Onboarding employees and contractors typically involves several teams and team members. Operations or IT must create user accounts and grant access to the proper tools and sites, managers need to send welcome emails and set up meetings, Marketing will create a new bio and maybe even post an announcement to social media. The list of tasks is lengthy and varies depending on the role, employee type, and location. It is more important now than ever to have a solid onboarding process as many employees are joining organizations while working from home. The first days of employment for a new hire leave an impression; the efficiency and attention to detail of the process affects how welcome they feel and how organized they perceive their new employer to be. Let’s look at the pain points of onboarding, a possible solution, and the impact this solution can have on your organization’s productivity. PAIN POINTS OF ONBOARDING Understanding The Entire Onboarding Process Too often, the onboarding process and tasks live only in the heads of a few key employees. Sometimes, the onboarding process is accompanied by documentation, yet the kickoff and tracking of tasks exist purely in email. This burns precious time for those involved; tracking anything via email is hardly efficient and rarely 100% accurate. Matching Tasks to New Hire Type Depending upon whether your new hire is full-time, part-time, W2, 1099, contractor, in state, out of state, the list of associated tasks can vary dramatically. Without a documented process, complemented with smart task automation, there’s a high risk of missing steps. Visibility into the Process If an onboarding process is based on back and forth emails, knowing the status of tasks for all involved is time consuming and messy. SOLUTION To solve for these issues, we created a solution that we use internally, as well as customize and deploy for our customers. To keep licensing costs in check, the entire base solution is built in Microsoft 365. The components include: 1. Form + Business Logic The form was created with field validation and branching logic to keep the data entry consistent and the requestor on the correct path. 2. Automation The onboarding solution creates the user account, generates a temporary password, and adds them to the appropriate security groups. This information is automatically sent to the new hire and their manager. 3. Task Assignment The onboarding flow also creates tasks for the items that cannot (or maybe should not) be automated, such as reminders to the manager to set up weekly 1:1’s. IMPACT Adding automation to our onboarding process is saving time and preventing missed steps for everyone involved, including our new hires. 1. Visibility The Requestor, Operations, Human Resources, and the Manager can see the status of all current tasks as well as any notes and questions made by the task owner. Additionally, the historical log informs of when tasks were marked complete and by whom. Creating the base solution in Microsoft 365 allows administrators to easily oversee and maintain identity, security, usage, and troubleshoot any issues. 2. Efficiency Documenting and automating the various conditions and their respective tasks helps prevent important items from being overlooked. With the increased visibility into the process and status, there is no need for emails or instant messages to stay abreast of progress. Accounts, passwords, and group memberships are automatically created and emailed, providing time savings for IT. Task owners are automatically notified of new tasks and reminded as the tasks are coming due, reducing the need for manual reminders to be sent. 3. Security Keeping the base solution inside of Microsoft 365 provides employees with a single sign on experience – no more memorizing or reusing passwords for third party applications. It also gives IT and Security Admins control over identity, authentication, data, and connections. 4. Licensing Costs Keeping the entire solution inside of Microsoft 365 allows us, and our customers who have deployed the same solution, to maximize the Microsoft 365 investment. There are no additional costs when used in conjunction with Microsoft 365 E3 licenses. Still, often there’s a need to connect to external tools to reduce duplicate entries and human error. To that end, Microsoft and their partners have created APIs to connect to hundreds of other platforms and developers can create custom APIs. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) can be incorporated to connect to legacy and on-premise too. 5. Employee Experience New employees are promptly greeted with a welcome email that includes their login information, important instructions, and next steps in their onboarding process. They are welcomed by their manager who was automatically reminded of the start date and assigned a task to set up that ‘welcome to the team’ meeting. Onboarding in a ‘work from anywhere’ reality still relies heavily on human interaction; but we’re all still only human. A little bit of automation helps keep us on track when so much is competing for our attention. 6. Peace of Mind
Overall, this solution is freeing up our time to focus and strategize on the more important aspects of our business, like keeping our employees safe and healthy and our clients happy. CONTACT US Want to learn more about automating your processes? Contact us for a demo and discussion. |
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