Everybody in your company loves Lisa. She’s your ever-cheerful go-to HR diamond, who has single-handedly hired all your co-workers for the past eight years, sorted out their paperwork, manually set up all their work account. Heck, she even sent them welcome cookies on their first day. Lisa’s great.
But yesterday, she quit.
And now you've like a quintillion new joiners ready to start next month, and you can’t even spell onboarding, let alone do it.
Here’s where onboarding automation is your new best friend. It’s not going to replace the can-do attitude of Lisa. Still, it will improve the onboarding experience by onboarding your new people seamlessly while you beg Lisa to come back. Because onboarding automation is Lisa’s best friend, too.
Onboarding Is More Complex Than You Think
For non-HR people, HR might seem an easy-peasy job. But allow yourself to be disabused of that notion. HR is damn difficult because HR people have to get the right newbies into the right roles to make your company thrive. They also have to get the right stuff to your newbies so they won’t leave. The recruitment and onboarding side is just a tiny part of HR’s job. No wonder Lisa quit. She’s knackered.
It’s down to you to sort this out. So, first lesson, here are just 14 of what Lisa’s core HR onboarding practices might have included:
- Requesting contract and ID documentation and signatures from new hires, and tracking progress.
- Signing them up to the right cloud accounts for their role, site, or level: Slack, Google, Dropbox, etc.
- Starting and managing their benefits packages.
- Ensuring their personal data is correct and recording emergency contact information.
- Signing them up to payroll and pension plans.
- Assigning them to customized workflows, depending on the role.
- Signing them up to your employee self-service platform.
- Assigning them to the right work group.
- Giving them access to your open source company wiki.
- Opening accounts for them on outsourced HR functions such as Sage HR for vacation planning.
- Making sure they’re assigned the correct uniform or safety equipment, depending on their role.
- Adding them to the correct communications channels.
- Making sure their birthday is assigned to the team calendar because Lisa is like that.
- Sending out an “Are you ok? Do you still love us?” questionnaire at Weeks 1, 4, 7, or whenever your company’s employee engagement scores are performed.
HR tackles all the tiny tasks that take so much time, but are the foundation of your company’s effectiveness. Now Lisa’s gone, is it time to start panicking?
Nope, because onboarding automation will pull you out of the Ditch of Gross.
Onboarding Automation: Where To Start Part 1
If Lisa has left some hastily-scribbled notes, that’s a start. Otherwise, you’ll need to create two things. First, an onboarding checklist: this ensures you’ve covered everything that onboarding is—payroll, communications, workflows, induction training, etc. Second, you’ll need to create an onboarding pipeline. Onboarding pipeline, say what?
Your Onboarding Pipeline
The onboarding pipeline is a plan of how a new person travels through the onboarding process, depending on their role or level. It’s an If This Then That (ITTT) situation, and it forms the basis of how you preconfigure your onboarding systems, so that automation can take over.
For example, you’ve hired Meena, and she’s a senior engineer. Because Meena’s a new person, an engineer, and senior, she’s assigned:
- All the new person stuff: payroll, vacation requests, legal forms, welcome emails, birthday on calendar, etc.
- All the engineer stuff: the technical training, the Slack engineering channel, the technical wiki, the Zoom meeting dates for the engineering team, the agile project management platform, an invite to the engineering department’s Christmas party, and access to all the tech apps.
- All the senior stuff: access to her team’s performance stats, the manager self-service channel, and her reporting workflow.
She’s not assigned to anything she doesn’t need, so she won’t be faced with an overwhelming catalog of apps and tasks that aren’t appropriate for her role.
Once you’ve done the hard thinking, it’s time for some hard work, preconfiguring and pre-populating your systems with all the stops on the pipeline for ITTT decisions—Ahem, we can help with this.
Onboarding Automation: Where To Start Part 2
We’ve just three words to say to you. Mobile Device Management. Or MDM to its friends. MDM is how you configure and deploy your onboarding pipeline. From a central, user-friendly dashboard, you’ll be able to onboard new people with just a click or two. Once they’re in their correct pipeline, automation does its magical thing.
With MDM, you can also securely deploy the actual device to your new hire, wherever they are in the world, through zero-touch or conditional access onboarding. They’ll be up and running in about twenty minutes for zero-touch and a little more with conditional access.
Why Onboarding Automation Improves the Onboarding Experience
Why would it not? Automation is your best pal. When you automate your onboarding process, the world is happier, and this is why:
- Your new person gets a beautiful first impression of you. They get access to everything they need from day one, meaning they feel valued and believe that you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t.
- Because your new hire gets what they need sooner rather than later, they’ll get productive sooner rather than later.
- Lisa will return, tempted by your promise that manual onboarding is no more, and she can have fun with more strategic projects.