From start to finish, the average employee onboarding process can range anywhere from days to weeks or even several months. GetFive teams around the world are all trying to find the most streamlined solution to make sure their new hires aren’t sitting around before they can start contributing. When the waiting doesn’t appear to have an end in sight, new hires will start to lose interest until they finally move on and find a job elsewhere.
Anytime the HR team is faced with the question of extended onboarding times, they go back to the drawing board and try to find a new solution. Better employee onboarding checklists? More Google forms?
Equally frustrated with poor systems, many department managers will develop their own onboarding process to fit their needs, circumventing the HR team and often duplicating work.
Rather than reinventing the whole process every few months, use an automated system to create one smooth and customizable onboarding workflow that integrates with all of your departments.Automation for consistent teamwork Employee onboarding software that relies on automation and not human memory promotes a culture of efficiency and a sense of purpose. The systematized workflow is based upon your team’s needs, eliminating redundant activities, endless paper trails, and miscommunication. It takes the guesswork out of assigned steps and their deadlines, and everyone sees changes or updates as they happen and stays on task, even when out of the office.
Onboarding software helps your team:
- Develop customized onboarding templates
- Define responsibilities for each team member
- Access analytics in real-time for generating reports
- Create and maintain an onboarding process without coding expertise
- Capture data and use it to link with other apps
- Receive alerts on mobile devices on the go
Instead of replacing the need for human exchange, the software enhances your ability to engage in meaningful conversation pertaining to the process, easily set goals, share details, define roles, and spot and fix any errors before they turn into costly delays. In turn, new hires save time completing required forms electronically ahead of time, so they are freed up to get acclimated to their roles once they start.Beyond the welcome committeeNo matter how many people you hire at a time, the software you use has to be as customizable as the onboarding process itself if you want to make new hires feel like they belong at your company. From the moment you tell them “you’re hired,” you have the chance to communicate the culture. But if you are constantly reshuffling forms around, you run the risk of showing new hires that your culture is chaotic and things stick around like gelatin nailed to a wall.
When creating a scalable onboarding process, you need to think beyond just your HR team. Other departments will have good ideas that are useful for all hires, or those specific to their teams. Have listening sessions where you can continuously build a better onboarding process.
Above all, be patient. If you make the onboarding experience is solid, your new hires will quickly become functioning members of your team.Start with something you can scaleWhen looking at your onboarding process, it is tempting to always want to go back and start from scratch. But if you begin with a tool that is customizable and can easily fit in specialty requests, then you can build on your knowledge instead of always tearing it down. Try it today and see where it takes you!
