So, you made that thing and it’s super successful. Well done, you! Now you need to hire a phalanx of top salespeople around the world to sell it before the world moves on to something more shiny/weird/edible. How are you going to get those new hires onboarded and selling before your next coffee break?
If your normal onboarding protocol involves fiddling around with 56 devices in your breakout room/walk-in closet/Room of Shame before packing and shipping them off to your newbies, you’re probably sobbing into your latte as we speak. Dry those tears, because you got this. We will teach you how to reduce onboarding time with our six favorite tips.
Why Should I Care About Onboarding Time, Anyway?
You should care about onboarding time because the sooner you get your new people in, welcomed, and up to speed, the sooner magical things can happen. Things like:
- Improved productivity: You want your new hires to be productive as quickly as possible You can achieve this by making sure each new hire has immediate access to the tools and resources that will get them up and running quickly. Onboarding delays mean a slower learning curve and Adam Smith spinning in his grave. Is that really what you want?
- Engaged employees: Give a new hire a great first day and they’ll stick around for longer, reducing your recruitment costs. But, if they’re waiting around at home for a device or can’t access the things they need to feel welcome and start learning, they’ll feel different about you. Heck, they might even leave and give you a big fat raspberry on Glassdoor.
Now that you care, learn how to reduce onboarding time with these six methods.
How to Reduce Onboarding Time: Our Six Favorite Tips
Tip 1: Get It on With HR
Grab a couple of donuts and go meet with Claire and Dezi, head of HR and Recruitment respectively, because IT/HR collaboration is a match made in onboarding heaven. The work you do together lays the foundations for streamlined, superfast onboarding for the future. Get started by:
- Using design thinking to create IT routes for HR’s onboarding workflow, including customizing workflows for different languages, etc.
- Discussing provisioning by role; HR will know what new staff needs access to. For instance, roles and grades may have different access requirements (or none at all) to Slack, Dropbox, and in-house files. Here’s where you decide your provisioning, file sharing, and access protocols for the IT awesomeness that is about to happen.
Tip 2: Get Mobile Device Management (MDM)
For those of you at the back, FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE GET MDM. It’s a message we’ve yelled about since before the pterodactyls, and it makes us more uncomfy than a gusset full of pill bugs that not every business has it yet. MDM is an uber-tip, an all-around business asset, but especially good for speeding up onboarding, as it facilitates the joys of Tips 3 to 5. Got a mixed fleet? Not a problem. MDM doesn’t care. It’s platform agnostic, so you’re welcome to use the right device for each hire.
Tip 3: Enjoy Zero-Touch Onboarding
Perfect for remote workers, simply drop-kick your shiny corporate-owned device directly to your new hire. They’ll boot up and follow the instructions while their yerba mate is brewing, and be able to access their schedule, apps, preferences, and welcome stuff in about, hmm, 20 minutes.
It’s automated and secure because your IT lead has pre-programmed all the provisioning and security stuff from the safety of the centralized MDM dashboard. Zero-touch onboarding isn’t magic, but it does reduce onboarding time in a way that will make you believe in fairies.
Tip 4. Choose BYOB-Friendly Onboarding
In the bad old days, making BYOB safe to the cyber security standards of even the laxest of compliance officers was hard. Then there’s the privacy issue: does your super new hire want to feel that they’re being watched? Nope, because who does? If your business model relies on BYOB for new hires, conditional access–another flavor of device onboarding automation–will get them working quickly and securely.
Tip 5: Get a Little Bonkers About Cloud Single Sign-On (SSO)
Dezi in Recruitment tells you there are 47 new hires starting Friday and today is Friday…each new hire needs a megaton of cloud accounts created so they can get on with doing their thing. No need to do violence to Dezi; with MDM you can create and provision the newbies with the cloud accounts they need in a single click. And, because the new hires only need a single sign-on to tuck into the goodies, they won’t waste time flapping around with passwords and calling the IT helpdesk every two minutes for a reset.
Tip 6: Discover Device Warehousing
Supply chain issues can throw a pineapple into your onboarding process. Do you buy ahead of time and store a ton of devices in your guest room? Or, do you hold off buying and risk your new hires being without their devices for weeks because of supply delays? The guest room is the better option for onboarding speed, but storage is no joke if you don’t have space.
Device warehousing is the new kid on the onboarding block. It allows you to buy device stock ahead of time, because you have somewhere safe and loving to store them (ahem, us). And, when your new hire joins, they will get their device at the right time.
Start Squeezing Onboarding Time Like You Mean It
These are today’s top tips for how to reduce onboarding time. Ask us tomorrow and our favorites will be different, but what we do know is that MDM makes everything better and is especially good at improving onboarding speed, security, and effectiveness. If you would like to get your new people happily onboarded, we can help.
Ignition is Silicon Valley’s best (and friendliest) IT security, compliance, and support team. Call us now – chatting about IT support and cybersecurity is our favorite thing to do!