have been handling the onboarding process in the past. The idea is to identify problem areas that can be solved by automating the onboarding process. These are mundane and repetitive tasks that require little or zero human effort.

These are tasks that you can easily automate.

Invest in a Unified Data System

A huge part of automating the onboarding process involves data centralization. The idea is to store the employee data in one system. You want to make it easy for the managers and the HR team to retrieve this data.

So, consider investing in reliable onboarding software to achieve this goal. You want to leverage this software’s functionalities to enhance the onboarding process.

Here are key features to check when searching for the best onboarding software:

• A user-friendly and highly intuitive interface
• Amazing customization options
• Cloud-based technology
• Workflow automation
• Easy to use assessment tools
• Easy to integrate with other HR and business software solutions
• Ability to generate comprehensive reports and analytics

A software that’ll automate communication, streamlining information sharing. You want to get the software to help you automate as many onboarding activities as possible. Finally, look for secure onboarding software to enhance data security.

Automate Onboarding Documents

The other way to automate the employee onboarding process is to go paperless. So, stop sending onboarding documents to the new hires via physical mail. Search for software that’ll help you electronically assign onboarding forms, such as the I-9 form.

Also, look for ways to verify the information filled on the onboarding forms, for example, verify I-9 remotely. The idea is to avoid the need for in-person meetings when assigning these forms. You want to leverage technology to streamline onboarding paperwork.

Use technology to create a schedule for sending documents and resources to the new hires. You want to avoid the risk of the HR team forgetting to send these documents on time. The goal is to ensure the new hires have the right resources when they need them.

Finally, use the onboarding software to track whether the new hires received the onboarding documents. Check if they opened these documents and their progress. The idea is to automatically prompt the new hires to go through the essential onboarding documents.

Simplify Accounts Generation

Your business must create multiple accounts on different work apps and software for all its new hires. It’s a nightmare creating each of these accounts individually. And that’s why a new hire can go for weeks without having access to key business software or app.

So, look for ways to simplify accounts generation to automate the onboarding process. The idea is to have a tool that automatically creates all the accounts the new hire needs on different platforms. So, all the HR team has to do is input the new hire’s information once.

Your goal is to ensure the new hire has access to all essential business apps and resources. Also, you want to eliminate the mundane task of creating these accounts individually. So, when comparing onboarding software solutions, look for the one that offers this feature.

Automate Benefit Enrollment

To improve the onboarding experience, automate the benefits enrollment. The idea is to send automated emails to the new hires walking them through the benefits package. Also, this email should guide them to complete the enrollment paperless.

Also, look for a source to merge all the employee benefits into a single portal. The idea is to ensure that the new hires don’t visit different portals to access this information. Finally, schedule automatic reminders to prompt the new hires to meet important deadlines.

Track New Employees’ KPIs

Tracking the new employees’ KPIs electronically is the other way to automate the onboarding process. The idea is to check how well they’re assimilating to their roles and the company’s culture. You want to check whether they understand what’s expected of them and how to deliver.

So, look for onboarding software that’ll help you develop easy-to-track KPIs. The idea is to have smart metrics to weigh the new hires’ performances. You’ll be able to real-time data that identifies performance gaps.

This data makes it easy to decide what to do to improve the onboarding process. The idea is to provide more training resources to the new hires automatically. You want to cover any training and knowledge gaps to enhance their performances.

Invest in a Notification System to Prompt Constant Feedback

A manual approach to the onboard process doesn’t provide a way to prompt new hires to provide feedback. So, despite giving the new hire hard copy survey forms, they might never fill them. And that’s why it’s hard to know how the new hires are transitioning into their new roles.

Without this information, knowing what to do to improve the onboarding process is impossible. You should automate this onboarding task by installing a notification system to promote constant feedback. The idea is to have a system that automatically surveys the new hires.

Also, this system will automatically prompt the new employees to fill in the survey. Your goal is to gather timely data on how the new hire is doing. This information makes it easy to take actions that improve employee happiness levels.

Improve Employee Engagement by Automating the Onboarding Process

You need to automate the onboarding process to streamline the employee hiring process. So, leverage the above tips to automate the employee onboarding process. You want to map out the entire onboarding process to pinpoint activities to automate.

To simplify undertaking all these tasks, search for the best onboarding software.

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