Industry Research: How to Improve the Employee Experience During Onboarding

Beginning a new job can be stressful for the new employee, and for the organization that is onboarding them. This stress has been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is very likely that if you have hired a new employee in the last few months, you have not even met them in person, and they have not been able to step foot in the office.  

 

Countless business operations have been affected by COVID-19, but it is more important than ever to focus on business continuity. This means helping your employees feel like it is business as usual – especially for the new starters. Their opinion of you as an organization hinges on their onboarding experience, and could mean the difference between a loyal, productive employee, or someone who leaves before their probation period is up. So how do you impress your new employees?

The Four Cs of Onboarding  

To maximize success of onboarding a new employee, SHRM recommends following the four Cs: 
 
Compliance: Teaching employees basic legal and policy-related rules and regulations.   

Clarification: Ensuring that employees understand their new jobs and all related expectations.  

Culture: Providing employees with a sense of organizational norms— both formal and informal.  

Connection: Developing vital interpersonal relationships and information networks for new employees.  
 
Satisfying these four Cs not only ensures employees can get to work and satisfy your business needs immediately, but also to help them feel comfortable and happy in their new role. SHRM lays out the three different ways organization approach onboarding: 
 
“Passive Onboarding: Almost all organizations naturally cover compliance as part of formal onboarding… [but] neither Culture nor Connection is addressed... If your firm is engaged in Passive Onboarding, also known as Level 1, you are likely to view onboarding as a checklist of unrelated tasks to be completed. Research shows that approximately 30% of organizations work at this level.  
 
High Potential Onboarding: When compliance and clarification are well covered by a firm’s formal onboarding practices and some culture and connection mechanisms are in place, High Potential Onboarding (Level 2) has been reached. In these organizations, about 50% of all firms, the complete process has not yet been established in a systematic way across the organization.  
 
Proactive Onboarding: All four Cs are formally addressed in Proactive Onboarding. If your firm is systematically organizing onboarding with a strategic human resource management approach, you are at Level 3. Only about 20% of organizations achieve this level.” 
 
Achieving proactive onboarding will be challenging in today’s environment. Remote operations will likely achieve passive onboarding with no problem. But it will be hard to instill culture and develop connections if new starters are working from home and have not had a chance to meet and interact with colleagues face-to-face. Having strategic HR and onboarding processes in place can help you meet requirements, adhere to best practice and reap the benefits. 

The Benefits of Getting Onboarding Right  

“Research and conventional wisdom both suggest that employees get about 90 days to prove themselves in a new job. The faster new hires feel welcome and prepared for their jobs, the faster they will be able to successfully contribute to the firm’s mission,” says SHRM.  
 
How you handle the onboarding will have an impact on productivity during the hiring period and beyond; it will shape your employee’s opinion of you. If they are happy, you will see dedication and efficiency. In fact, Forbes found that satisfied, happy employees are 20% more productive than unhappy employees. This happiness will stem from fostering meaningful relationships (Connection), understanding and delivering what is expected of them so they can be successful (Clarification) and feeling like part of the team (Culture).  
 
It will also save money on recruitment. A quarter of new hires move on within a year, according to Allied, so you need to instil positive feelings from the beginning. A great onboarding experience can improve employee retention by as much as 82%, according to Glassdoor. But a negative one results in new hires being twice as likely to look for other opportunities. And you don’t want that. 

Automating the Onboarding Experience  

According to the Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Research report, when digital onboarding is used in the hiring stage, new employees are more productive within their first few weeks of work. This sets the stage for the rest of the employees' tenure at the company and gives them a great head start. 
 
But digitizing the experience is just the start. You need to automate processes if you want to guarantee a smooth onboarding experience. You can create a process flow in Bizagi Modeler to ensure that important services and assets are delivered in time for the employee’s start date. You can automate triggers in the process so that once one task is complete, it prompts the next person in the chain to complete their responsibilities. 
 
Key tasks within the process can also be automated, such as the distribution of forms and documents to be signed, and connecting with IT to ensure the new starter has access rights on the network - particularly important when working remotely. This way, you can rest reassured that your new starter will hit the ground running. 
 
Bizagi’s robust orchestration capabilities enable the automation of tactical onboarding. This includes IT account creation, hardware distribution, email set-up, and sponsor assignment, which can all be co-ordinated and completed efficiently. Bizagi also supports full scale pro-active on boarding; native integration with Microsoft Sage enables AI analysis and recommendation for training and inculcation paths. Standard integration with the three leading RPA vendors also allows for document processing and industry-standard APIs that enable total processes workflow to include your payroll, accounting, training and other HR systems.  
 
Automation should be used so that the human factor can be focused on. Less time spent on paperwork means more culture, connection, and clarification. Most organizations only focus on onboarding for a week, but that’s hardly enough time to get someone fully settled. You should continually track an employee's progress and review how they are getting on. 
 
In this day and age, employees expect their onboarding experience to be proactive, and most importantly, demonstrative of the value the company places on them. Use automation to free everyone of the tedious tasks and to move right towards the more important aspect: the employee themselves. Employees are not numbers or cattle; they are special and need to know how valued they are. After all you did just invest thousands of dollars to find them…  

Drew Jaehnig is an Industry Practice Leader at Bizagi (Business Agility) with 27 years of management and supervisor experience. Drew has successfully managed large globally dispersed staff for the Department of Defense in some of the most challenging environments. He is also a process improvement and customer experience expert and has been helping organizations with on-boarding issues for over a decade. Visit www.blog.bizagi.com   Connect Drew Jaehnig