First impressions ARE important!Gone are the days of sticking your new hires in a conference room for a day with a mountain of paperwork and instructions to read and sign the employee handbook! Just like meeting a person for the first time, employers have a short window to make a great, first impression. The struggle for HR and managers is to find a balance between the required paperwork and actually welcoming the employee into the new work environment and setting them up for success in their position. An automated onboarding process can make a significant impact on first day logistics and streamline the entire process for the employee.
The paperless onboarding process can save HR hours of work by eliminating virtually all the printing and papers the new hires need to complete and sign. Instead, a checklist is assigned to the new hire’s profile within the unified HR platform. The new hire simply logins into their self-service portal (even on mobile) to access their checklist and to do items. The system presents digital forms like W4’s, handbooks, company policies and more. Benefit plan summaries can be read and selected online. The employee signs everything electronically and all is saved on the employee’s profile with a date stamp. HR Administrators can reports on completed checklists, pull documents and prove acknowledgement with time stamped e-signatures.
Due to state and federal regulations related to employees, not only are there several forms and brochures for your new hires, there are several tasks that need to be performed by others, besides yourself, to prepare for that employee to start, which need to happen. Coordinating this and ensuring you have collected everything you need can be time consuming and error prone without automated onboarding process.
The system can trigger reminder email notifications to various individuals including yourself, requesting that particular tasks get done. If it requires a flow through your business for multiple individuals, a HR Action and Workflow can be configured to move that process along to completion.
Most employers have different classes of employees and therefore require different documents and first day tasks and processes to be completed during on-boarding. Configure your checklists within our unified HCM solution that become the roadmap for the automated onboarding process. Create consistent experiences for the employee and make it easy to get your new hire up and running.
Depending on the classification, simply assign the correct onboarding checklist for the new hire and be confident that their onboarding experience will be correct. Consistent practices are key in a positive onboarding experience that treats everyone fairly and ensures all steps are completed.
Conducting onboarding using manual processes and different systems can make the onboarding process more complicated and difficult to find errors or omissions. With a unified HCM platform like OnePoint you and your employees are working in a single system so that every step of the onboarding process is trackable through completion. HR administrators can reduce the time and number of steps by as much as 40%.
Cohesive dashboards and reports make it easy for the employee, managers, administrators to see what steps have been completed on the checklist (or not). If there are tasks that have been missed by anyone in the process, automated reminders can be set up in the system to send emails reminding the employee that there are items to be completed.
By harnessing an automated onboarding process your time can now be spent on ways to put the human touch back into the first day. Both employer and employee have spent a lot of time and resources to get to this point. So finding a balance between the required stuff and the personal touch can have a significant impact on the employee experience and long term engagement. Create fun ways to introduce new hires to co-workers that showcase the company culture. Help managers find find ways to welcome the person to their team and establish objectives and clear expectations…all things needed to set up the new hire for success of being a happy, productive, collaborative team player for your organization.
Using an all-in-one HCM solution like OnePoint gives you the chance to create an automated onboarding process easy to follow, consistent and compliant onboarding process freeing up your time to make a great first impression on your new employees. Engagement and Interaction don’t have to be sacrificed when on-boarding your new hires. Remember that this electronic process does not take away from the human aspect of the on-boarding process. Hmmmm….with your onboarding automation time savings…you may even have time to start that mentoring program you’ve had on your wish list to complete!