Navigating the Challenges of New Employee Onboarding

Sapling, a leader in manufacturing synchronized clock systems and time zone clocks helping organizations over the globe to better coordinate time and attendance management systems has recently conducted a survey and found that 88% of organizations fail while forming an efficient process for a comprehensive employee onboarding program.

“It was only lately when I asked my super senior about clarity on my roles and responsibilities, I got connected with my reporting manager but that too after more than a week I joined.”  I came across various such statements from new hirings while surveying more than 1500 new hires and some 450 HR professionals in different MNCs primarily based in Singapore. Our report concluded that just 12% of employees are satisfied with their organization assisting in onboarding the new hires.

Badly designed manual onboarding processes hinder employees and employers to connect, it’s not that they delay communicating rightly, it’s just they are busy failing to prioritize tasks. A poor onboarding experience can quite potentially negatively hit the newly hired ones and can also impact employee retention, productivity, and the employer’s overall understanding reputation. Said that, there is a cure, which is being embraced worldwide, which is automation of the onboarding process to rightly navigate through the challenges in new employee onboarding.

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Key Challenges Of Manual New Employee Onboarding

While highly equipped HR professionals have been failing to cope up with this issue and operations managers are failing to understand why the HR department isn’t able to retain employees when they are forwarding papers in a month of joining. It represents the culture of your organization and how you prioritize your crucial assets which are the employees. You don’t know them and they don’t know you and if communication fails then the relationship establishments could be hindered and new hires are most likely to presume things on their own. You hired them and you must take care of them, at the least, communicate, understand other challenges below;

• Information Overload

  Loads of paperwork and manual data entry usually pressurises new hires with least information in the beginning.

• Inconsistent Process

  No standardized system with predefined set of elements for different employees to deliver varying levels of information on onboarding steps, prevails inconsistency.

• Time Constraints

  Running between different departments to manually complete the onboarding prerequisites consumes significant time from HR personnel and puzzles the new hires.

• No Monitoring

  The huge challenge is to track which onboarding steps and if the newly hires have been able to understand and complete them as required, confusion prevails.

• Compliance

  Raffling between piles of physical documents and ensuring compliance simultaneously is nearly impossible which gives challenges to both, HRs and the new hires.

• Lack Of Personalization

  To handle every onboarding task manually is not possible and efficiently tailor the information to support individual new employee needs goes missing in all this.

What Is Onboarding Automation?

Automation is everywhere and when we specifically talk about the HR related tasks catering the people needs, automation is an essential. It doesn’t only help in streamline onboarding-related workflows. Its adaptation provides a space where an organisation can set predefined business

policies and regulations to be followed. At any event, when a deviation from the adherence is observed, the automation system triggers notifications and ideal actions to be implied within your apps, data, and teams.

Adopting automation in onboarding helps in tackling the repetitive tasks required to be put in place for a new employee to assist them with everything they need to start pushing your growth. An onboarding automation solution usually includes;

• Facilitating with applications and equipment as required
• Planning and conducting a variety of orientation meetings
• Designing and providing all documents related to onboarding which are required to be reviewed and signed
• A mentoring schedule or buddy-up with seasoned ones
• Sending them a package with company swag

How To Automate New Employee Onboarding

After you have got the idea on how you could address the struggles while you onboard the new hires by integrating automating processes, let’s now proceed on understanding how to undertake solutions and cover the path to get optimum results.

By Adopting Automating Software Services

There are many comprehensive solutions available to help your organisation’s HR department handle the new onboarding with complete efficiency and ensure that the experience of your newly hired ones never gets faltered. Some of you might be stuck with the thought of long implementation time in integrating with your in-house process and information and sharing of IP.

These softwares/apps are well designed to be highly adaptive as per your company policies to ensure adherence and data safety can be trusted upon with high security. They also need less amount of data and most of them never even ask for IP rights and access as they are highly intuitive and based on machine learning ML, which learns over the time and suggests solutions as per the experience and behaves accordingly.

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Before you select the onboarding automation solution, make sure that;

• You understand your needs like what portions of the service you need.
• Know your vacancy structure, as they offer curated solutions for varying needs.
• You understand the cost differences between services and plans offered.
• You validate data safety and understand the repercussions.
• Your HR department is ready to adapt any such solution to ensure complete efficiency and desired productivity.

Conclusion

I suggest you must conduct surveys and questionnaires to accumulate feedback on the challenges faced from your new employees. This can be done digitally via Google forms, or you can also connect personally. Surveys must include questions about the clarity of on job responsibilities, the agenda of training, and the overall communication experience. Always remember that securing the best talent is just halfway to your growth and another halfway lies in sustained and balanced onboarding process to leave an impression which lasts and automation can definitely help you in that.