How Does Automation Take the Stress Out of Your Onboarding? 24 Jun 2019

Now that you’ve found the new hire your business needs, you want them to stick around. That’s why you use onboarding. Onboarding gives new hires a positive impression and prepares them for a long career at your company.

At least, that’s what onboarding is supposed to do. Have you been hearing some complaints about your process? Employees can’t keep up with their workload and running onboarding, and new hires aren’t getting the tools they need. It seems like nobody’s happy with how things are going. How do you get your onboarding back on track?

Automating time-consuming parts of your orientation process takes the stress out of training a new hire. While saving time and effort is appealing, using automation may worry you. After all, new hires need to meet other employees. How can they do that if onboarding is automated?

In this article, you’ll find out how automation can streamline your onboarding process. You’ll also learn how you can balance automation with human interaction.

Automation Works With Your Employees, Not Against Them

Many businesses use onboarding to help new hires build strong work relationships. Will using automation make your onboarding process too impersonal?

No. It may surprise you, but automation makes your onboarding more employee-friendly. Instead of bogging down Human Resources with having to prepare paperwork and other materials, automation takes the load off your existing employees. It gives them time to focus on making the new hire feel welcome.

For example, automating repetitive tasks reduces onboarding time for everyone. Parsons Corporation, a digital security company, reduced their onboarding time by 56 percent. How? By automating their workflow.

Automation doesn’t just support your current employees; it helps new hires too. Busy staff members can easily forget steps of the onboarding process and deprive your new hire of essential information. However, automation can remove that risk of human error and ensure that a new employee receives every step of your onboarding experience.

Businesses can even use automation to make their onboarding fun. Essar, an oil and gas company, turned their onboarding process into a game. By using an interactive 3D onboarding solution, Essar was able to train new hires in an entertaining way. With a positive onboarding process, the company also improved employee retention.

Automation can improve your onboarding process. However, too much automation can make your onboarding ineffective. How can you balance automation with human interaction?

Automation Plus Human Contact Creates the Ideal Onboarding Process

Striking a balance between automation and human contact may seem difficult. To achieve this balance requires planning.

Before you automate, review your process to find out which parts of your system need to be improved. Areas needing improvement are good targets for automation. Here are some onboarding tasks that you can easily transition to automation:

• Transform paperwork from physical copies to an online form. No one likes filling out forms their first day on the job. Request paperwork via online forms so your new hires can complete it before they start.
• Get system access and work accounts set up. New employees may need access to work systems, tools, and an email account to do their job. Automating requests for system access and account creation gives new hires everything they need to get started. LinkedIn prepares its new hires by giving them a laptop with all their communication tools already set up. Making sure new employees have access to the right work systems allows them to get right to work on the first day.
• Record your basic training for future reference. Training videos may seem impersonal, but they give new hires a handy reference when they forget something. Recording your training also saves employees from having to explain basic company procedures multiple times.
• Create a short survey. Send an automatic survey to check how well your onboarding is preparing new hires for their new job. Ask whether your onboarding process is getting new employees ready for their job and how happy they are with the current process.
• Set automatic reminders to help you remember each step of your process. If you can’t automate a task, set automatic reminders for it. Set up task reminders to automatically alert the right employees when you get a new hire.

After you’ve automated the repetitive parts of your onboarding process, you and your employees can focus on getting your new hire up to speed.

Onboarding Automation Lets You Relax

You value your employees. Show how much you appreciate them by making your onboarding process easier for everyone.

Remember, you don’t have to automate your whole onboarding process. Limit automation to duties like paperwork, basic training, and reminders. Automating these time-consuming tasks lets you spend more time teaching your new hire.

With automation relieving some of the stress, onboarding can be fun for you, your employees, and your new hires.