Are You Missing The Mark On Onboarding?

How automation can help move the onboarding process along

Our recent study, "The Definitive Guide to Corporate America's Most Broken Processes," found onboarding ranked fifth on our list of the top broken processes in corporate America. The study also found that 71 percent of employees who are looking for new jobs think their company's onboarding processes are broken.
 

One of the main ways organizations miss the mark on onboarding is by not providing for new employees the tools and documents that enable good job performance. Other top onboarding issues include process-based onboarding (such as emergency procedures), becoming a part of the company culture, and even tasks as simple as being introduced to colleagues. Considering onboarding is a huge investment for today's organizations -- an average mid-size company spends $40,000 per year to onboard new employees -- it's disappointing so many onboarding programs aren't effective.
 
Automation can help HR departments during the onboarding process in a few ways. Despite their importance, tasks that require the human touch, such as one-on-one training or ongoing manager feedback, are difficult to squeeze into a busy schedule. To make sure there’s enough hours in the day, automation tools can streamline repetitive onboarding tasks like benefits enrollment and direct deposit set-up, freeing managers' time to focus on cultural training and other more complex tasks.

How Long Should the Process Take?

While there's no single correct answer for how long a company should devote to onboarding, it's safe to say most organizations could shorten this process after proper evaluation. Given how much needs to happen to properly onboard an employee, however, you’d be hard pressed to find an HR pro willing to shorten that timeline. That said, our study identified one common denominator among the most cited broken onboarding processes: paper.
 
Pursuing paperless processes cuts costs and drives efficiency. Once the basic tasks have been automated, managers and HR professionals have time to involve employees in the company culture and reap the benefits of a more engaged team member.

How Can a Company Make the Sensitive HR Data More Secure?

Human resource teams have a crucial role to play as gatekeepers of employees’ personal data. And as U.S. regulation around personally identifiable information (PII) comes to mirror that of GDPR, it’s important that HR staff understands their role in securely maintaining stores of employee information.
 
For instance, GDPR mandates any citizen can request of an employer their PII, whether that be a resume or performance reviews, and the employer must remove, access or provide that data on demand. If that data isn’t securely stored in a way that makes it easy to access, organizations will run into a compliance problem. While GDPR does not yet apply to U.S. citizens, we’re trending toward a similarly regulated future.
 
Adopting automation into your interactions with employees can ensure all data their employment generates is stored properly, accessed easily, and done so every single time without placing unnecessary burden on HR staff and eliminating the common mistakes in the process that could spell non-compliance. 

What are the Common Obstacles HR Experiences When Onboarding?

Companies continue to see a rise in remote workers, and it’s impacting how employees fit into new work environments. In the past two years, 43 percent of employed Americans said they spent at least a few days out of the week working from home. At the same time, our study found that 34 percent of employees believe their company did a poor job at assimilating them into their company culture, and 33 percent even said their company's process for introducing new employees to their colleagues was flawed.
 
With this in mind, HR leaders and supervisors need to restructure their onboarding process so that remote workers feel engaged in their company roles, as well as immersed in the culture.

Author Bio

Ryan Duguid is the Senior Vice President of Technology Strategy at Nintex. He has more than 20 years of global IT experience and works closely with organizations to define automation and technology strategies. Visit www.nintex.com Connect Ryan Duguid