We get it. Your business is growing. You’ve optimized all the markets that ever were, adjusted your verticals, done things with blue-sky thinking and flagpoles, and now it’s time to hire all the people.
Employing many people at once can get sticky. If it’s the season for that thing you sell, you’ll need many seasonal workers up and working quickly. Maybe you’re hiring a team in Delhi, three people in Worcestershire (bet you can’t pronounce that one), and two hundred more somewhere else. Onboarding remote workers is a challenge. That’s why you’ll need to automate that employee onboarding process quickly.
Why Automate Onboarding?
Why automate anything? Because it saves time, money, headspace, and donkeywork, usually.
Here’s precisely why employee onboarding automation should be top of your to-do list:
It Saves You Time and Headspace
Without automated onboarding, here’s what you don’t have to do: unpack a device, boot it up, secure it, configure it, provision it appropriately, pack it up, stick a label on it and send it out. Even if you’re fast, it’ll take two to three hours per device. Who’s got time for that? Use that time to do something more fun or strategic.
With automated onboarding, the device pretty much configures itself.
It Improves Employee Productivity
Automated onboarding gets your new hire up and working in about fifteen minutes. They’ll get access to their online tools like Slack or Dropbox, the welcome emails, the team meeting calendar, and the rest of the online induction stuff while brewing their first organic matcha latte of the day or just regular coffee, hopefully.
It Makes You Look Good
Give your new hire the first day to remember (in a good way), and they’ll love you forever, or at least until their first paycheck. Automated onboarding is an anxiety-reducing streamlined approach that can give your new people a belief that you know what you’re doing and that you’ve thought of everything they need. An excellent first day contributes to improved levels of employee engagement, so well done you.
Employee Onboarding Automation: How To Get Started
1. Get Yourself Some Sweet, Sweet Mobile Device Management (MDM)
MDM is the engine that drives automation. Your fleet of devices might be corporate-owned, BYOD, or both. It might be made of pure macOS and iOS, Windows, or a blend. But whatever makes up the DNA of your fleet, you’ll need MDM. Onboarding technologies, such as those provided by Apple or Windows, can only be enabled through MDM.
If you already have MDM, make sure that its configurations and payloads are up-to-date and that somebody is responsible for actively managing it. Automation doesn’t work well if the system is out of date.
2. Get Yourself Some Protocols
When you’re automating the tech and software you’re using, you need to know what you want. Basically, you’re programming the automation to do the right things for the right people. For some of this, you’ll need to have a beer/coffee/wrestling match with HR, but think through:
- Role-based access and permission levels. Which new hire needs access to which online tools or data? To reduce the risk of data breaches, it’s good practice to allow data access only to people who need it.
- What information is included in the induction process, and in what order. HR may write and present a lot of this—welcoming emails, access to digital learning, team calendar stuff—but you’ll need to ensure that the new hires can access it.
- When to set up accounts for new hires. Platforms like Slack will start charging as soon as you set up a new account, so it makes sense to open your new hire’s account just a few days before their first day.
- Offboarding protocols. It’s essential for data security that offboarded employees can’t access corporate data. Accounts that you create for them will stay current and open until you remember to shut them down or block access. The good news is that you can automate employee offboarding, too.
3. Choose Your Flavor of Employee Onboarding Automation
Much of this will depend on the mix of devices in your fleet. Here’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it in-depth guide:
Zero Touch Onboarding
If Your New People Get a Brand-Spanker of a New Corporate-Owned Device on Their First Day
Zero touch onboarding means you never even have to look at that dang device. That’s because it’s shipped straight from the fruit company (or whomever) to your newbie. They’ll open it up as excited as a kid getting their Christmas present. Your new person will boot it up, connect it to their WIFI, and before they can say, ‘Wow, my new employers are so cool,” (quite slowly, say, over 15 minutes) they’ll have access to all the apps, platforms and data they need to feel welcome and get productive.
That’s because zero touch onboarding is the bee’s patellae when it comes to automation. Here’s how it works:
- As soon as it’s connected, the device will metaphorically phone the fruit company to ask, “Who owns me?”
- The fruit company will identify your business as the device owner, and give it access to your remote management server.
- The remote management server will ask your new hire to create an account and then…
- Bingo! Your new hire has access to a catalog of apps and fun that’s tailored specially for their role.
Good work! And you never lifted a finger.
Conditional Access
If Your New People Are Using Their Own Device
Conditional access says “If you want to access your new employer’s stuff, you have to do these things.” It’s a little more complicated than zero touch onboarding, but still automated and fast, as the new hire will be prompted step-by-step through the enrollment process. It’s self-service and they’ll be prompted to:
- Accept remote management for some device activities.
- Ensure their device is compliant with corporate security requirements. For instance, remote management will push for strong passcodes, encryption, multi-factor authentication, and the latest OS update
If you add Cloud Single Sign-On to your employee onboarding automation, they’ll have fast and secure access to whichever corporate apps and tools are right for their role.
Why not get started?
Employee onboarding automation is one of the simplest ways to make life easier and work less hassle for you, your HR colleagues, and your new hires.
If you’d like to give employee onboarding automation a go, give us a call. We can help.