How you handle employee arrivals and departures says oh-so-much about your corporate culture. Giving a new hire a shoddy first day says, “Hey, we’re not prepared, and we don’t care enough to get prepared.” Offboarding people insecurely and ungraciously says, “Nope, still don’t care.”
Here’s where onboarding and offboarding automation can make it seem like you care. But it’s not just about your reputation and building employee engagement. When you implement onboarding and offboarding automation, you’re streamlining a ton of business processes. When things are faster, more secure, and all-joined-up, you can make everybody happy. Including yourself.
Non-Automated Onboarding and Offboarding Is Hard
Onboarding and offboarding employees can be challenging at the best of times, let alone in a stressed-out startup environment with minimal HR staff and an onboarding target of a bazillion by Friday. (And, yep, you’ll need to offboard the original founder, too. Awkward.)
Hiring and firing is time-consuming, and there’s a massive opportunity cost. Think of all the IT/HR/newbie-person hours that could be better spent on strategic rather than mundane tasks. Non-automated hiring and firing is often cursed with:
- A lack of resources. Traditional onboarding and offboarding require manual employee-by-employee transactional processes. This takes forever. <4eva>.
- Non-standardized procedures. A hasty, disorganized onboarding process creates skyrocketing anxiety for your new person who’s slow getting into the role and can leave remote workers feeling super isolated. Similarly, an unstructured offboarding procedure often leads to missing documentation or failure to remove ex-employees from your network. That’s a future data breach right there.
- Non-compliance with legal obligations. You’ll need to check off umpteen regulatory compliance boxes for both onboarding and offboarding processes, including a dumpsterful of employee information to distribute to tax, bank, and healthcare authorities.
- Higher employee turnover. Lackluster onboarding can leave your new people questioning their life choices. If you can read minds, you’ll hear them think, “Is this the company I really want to work for?” Or something ruder. Best practice onboarding strategies make new employees feel valued; best offboarding practices make former team members feel appreciated for their hard work.
Want to avoid the risk of a.) sad new hires, b.) angry old hires, and c.) cybersecurity vulnerabilities? Simple: Get yourself some automation.
The Advantages of Onboarding & Offboarding Automation
Here’s the thing. Onboarding automation is one of those awesome all-around tools that can boost your team’s productivity, reduce errors by taking complex processes out of fallible human hands, and allow people to focus on more rewarding jobs instead of repetitive tasks. Bless your eyes with Diagram 1.
Fast onboarding process: Zero-touch onboarding – and its BYOD cousin, conditional access onboarding – gets your new hires set up and connected to their teams in Hour One, Day One. It also allows your IT team to do funner things than sitting in a dusty basement manually configuring devices. (Maybe even venture above-ground.)
Shortened learning curve: Efficient onboarding gives your new hires access to the tools, files, and teams they need to do their job super-quickly. They’re not waiting for something they need, and they’re not bamboozled by a ton of apps they don’t grok because app curation is a thing you have now.
Improved employee engagement: First impressions count. So when a new job welcomes you with a new device, a user-friendly self-onboarding process, and no foul-ups, you’ll probably think your new employer a.) knows what they’re doing and b.) actually values you. Yay!
Improved security: Traditional onboarding is risky. Every time you onboard someone, a new attack vector is born. Traditional offboarding is super-risky. You’re looking at:
- Open access to sensitive information.
- Corporate-owned devices that go AWOL.
- Non-compliance with cybersecurity frameworks like SOC 2.
Automated onboarding and offboarding are rammed full of security protocols that totally betamax almost all such risks.
How to Implement Onboarding and Offboarding Automation
Implementing new onboarding and offboarding systems definitely takes work and is a project in itself, but it can be fairly bloodless if you check a few boxes:
1. Create A New Onboarding/Offboarding Policy
This is your set of guidelines that describes how you’ll onboard and offboard using your new automated system (we’ll get to the automated bit later, but a policy structure always comes first). It gives you your one source of truth for important stuff like:
- Roles & responsibilities.
- Setting expectations.
- How new hires are onboarded and old hires transitioned out.
- How and when the process is reviewed and improved.
2. Get Yourself Some Mobile Device Management (MDM)
MDM is your primary tool for automating many of the workflows and security considerations involved in both onboarding and offboarding. It allows you to enroll all your corporate devices under a single pane of glass from which you’ll configure and control them. MDM also lets you:
- Preconfigure user profiles based on role and seniority. Once you’ve thrashed it out with HR, MDM automatically gives your new hires access only to the tools and apps they’ll need for their jobs.
- Configure devices remotely. This is super handy if you’re offering a BYOD device policy. MDM ensures that only devices that are compliant with your corporate security policies get access to your corporate network. Mobile application management (MAM), a subset of MDM, ensures that you can offer BYOD with confidence.
- Onboard in batches. Hiring 57 people by tomorrow? Don’t panic because, once configured, MDM automation will take care of all your hires simultaneously. MDM handles bulk actions with aplomb. You’re welcome.
- Automate rules and triggers. Arrange for tasks to execute automagically when triggered by specific actions. Rules-based logic uses an “if this, then that” scenario to set automations, e.g., “If an employee end date is entered into the HR system, then all accounts belonging to that employee automatically close on that date.”
3. Don’t Forget Your Checklist
Yep, automation is the gift that keeps on giving – but that doesn’t mean humans can set it and forget it. At least one human team member needs to get up on their hind legs to make sure each onboard and offboard is completed properly. Here’s where a robust onboarding and offboarding checklist comes to the rescue. Your checklist is a structured document that clarifies each step of the onboarding/offboarding process and who’s responsible. It ensures that the process actually happens IRL.
Automation Is The Thing You Need, And We’re Not Even Joking
You want to hire new people, but you don’t want to do More Hard Things. You want to fire Freddie in Sales, but if it’s not secure, Freddie will definitely come back and spear-phish you. Automation is how you make it happen. And we can help you implement an onboarding and offboarding automation process that works for your business – probably by Friday. Or Monday. Anyway, if you’re automation-curious, give us a call. We’re here to help.
Ignition is Silicon Valley’s best (and friendliest) IT security, compliance, and support team. Contact us now – chatting about IT support and cybersecurity is our favorite thing to do!