Your team likely has a strategy in place to keep candidates engaged and excited throughout the hiring process, and it’s just as important to drive employee engagement once you’ve secured qualified candidates.
A recent study found that employee engagement drops 22 percent after a few weeks on the job, and 52 percent of employees don’t believe their employers invest in improving the employee experience. When employee engagement declines, not only does this lead to decreased productivity, but disengaged employees are also more likely to seek job opportunities elsewhere.
To boost employee engagement and motivation from the moment an offer letter is signed, your team can leverage technology to ensure all HR-related processes are seamless. Below, we’ve outlined a few examples of technology solutions that can help your team connect with employees post-hire.
Support digital onboarding
For many employees, the onboarding process involves spending hours of the first day filling out tedious onboarding paperwork. This can cause employee engagement to take a hit, as the most motivated employees want to get straight to work and start contributing to the business.
Instead of completing paperwork on the first day, your team can turn to digital onboarding, which enables the onboarding process to kick off as soon as an offer letter is signed. Digital onboarding can help your team keep new hires engaged and excited to get started, and will save your HR team time that would otherwise be spent on administrative work during a new employee’s first day and week.
Automated, digital onboarding tasks that can be completed before the first day include: filling out direct deposit information for automated payroll, completing tax forms, filling out benefits paperwork and signing the employee handbook.
When employees read through your employee handbook before they even get started, they’ll get a chance to learn more about your company culture and core values, making them even more eager to get started driving results for your team. Recent data found that 69 percent of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they have a positive onboarding experience.
At a time when many businesses are operating in a remote capacity as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital onboarding can also help your team continue hiring and setting new employees up for success, even if you can’t meet in person.
Tap into a seamless payroll & HR platform
In addition to an efficient, engaging onboarding experience, your team needs to have the right technology in place to make HR tasks as user-friendly as possible. If employees can’t find their pay stubs, or lose track of how many systems they need to log into – such as payroll, benefits, time and attendance and countless other systems – they might get frustrated with your organization, causing engagement and motivation to decline.
Instead of tapping into several disjointed systems for your HR needs, your team can partner with an integrated hiring, payroll and HR platform to decrease manual tasks and avoid errors.
With an integrated platform, your team can make all HR processes seamless, boosting employee engagement and productivity, and saving time that can be spent on their day-to-day responsibilities.
Embrace integrated employee scheduling
Once new hires are onboarded, another way to drive engagement is by making the scheduling process as streamlined as possible for your employees. This can be made possible by an integration between your hiring and scheduling system. Through such an integration, new hire data can be seamlessly sent to your scheduling provider, enabling employees to accept new shifts quickly.
If your employees end up waiting around for shifts to manually get scheduled, they can get frustrated and might even seek work elsewhere. But more streamlined scheduling can enable your team to manage their own time – and accept shifts as they open up. Beyond shift flexibility, improved scheduling can also help your employees cut back on administrative tasks, helping them stay engaged and focus on more critical priorities.
Employee engagement can have a significant impact on your organization’s overall productivity and profitability. By tapping into the right post-hire technology, you can continuously drive engagement, which will set your team up for success in the long run. For additional tips on getting employees up to speed quickly and efficiently, read our Digital Onboarding Playbook.
