HR person, meet your new best friend. It’s your IT lead. Yes, that Lycra-clad colleague that communicates only in C#. That person with whom you sometimes exchange friendly grunts in the corridor. It’s time to buddy up, because they’ll help you automate onboarding process so hard that you won’t know what to do with all that time you’ll save.
Onboarding is your thing, and you know it’s essential to get it right, especially when your team is fully mobile, hiring in four hundred different countries, or your hybrid model of working just got CEO approval, and now you’ve got to make it work.
Why Good Onboarding Is Good
You’ll know that onboarding starts the moment your new hire signs the small print, and continues up to and beyond their first day. Best practice onboarding is packed with integrated elements that help your newbies:
- Acclimate quickly to your company and its way of working
- Get to know colleagues and managers
- Understand their role
- Start working effectively and rapidly
- Get a good first impression of your company
- Not badmouth you on Instagram
Why Bad Onboarding Is Bad
Ineffective onboarding can hurt your business. If your new people lack clarity about their role, feel isolated or unwelcome, don’t have the tools to do their job, or are frustrated by employer inefficiencies or mistakes, they’re more likely to leave. This means a smörgåsbord of hurties such as:
- Increased recruitment and training costs
- Lower morale
- Reduced productivity
- Risks to your brand reputation
- Wasted time for you, your HR team, and the leavers’ managers
No one wants this. No one.
Onboarding Automation Doesn’t Make You Less Human
Automation doesn’t mean you’re treating your new person like an automaton. You can use your tech to provide your new person with all the humanity.
With automated onboarding, you can quickly give them access to a suite of warm’n’fuzzies that will make them feel super-welcome and focused, such as:
- An interactive, personalized checklist and structure for their first few days and weeks on the job.
- Their calendar is pre-scheduled with video conferences: team and line manager meetups; work buddy chats (vital for remote working); webinars; training sessions, and team socials.
- An oh-so-informal virtual head office tour introduces key people, e.g., “Hi, I’m Derrin, and I’ll be sorting out your benefits.”
- Videos from recent recruits recording their feelings when they started, what they liked about working at the company, and any advice for the new person. Choose your recruit wisely.
- A gamified, interactive dashboard that records and directs them through the process of formalities - why make form-filling difficult and tedious?
- All the apps and platforms they need to actually do their job.
Your tech gives you the flexibility to respect your new hire’s personality. Extraverts want to press everything, party with everyone and have a gazillion team meetings on the first day. Introverts want to take their own sweet time to explore on their own, and maybe chat with a supervisor. Verts (it’s a word) want something in between. It’s all doable. Humans program your automated onboarding set-up for humans, so here’s how to get started:
How to Automate Onboarding Process
1. Meet Up With Your IT Lead
They’ll be way too excited about telling you how Mobile Device Management (MDM), the joy of their life, can automate your onboarding process. But you’re going to have to sit through it, because this is how your new hire gets the best first day ever, and you get to sleep at night.
Your IT lead will explain how the features of MDM can support automated onboarding. You’ll learn that it can give your new people the access, tools, and security they need to get productive, whether they’re working from their own Mac, Android, or Windows device, or whether you’ll send them a brand new device straight out of the box.
Your IT colleague will explain that automated onboarding using MDM has all the functionality you need to give your new team member the first day to remember, in all the good ways. For instance, MDM’s onboarding automation is:
Fast
On their first day, your new hire can get straight to business in under fifteen minutes. End of story.
Cross-Platform
Got a mixed bag of devices? Suppose you’re running a hybrid, BYOB, or fully remote team. In that case, your friendly cross-platform MDM provides an onboarding protocol that works with all the flavors: iOS, OS, Android, Windows, and heck, even Linux, if you’re desperate.
Simple to Follow
The first days can be anxiety-inducing. A well set-up MDM onboarding flow can alleviate anxiety by ensuring that it’s easy for any new person, whatever their level of tech, to get set up and started. It’ll lead them step-by-step through the required processes, and keep them informed of progress at every point of the joining journey. If they’re informed, they’re happy.
Pre-Programmable
This is what’ll make your HR team cry the happy tears. Traditional onboarding can be an unholy mess of duplication. All new people need access to some information. Some new people need access to all the information. Your new salesperson Neela needs different apps to those that new Binky in Accounts requires. MDM automated onboarding gives you a pre-programmable functionality to allow access, permission levels, and provisioning to new people based on role, location, or other criteria. It gives the right people the right access to the right things. And once you’ve agreed the protocol with your IT colleague, that’s it.
2. Co-create Your Onboarding Plan With It
Now you know how MDM can supercharge your onboarding process, discuss with your IT colleague what your new people will need. And your IT person should tell you what they need from you, from a data security perspective. Here’s what your agenda might look like:
- Are your new people getting corporate-owned new devices, or using their own? This will inform the kind of onboarding automation—zero-touch or conditional access—that’s deployed for them. It never hurts to find out more about the technical side of this.
- What apps and platforms does each role and level require access to? Do you use team calendars, collaboration platforms like Slack, or file sharing like Dropbox? Does your remote buddy system need messaging or video calls? Make sure your IT person knows what you need.
- What data security issues are important for your new people to comply with? You’ll be delighted to know that MDM can reduce the opportunity for your new people to make common data security mistakes.
Delight your IT colleague by asking them how you and your new people could make their job easier. Phishing training? Lovely. Enforced upgrades? Let’s welcome it!
Let’s Get Started
Automated onboarding gives your new employees more than a great first day. It will streamline your processes, and save you and your team time, money and headspace.
If automate onboarding process is something you could use, call us now. We’re techies, but we speak human.