June 22

Essential Guide to Employee Self Service Onboarding

The first day at work used to be rough. You got lost on the way to the staff toilets. You couldn’t get the computer to switch on. You called a co-worker Taylor for the entire first day, until someone told you his name was actually Cooper. Now that employee self service onboarding is a thing, the first days have improved for everyone, including Cooper. 

Employee self service onboarding is a way of automating the onboarding process so that new hires get streamlined, easy access to the IT, information, and resources they need to become properly oriented to their new company and role. It’s about giving newbies the right tools and pathway to set themselves up for a career of awesomeness.

Self service onboarding can be deployed in-office or to a remote workforce. You can bring newbies onboard wherever there’s a secure internet connection. It’s beneficial when hiring remote team members, as self service onboarding helps you give a consistent, personalized, and comprehensive onboarding experience for any new hire, wherever they are in the world.

What Employee Self Service Onboarding Isn’t

Employee self service isn’t about allowing new hires to help themselves to anything they want from a range of digital goodies. It’s not about letting them loose in your corporate networks and communication channels. It’s about creating a pathway that guides the new hire to what they need for their role, but also takes care of identity management, data security and compliance.

Why You Should Do Employee Self Service Onboarding

Done well, employee self service onboarding is a business asset. The advantages can improve your bottom line because time is money, and employee self service onboarding saves a whole truckload of time. Self service onboarding also:

  • Frees up HR administration time and effort by automating the repetitive onboarding elements. 
  • In some cases it uses e-signature capabilities and other integrative content management tools that speed up onboarding admin. This means the new hire can get started quickly on what you actually hired them to do.
  • Involves automated configuration of user accounts, email, and contacts, which liberates your IT team to work on more strategic tasks. No more manually configuring each new person’s device! “Yay”, they will tell you.
  • Gives your new hire a great first day. A good first day contributes to employee engagement, reasonable retention rates, and a happier team. First days can be nerve-wracking. If your newbie is faced with an easy-to-follow digital pathway that makes them feel welcome, and gets them connected with the resources they need to do their job, their anxiety will evaporate and they’ll love you forever.

Employee Self Service Onboarding: What You Need

For streamlined self service onboarding, you need two things.

  1. Content: the resources your new hire needs to a) become oriented, and b) do their job.
  2. Connection: how your new hire accesses and works with the content.

This is where you’ll need to become besties with your co-workers in HR, and if you are the HR member in charge of all of this process you probably know why. As the HR person, you provide a lot of the onboarding and role content if not all.

HR Duties: Creating the Content


Transactional Onboarding Content

HR should already have a workflow of transactional onboarding activities for the new hire to enjoy: personal data updating, policy agreements, benefit enrollments, e-learning, timesheets, team handbooks, first day videos, buddy assignments as well as induction into the corporate culture, in whatever form that takes. One, some or all of these might be accessible in various areas of the corporate intranet, or an unholy mashup of paper and online. There may also be manager self service portals through which managers deal directly with their new hires, for instance, by approving vacation leave. 

It’s important that, for new hires to access what they need from anywhere, all the transactional content should be online. Many organizations already use third-party SaaS Employee Self Service onboarding and management software that contains all the transactional content required, but this isn’t always deployed adequately or comprehensively. 

Role Content

The faster your new hire can access the tools and resources they need, the sooner they’ll be productive. HR and the newbie’s manager will know which apps, tools and data are required for the role. This has an impact on data security and permission levels. Self service shouldn’t be so free that a new person can access All The Things. They should only be able to access All The Appropriate Things, says the Principle of Least Privilege.

IT Duties: Preconfiguring, Securing and Deploying

The IT team has a Godzilla-like role in employee self service onboarding because only through the magic of Mobile Device Management (MDM) can your new person get their hands on all the lovely onboarding stuff. 

MDM allows you to automate onboarding using a zero-touch strategy, which saves time and temper for your IT team, and looks awesome to your new person. Here’s what happens, in two flavors:

Flavor 1: Zero Touch For Corporate-Owned Devices

Using your magnificent MDM platform, you’ll be able to securely deploy shiny fresh-from-the-oven devices from Apple (or whomever, we’re not judging) to your new hire based in Waikiki, Walker Mill or wherever. Or, if you’re on top of your asset register, you can assign them one of your spares, but you’ll have to lick the stamps yourself.  

For a new device, your new hire’s best first day ever starts when they boot it up and connect it to their WIFI. It’ll hit Apple up to ask, “Who do I belong to?” Apple will reply, “Hey, you belong to the new hire’s new company,” and the magic of MDM commences. Newbie will be led gracefully to create an account which gives them access to all the apps, tools and data that’s appropriate for their role. They’ll be taken to a dashboard where they can get started with the transactional onboarding activities, and self-serve from a custom list of enterprise-approved apps. Because you’re awesome at preconfiguring, the whole thing will take about twenty minutes. 

Flavor 2: Conditional Access for BYOB 

When your new hire is using their personal device for business, self service onboarding is a little more complex, because you’ve got to make sure that their device is compliant with corporate data security policies. It’s still zero-touch for you, though. Conditional access drops a big iron gate between your new hire’s device, and their ability to get access to corporate stuff. But their first day will still be awesome because they’ll be led through the process of signing up to their corporate account, verifying their identity and accepting the various security updates and requirements that reduce the risk of data breach through their device. 

Once your new hire has jumped through the security hoops, Cloud Single Sign On gives them a single point of entry to the corporate app catalog (one you pre-configured earlier) and away they go! 

Employee Self Service Onboarding: Getting Started

Once you’ve deployed employee self service onboarding, the only thing you’ll regret is the time it took you to make the decision. 

If you’d like to know how to get started, give us a call. We’re here to help.

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