Onboarding is a critical time in every new employee’s work cycle to ensure that they adjust to their new jobs and work environment quickly and smoothly. There are many tools and applications to be set up, access cards to be issued, and VPN access to be shared. A negative onboarding experience can ultimately affect employee retention and turnover rates, costing the organization human and capital resources.
According to Forbes, “The Bureau of National Affairs estimates U.S. businesses lose $11 billion annually due to employee turnover.” For this reason, organizations need to start thinking about how to improve their current onboarding processes across the organization and provide the right tools to increase employee engagement and work assimilation from the start—and IT plays in critical role in the process.
In the following sections, we will talk about how you should be leveraging your self-service portal to speed up the onboarding process and improve new-hire experiences.
Automate Onboarding Processes with Self-Service
Eliminating manual procedures can streamline your organization’s onboarding process by reducing paperwork errors and eliminating oversights. It can also help you provide consistent information to all new hires, such as company information, internal procedures, organizational charts, or tax forms. But in order to automate, you need to make sure you have the most valuable asset in the company—knowledge.
Talk to newly-hired employees to find out what questions or requests they had during the onboarding process or analyze what common questions or requests were brought to the service desk during an onboarding process by analyzing past tickets that were submitted. Once you have that, talk to HR to identify the right processes for those questions or requests so you can move forward to automating these processes.
Automating your processes with a self-service portal enables your organization to:
- Customize work flows and electronic forms that fit the new-hire needs
- Facilitate inventory transactions such as request ID badges, computers, and equipment
- Integrate departments’ platforms into a self-service portal to extend the knowledge base
Additionally, being able to integrate your existing ITSM system with your self-service portal can help you gather accurate data from new hires to continue improving onboarding processes.
It is important to understand that process automation does not mean that the human touch is completely eliminated, rather, it helps facilitate your organization’s processes, reduces costs, and improves the employee experience.
Reduce Department Oversights
HR can have a lot on their plate, and overlooking tasks, such as forgetting to send pre-boarding paperwork or following up with new employees after their first week, can create a stressful self-service onboarding experience for new hires.
Using a self-service portal will allow new employees with 24/7 access to onboarding and organizational information. By removing ongoing logistical tasks and potential paperwork oversights, HR can focus its efforts on strategic planning and day-to-day operations.
While it’s critical that your organization’s self-service onboarding process is seamless, it is also essential that your departments are efficiently allocating their resources and costs. Bringing a new hire along might not only require HR efforts but other departments, such as IT or supervising departments, could be involved as well.
This is why creating a successful knowledge base—with a common FAQ for new employees or an interactive overview of how the organization is structured—will help your HR department, and many other departments within the organization, reduce oversights. Some more examples of materials that can be added to the knowledge base are:
- HR follow-up schedules
- Training demos and walkthroughs
- Company communications
Promote Employee Engagement
Employees’ onboarding experiences set the tone for what the rest of the company’s atmosphere will be like. Organizations that fail to provide an engaging onboarding experience run the risk of new employees not forming an initial bond with the organization, potentially increasing high turnover rates.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management’s research, self-efficacy, or self-confidence, in job performance is the first step in successful onboarding. This may include providing new employees with the necessary tools and knowledge in order to integrate with the work culture and become productive faster. But how do you keep new employees engaged from the get-go?
Using a self-service portal that has a strong knowledge base that provides an interactive experience, whether it be in a Q&A format or a video tutorial, can facilitate self-service onboarding processes and training for employees to engage with.
Using interactive self-service tools in the onboarding process helps:
- Set the tone for the company culture—it’s all about first impressions!
- Make new employees feel as if they are contributing to the company from the get-go
- Give employees the confidence they need from day one!
Improving the onboarding experience for new employees, and your organization, doesn’t have to be complicated. Automating procedures, reducing the possibilities of manual oversights, and providing engaging material can motivate new employees during the onboarding process and make your team’s job easier. With the right knowledge management and self-service tools, your organization can successfully improve and speed up the onboarding process.
