How Automated Employee Onboarding Workflows Can Save HR Pros 10s of Hours Per Month
As businesses have evolved over the years, companies have gained access to a new suite of tools to allow them to maximise their efficiency. Automation is one of these important tools, as the repetitive but necessary tasks of past generations haven’t become less relevant, but perhaps even more so, as businesses can now scale much further than they could before.
Some business owners may hear “automation” and think about programs completing entire employee workloads. While that is certainly one possibility of automation, a lot of automated tools exist as a helpful way to assist human workers. HR professionals are one category of employees who have a lot of responsibilities to handle, but in an effort to maintain fairness and transparency, they also deal with many tasks that can become repetitive and standardised. Of all departments of a business, HR is one of the areas that can benefit from automation the most.
Onboarding, in particular, is one of the most essential functions of an HR department. Making sure you can find, hire, and, most importantly, retain employees is how a business can function in the first place. To ensure your onboarding process is efficient and streamlined, you should consider adopting automated employee onboarding workflows.
Utilising these automated processes can save countless hours a month, as those small tasks you previously completed manually can now be deployed with just your oversight. To delve deeper into these tools so that you can make the most of your time, we will discuss what automated employee onboarding workflows are, what they accomplish, and how you can implement them seamlessly into your business operations.
What is an automated employee onboarding workflow?
Many areas of business operations are repetitive and standardised but integral to a functioning workplace. Human error can pose a problem if these tasks are disrupted. In order to ensure these standardised processes can be managed and completed with consistent success, you can turn to automation to assist the process.
Onboarding is one of these essential processes that is purposefully standardised. By ensuring that incoming employees are introduced to the company culture and systems reliably, you can ensure that all levels of your organisation are functioning with the same understanding and outlook on your business goals. Since this onboarding process will involve a very similar set of tasks and objectives for workers to accomplish, you can turn to automation to streamline the process.
An automated employee onboarding workflow will organise all the tasks that comprise your onboarding process and then automate things like emails, deadlines, and designating assignments for specific employees.
What is it meant to accomplish?
As with any other usage of automation, automated employee onboarding is meant to help reduce human errors and the time needed to manage and complete these processes. Onboarding will be an essential and often expensive cost for businesses, so you will want to save time and money wherever possible.
Some solutions for saving time mean cutting corners, but with automated employee onboarding workflows, you are not reducing any of the essential portions of the process, only empowering them with automation.
If your typical onboarding process would require you to send out the same emails to every new hire and instruct them along the same onboarding pipeline, this can quickly become tedious and take up a lot of time that your HR pros could use elsewhere. If you utilise automation to assist these processes, you can still oversee the workflow process, but these repetitive tasks can then be automatically completed with software solutions rather than your manual inputs.
How could this be implemented in your organisation?
While the idea of automated employee onboarding may sound helpful, you may still be lost on exactly how you would implement it into your business. Well, to help, let’s give some examples of ways that you could implement automated workflows for onboarding success.
Onboarding Checklists
Onboarding checklists are important for organising all the duties you must consider when adding a new employee to your team. Odds are, your onboarding checklist will look similar every time you find a new employee, so rather than go through the manual process of executing these steps every time, consider how automation could assist you.
Let’s say you begin your onboarding process with an email welcoming your new employees to their positions and sharing details about their new workplace. A lot of this content will carry over from employee to employee, so an automated workflow could streamline this process and automatically send out an email based on the amount of time they have until they begin their role.
Next, you may have a set time where you want to discuss employee benefits and remind them to opt-in or ask any other questions about their options. An automated workflow could send out an email reminder and even set aside a chunk of time so that you could discuss your benefits package with employees.
Another critical part of your onboarding checklist will be introducing your new employee to the rest of your team members. With an automated workflow, as soon as an employee is set to join your business, automated workflows could send out an email providing some base information about the new hire and inviting your existing employees to introduce themselves.
New Hire Paperwork
After your onboarding checklist, you may also have a process for providing new hires with the paperwork they need to prepare for their role. You may have a set of forms you have organised for each new hire, and rather than walk them through each one or manually hand them out, you could have an automated workflow oversee the process.
With an automated workflow, you could organise an entire new hire paperwork timeline and have your new prospect receive each piece of paperwork in the necessary order. You could oversee their current progress and where they are on the timeline and even have emails sent out if they have not made the desired progress at the right time.