Bringing on a new hire can be both an exciting and stressful time for the employee and the organization. From an employee’s perspective, it is difficult to come into a new environment where you don’t know anyone and learn new processes and systems from the ground up. From an organization’s perspective, it’s difficult to know how to best train the new hire and prepare them for their role so they can begin providing value to the organization as quickly as possible. That’s why the employee onboarding process is so critical to a new hire’s success.
When the organization has a strategic plan to onboard new employees, it allows the newbie to hit the ground running. Employee onboarding automation ensures new hires are effectively brought into the organization through a streamlined process. This article will explore what onboarding automation is, the many benefits it provides, potential challenges to overcome with employee onboarding automation, and the different elements of the process that an organization can automate with the right tools.
What is employee onboarding automation?
Employee onboarding is about introducing the new hire to various aspects of the company, including the culture, people, and processes. It also includes role-specific familiarization with the skills and knowledge required to effectively complete their position’s day-to-day tasks. Because employee onboarding has so many different elements, such as data gathering, training, and meetings over several weeks, automating some aspects of the process can provide several benefits.
With employee onboarding automation, organizations can
- Reduce the number of missed or forgotten tasks
- Ensure new hires properly complete and sign off on each onboarding task
- Meet industry or government compliance regulations around safety and legality
- Clarify all expectations surrounding the job and the company
- Connect new hires to internal and external stakeholders within the company
- Teach organizational cultural norms
- Improve productivity within the organization
- Prepare new hires to begin providing value faster
- Increase employee retention rates
Jon Torres, a digital marketing consultant who provides entrepreneurs with guidance in setting up their own digital marketing firms, notes that onboarding automation speeds up the entire process of bringing on a new employee. “Automated employee onboarding helps create multiple accounts or open multiple files for a new hire in different business units at the same time,” he says. “Once the new hire’s file is opened, you can assign documents you use to teach your procedures and processes. In addition, you can track which documents they have opened and even test their understanding by giving them a quiz per process.”
Potential challenges of employee onboarding automation
Without onboarding automation, organizations face a number of difficulties. Not having a streamlined employee onboarding process means
- There is inconsistency in how the organization onboards new hires across departments and business groups.
- Employees in charge of onboarding face competing priorities and can’t fully focus on getting new hires up and running.
- The organization lacks a procedure to measure the success of the onboarding activities.
- New hires leave important onboarding tasks incomplete or forgotten.
- The onboarding process takes too long because employees aren’t notified when they are required to complete a task.
To avoid these challenges, organizations can use automation for certain parts of the employee onboarding process. Torres notes, ”Getting employees set up in accordance with your onboarding process could be the biggest challenge. However, some onboarding programs provide tips, templates, and other information to help you seamlessly add new automation items.”
Aspects of employee onboarding you can automate with ease
Automation enables organizations to focus on high-value onboarding activities, such as face-to-face meetings with important stakeholders as opposed to administrative tasks. Here are several onboarding processes organizations can automate for streamlined results.
Gathering data
When a new employee is brought into the organization, it’s vital to capture their contact information and technology requirements. Using a new hire onboarding form from Jotform is an organized way to capture this data. The form is fully customizable, and organizations can add or remove question fields as necessary.
Organizations can use many other employee information form templates during the onboarding process, such as emergency contact information forms, new hire checklists, medical information forms, time-off request forms, employee availability forms, and coronavirus checklist forms.
Getting to know new hires
In addition to gathering data such as addresses and phone numbers, organizations also need to learn more about their new hires by asking qualitative questions. For example, knowing the employee’s interests and hobbies is a great way to start a conversation and help them feel at ease in their new workplace. Torres explains, “It’s helpful to learn about a new hire’s likes, dislikes, and ambitions so they can build genuine relationships with colleagues and establish their place in the office.”
Jotform’s new hire questions form is an easy way to automate this process and capture pertinent details. Each form field is customizable so organizations can ask questions related to the culture of the business.
Requesting feedback
To improve the employee onboarding experience, it’s vital to solicit feedback from new hires as soon as they begin the process. This way, organizations can understand whether the onboarding activities are helpful, where they can improve the process, and if any gaps exist in the onboarding experience. Use Jotform’s new hire feedback form to capture this information and derive insights from the results. “You can automate the process of collecting employee feedback every few weeks and sending it to the right people at the right time,” says Torres.
Keeping new hires on track
There is a lot to remember as a new hire: coworkers’ names, meeting times, the many documents to digest, who to ask about troubleshooting a technical issue, and so on. To keep new hires on track during the onboarding process, you can automate these details within an employee onboarding template.
Jotform enables organizations to customize details like names, tasks, resources, processes, and other important information. Organizations can also add photos and links to documents to make the onboarding template more robust.
Securing timely approvals
Many aspects of the recruiting, hiring, and onboarding process involve complex workflows. For example, when providing the candidate with an offer letter, the HR associate may need to draft the letter and have the HR manager approve it before sending it to the candidate. In a busy workplace, securing these approvals can add days or weeks to the schedule. Employees get caught up in other tasks and forget to review items that need approval, requiring others to follow up multiple times before they can move forward.
Automating approvals with Jotform’s approvals template is an effective way to streamline this process and increase efficiency. Customized automated emails, conditional logic, expiration dates, automated notifications, and other elements help improve the workflow.
Organizing and managing data
Some of the data organizations gather during onboarding, such as contact information, is typically stored in a database and accessed when necessary. Other data, such as feedback forms, is more actionable and provides organizations with insight into how to move forward. Jotform Tables provides organizations with a way to collect, manage, and organize data in a low-code database — and share that data with other stakeholders for collaboration.
Depending on the type of information your organization collects, it can be vital to setting up the onboarding process as a whole. “Our company decided several months ago to use the same approach for onboarding employees as we do for customers. Each new hire undergoes a personalized onboarding process,” says Torres. “As an example, we determine the training materials, hours, methods, and preferred technology and gadgets based on what the candidate says in their application, or during the interview, and what we discover during our candidate research and background check. Employees are internal customers, after all. Before they can confidently sell you to your external customers, you need to sell your organization to them first.” Gathering data about your employees effectively and organizing and managing that data properly is critical to the success of the whole employee experience.
Employee onboarding automation enables organizations to save time, streamline processes, and reduce errors. It also provides companies with resources to focus more on strategic aspects of onboarding and less on administrative tasks. With the right onboarding automation tools, organizations can ensure their new hires are on the road to success from their very first day.
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