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To ensure any new employee’s success, effective onboarding is critical. But many businesses and HR leaders don’t have a set onboarding process and find it stressful and time consuming. Disjointed onboarding can leave new employees feeling frustrated and harm your business as a whole – in the rush to get an employee onboarded, you might miss out on key documents or you might not provide new employees with enough information and training to succeed in their roles.
Onboarding doesn’t have to be tedious. Instead of manually completing each onboarding step, automated onboarding can make the process seamless for both your HR team and new hires. Below, we’ve pulled together several benefits of automating your employee onboarding.
Complete Digital Onboarding Before New Hires Start
Most new employees have two weeks or longer between when they sign a job offer and start a new job. And during this period, there’s plenty of time for new hires to get ahead with onboarding. Sending onboarding documents digitally will help keep employees engaged and excited to get started, and will save your HR team a significant amount of time during the employee’s first day and week.
Up to 70 percent of corporate managers think employee onboarding is frustrating, while more than half say that it takes 10 or more interactions across an average of five departments to prepare for a new employee’s first day. And no new employee wants to spend the majority of their first day in the HR office filling out paperwork. Digital onboarding enables new employees to start contributing to the company on the first day, rather than focusing on required paperwork. And it saves your HR team from repeating the same onboarding tasks each time a new employee is hired.
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 dive into 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 start working for your team.
Centralize All Onboarding Documents
Some businesses still keep onboarding documents and other related materials in a filing cabinet or other physical space. But this method of organization has many drawbacks. For example, you could lose a critical onboarding document right before a new employee starts, or end up sharing an outdated version of a document, such as an employee handbook. And your HR team likely spends a significant amount of time tracking down each document any time a new employee starts.
Rather than collecting a stack of papers, you can stay more organized, reduce errors, and save time and money by keeping all onboarding and training materials centralized in a single hiring and talent platform. With automated onboarding, as soon as a new employee is officially hired, he or she can immediately begin onboarding digitally. This process also ensures each employee receives consistent materials, so no new employee will miss out on critical information.
Track the Progress of Onboarding
Think about the current process you have in place for keeping track of onboarding paperwork. Perhaps you use a physical folder with printed material, or a digital folder in your email or on your desktop. If you’re using any of these processes to manage onboarding, there’s always a risk for human error and you could end up missing a step in the onboarding process – especially if you’re hiring many employees at once. For example, one employee might forget to fill out his or her direct deposit form, which can delay the first paycheck. Or a new hire might not sign a copy of your employee handbook, and end up not knowing what to expect on the first day.
By instead centralizing your onboarding materials in a hiring and talent management platform, you can automatically track which onboarding steps have been completed and which tasks still need to be taken care of. The platform will show an overview of new hires and the status of each, including: those who have not started onboarding, which step each new hire is on, steps where action is required and which new hires have completed all digital onboarding steps. Email reminders will also be sent to new hires so you don’t need to chase each employee down to complete onboarding paperwork.
Not only will automated onboarding help your HR team stay organized and productive, but it will also help your new employees begin contributing to the company as quickly as possible. Without rushing to fill out written paperwork on the first day and hand it into the HR team, your employees can dive right into training and get started in their day-to-day roles.
For more information on effective onboarding and talent management, download our eBook, “Unifying Your Hiring and Talent Management Systems.”
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