How to Have a Successful Onboarding Process Automation?

As the COVID-19 Pandemic continues to evolve, it has been a major driving force for digital transformation of Business Processes throughout the world. There has been a big leap in the direction of digitization. With a blink of an eye, our daily life has drastically evolved to a more virtual world.  

At ASP, we embraced the new norm and were quick enough to react and re-shape our internal business process strategy for business continuity.  One of the key digital transformation project initiatives that we plunged into during the COVID crisis is “Onboarding Process Automation”. In this article, you’ll get an insight on how we are “drinking our own champagne” with our new employee. The goal of this initiative was to digitize & automate the onboarding process and enhance the new employee experience with a warm a memorable welcome.

The Problem with Traditional Onboarding: Harsh Reality & Horror Stories

Most of the traditional Onboarding process are severely outdated and remained overwhelmingly analog involving multiple departments: HR, Team Leads, IT Team etc. It is not uncommon to hear the Onboarding horror stories, particularly if an employee is recruited on a fast-track manner to fill-in a role quickly. 

Specially with the current COVID restrictions, imagine the condition of the new employee stepping in at the abandoned office with no furniture, computer, or phone allocated. To add oil to the burning fire, imagine an administrative error from the HR side with an incorrect start date, what’s the worst that could happen?

When onboarding process are overly reliant on human interventions, it is easy for steps to be forgotten.  Whether it’s a miscommunication, administrative delays or errors, even a minute mistake in the Onboarding Process can have a serious repercussion.

Now Platform  – Our Digital Transformation Solution

Being the Premier Partner of ServiceNow, we believe in harnessing the power of Now platform, the platform of platforms for digital transformation.

Behind every great experience is a great workflow. As the foundation for all digital workflows, the Now Platform connects people, functions, and systems across your organization. While an automation workflow solution for Onboarding may sound impersonal, it streamlines & standardizes the onboarding experience, making the employees feel welcomed and better informed as they gear up to the speed on their new role.

With ServiceNow’s low-code capabilities, we can easily configure digital workflows that manage the employee onboarding lifecycle events across multiple departments. Additionally, repetitive tasks can also be automated & managed by these workflows. This in turn cuts down on manual effort & time, which ultimately results in enhanced productivity for the organization, as well as creating a standard, consistent maintainable process that runs like clockwork.

Our Agile Approach: Think Big, Start Small!

“It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.”

-By Winston Churchill

We kick started our project by starting small, by setting the foundations right, evaluating our existing Onboarding process and further streamlined the process by building on top of the foundations laid. Here are the key points considered for leveraging onboarding automation.

• Streamlining the process:

  We analyzed our existing process, the various stages on the onboarding lifecycle and the tasks/activities that were dependent on the role & departments. The approach we took here was to map out the process & breaking down the Onboarding lifecycle into smaller pieces such as:

• Pre-hire: Focusing on simplifying the joining formalities and digitizing the employee form submission via the HR portal. It will also make the verification process simple.
• Pre-boarding: Initiating the relevant arrangements for the new employee with the asset allocation & provisioning of access to the tools & technology based on his/her profile. Additionally, making arrangements for personalized welcome kit/goodie bag.
• On the first day: Welcoming the new employee and orientation with team, buddy & manager.
• On the first week: Scheduling sessions to introduce the new employee with relevant teams, clients & company specific internal tools & technology etc.
• After One month: Employee Onboarding Survey feedback, follow up meetings with manager & HR.

• Tasks to Automate: 

Though the goal was to automate pretty much everything on the onboarding lifecycle, yet it is important to also have a human touch & a personalized experience for the new hire.

Identifying the more tedious, repetitive, time-consuming tasks that were prone to human-error was our focus area.

For example, one of the key repetitive time-consuming tasks during onboarding that an IT Support Engineer perform is granting access to the new employee on the Company IT systems and allocating additional privileges as well as relevant licenses based on the role. Imagine the boring situation of the IT Support Engineer having to connect to various admin centers manually configuring the user settings and adding them to relevant groups & repeating the same for several times to get the desired outcome. If there is more than one new employee all the same steps must be repeated, the chances of human errors that could slip in was quite high. 

By automating the User Account creation & license assignment, we have consistent result, saves time, and most importantly avoid mundane tasks among the IT Support team.

• Personalized Onboarding Experience with a human touch

A personalized human touch is an inevitable part of onboarding process automation that accelerates productivity, engagement & retention.

The “personalized” here does not mean only the digitalized syntax on notifications & welcome emails/SMS like “Dear ${user.name}. Welcome to our team! “. Rather, it is key that new employee feels welcomed and is engaged with timely & relevant Onboarding information depending on his/her role & department.

Make the onboarding journey memorable by spicing it up with a human interaction on top of the automated personalized notifications triggered on various stages on the Onboarding Lifecyle process.  Impress the new employee with a personalized onboarding welcome goodie bag and introduce the “Meet & Greet” on Onboarding Orientation process, that helps the new employee to socialize & create bonds with their teammates, clients & colleagues. Additionally, to align the goals & expectation for the new employee, it really helps to have the timely feedback & follow up meetings with new employee manager/HR on top of the automated surveys sent out via the system.

The personalized onboarding with the human touch demonstrates that company values each individual talent & also creates a positive impact throughout the career of the employee.

Take the leap towards Digital transformation

Now that you have got an insight on our digital transformation on the Onboarding process, it’s time for you to reflect & prioritize the processes that you would like to automate for your business.

As goes the saying from Mark Twain “The secret of getting ahead is getting started”, so get started & reach out to us to discuss further on the solution options for your Business process digitalization journey.