Onboarding new people successfully: Is it an art? A science? Or is it pure luck that your new hire had an awesome first day and doesn’t hate you yet? A negative onboarding experience can stomp all over your brand image and lead to high employee turnover and a ton of wasted time and money. That’s why onboarding automation exists – to streamline your onboarding process so that it’s fast, error-free, and contributes to a great experience for everyone. Even you.
So let’s take a peek at the onboarding automation best practices you need to know about.
Wait Up, Shouldn’t My New Hire Just Be Grateful They Have A Job?
Lose the attitude. The first thing they tell you in CEO School is that happy employees make better employees. They’ll not only do their jobs well, but they’ll even work the discretionary stuff just for the pure joy of it. If you’ve got a fistful of employee engagement, you’ve got a good foundation for a successful business. And a good onboarding experience is a great start.
What’s The Purpose of The Onboarding Process?
The way you introduce and guide employees into their roles directly affects your company’s bottom line – influencing retention, morale, and productivity.
The onboarding process should make more than just a positive impression, though. It should establish a strong connection between your new hire and your company. It should give your new hire an understanding of your organization’s culture, values, and goals. It should get them quickly connected with their teams for a sense of belonging and present them with the tools and access so they can dig into their work quickly.
How Automation Helps The Onboarding Process
Old-school approaches to onboarding involved a lot of paper and intensive new-hire management. The process can be crammed with tedious workflows, time-consuming tasks, and endless checklists. Automation improves the process’s quality and speed, and this streamlining saves you time and effort when hiring new employees. And making it oh-so-easy saves your new hires a ton of first-day anxiety.
Onboarding Automation Best Practices For Your Pleasure
Here’s where to start:
1. Work With HR
The starting point for introducing your shiny new automated onboarding process is to set the groundwork with HR. Here are your steps:
Onboarding requirements. Work together to establish the goals and requirements of your automated onboarding process. What does “good” look like? What would make a great experience for your new hires? Are you gonna have fun with KPIs on the speed of onboarding, feedback from newbies, and error rates?
Nature and content of workflow. Here’s where you get knee-deep in flowcharts and If-This-Then-Thats to establish what happens during the onboarding process and also decide when, where, and to whom. Remember, the workflow starts way before your noob’s first day. For instance, if you offer Choose Your Own Device, it won’t mean ordering the dang thing on Day One – there’s a lot of prep work to do beforehand.
Role-based apps and access. Half the fun of automation is welcoming your new person with a suite of apps and access based on their role and seniority. Everything will be ready when they start, and they won’t be overwhelmed with or confused by a pool overflowing with resources they don’t need. But first, you gotta establish which roles need which apps/files/access/permissions, etc., and that means working with HR and your core teams.
Once you establish who gets what, you’ll have the necessary info to preconfigure your system and deliver the right stuff to all the right meats. People. (Oops.)
2. Get Yourself A Checklist
Checklists make everything better. Your checklist is what keeps your onboarding process consistent and error-free and tells you where you are in the process. It’s a key part of your device onboarding strategy, too. Automated onboarding doesn’t mean everything is automated – people still have to make decisions and press ‘go’ for various automated procedures to happen.
3. Get Yourself MDM
The process of setting up a new remote employee’s devices can be pretty involved, including:
- Physically delivering a company laptop or other mobile devices.
- Setting up a business email account, logins, etc.
- Downloading company or 3rd party apps like Slack, Zoom, etc.
- Configuring system settings.
- Syncing contacts for team access.
- Setting up cloud accounts.
Fear not! For mobile device management (MDM) hath been built to do hard things. Using the power of divine awesomeness, MDM’s flexible configurationability (it’s a word) and automation-on-steroids capability can soup up your onboarding for a fast, error-free process. For starters, you can delight your new person with zero-touch onboarding.
Zero-touch onboarding is only the best thing ever. Here’s how it works:
- Your new hire gets a welcome present of a brand-spanking-new device from the Apple or Whatever Store delivered to their home on Day One. Have your IT people touched this device? Nope. They’ve not even seen it.
- Your new hire unboxes said device (hopefully without TikTokking the crap out of it), boots it up, and connects to their WiFi. And then the magic happens.
- The new device phones home to Apple or Whatever and asks, “Who’s my momma?” Apple says, “Newbie’s New Workplace is your momma – please proceed to Newbie’s New Workplace’s remote server.”
- The new device says “hi” to your remote server, and hey, bajingo! your new hire can now create an account. Their eyes are then dazzled with all the apps, permissions, and workflows required for their role and they’re ready to go.
- P.S. From unboxing to ready-to-roll takes about 15 minutes. Earth minutes.
4. Keep It Secure
Insecure onboarding rolls out the welcome mat for hackers. Inadequate security measures can pump up those device and network vulnerabilities to chunky proportions, and nobody wants that. Nobody. Here’s where you configure and automate MDM with an all-you-can-eat buffet of security measures to keep your newbie and your company safe from all the crapware. Configurations like:
- All the encryption.
- Remote lock-and-wipe in case of AWOL devices.
- Mobile application management for secure containerization if you’ve a BYOD policy.
- Network configuration, including VPN settings, WiFi access (or blocking), and firewalls.
- Detection of jailbroken devices.
- App denylisting – only authorized apps allowed here, folks!
Automating Your Onboarding Process Isn’t As Hard As It Sounds
Automation via zero-touch onboarding takes your process from several hours/days to 20 minutes or less. And there’s far less chance of anyone having an aneurysm in the process. And that’s just one of the benefits. If you’re a start-up that’s scaling up, onboarding automation really is a game-changer, despite the trite phrasing. If you’re at all automation-onboarding-curious, then give us a ring because we’re busting to help.
Ignition is Silicon Valley’s best (and friendliest) IT security, compliance, and support team. Contact us now – chatting about IT support and cybersecurity is our favorite thing to do!