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Onboarding New Employees At Multiple Locations

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“You just need a little time to get your feet wet.” Onboarding new employees could be described as the process whereby a new employee gets her proverbial feet wet. It’s a process of discovering something for the first time, overcoming fear and anxiety, and gradually becoming familiar, comfortable with a new experience. It’s a slow, measured lowering into the water–starting with the feet. A summer dip in the pool.

Sadly, far too many new employees never experience that placid scene. Their experience is quite the opposite. It’s more akin to Uncle Larry running across the the pool deck in all his gut jostling glory, scooping up nieces, nephews, unaware bystanders– and an unfortunately placed inflatable–before lunging mercilessly into the deep end with all wrapped in his arms. “Uncle Larry I can’t swim!”

Of course, the “sink or swim” approach works at some places. When it’s planned. And when it involves experienced swimmers. And when Uncle Larry isn’t in charge. But regardless of whether your employee onboarding process is measured and methodical or fast and furious, it becomes exceedingly difficult to manage outcomes when onboarding employees at multiple locations.

Employee Onboarding without a lifeguard

No Guard On Duty

Onboarding new employees at multiple locations is a challenge because it’s rarely possible to have a person dedicated to guarding the process at each location. Things get dropped, forms don’t get signed (or counter-signed), documents are lost, important instructions are delivered secondhand or not at all…the list goes on. So for organizations who must onboard employees across multiple locations, many must default to the “sink or swim” approach because they simply do not have the HR staff to facilitate anything else.

However, when no one is around to determine whether a new employee is sinking or swimming in the early stages of employment, a number of negative outcomes can result. These include:

Inconsistent Service or Operations

New employees–to a business’s customers–are just employees. Customers don’t care if they are receiving subpar customer service from a new employee–it’s still subpar service, and it’s not appreciated. When new employees are thrown into a position without adequate preparation, operations and customer service will suffer.

Low Employee Morale

Perhaps a new employee is doing well, but no one is affirming her work in the early weeks. She thinks she’s doing well, but she’s not too sure and so anxious. Over time, that anxiety turns into ambivalence. Ambivalence will soon become resentment. Resentful employees don’t stick around; they start looking for new opportunities.

Low Productivity

Maximizing productivity depends on consistently executing optimized processes efficiently. New employees who are poorly onboarded may lack the knowledge or motivation (sometimes both) to execute a process efficiently, even if that process is optimal. In other words, bad employee onboarding may lead to bad business outcomes.

Rapid Employee Turnover

The initial results of bad employee onboarding are experienced by the employee and felt by the customer; however, eventually this all comes back to injure the employer–specifically, the employer’s brand. A negative employer brand makes it increasingly difficult to grow a business and hire new employees. And maintaining a constant hiring cycle with minimal growth is expensive and ultimately unsustainable for many small- to medium-sized businesses. Hand-in-hand with low employee morale, rapid employee turnover can have a lasting effect on an organization.

Employee Onboarding Pool Rules

Planning Your Pool Party

For organizations with multiple “pools” of employees spread across a geographic area, hiring an HR representative for each location is not likely feasible. So those organizations must find a way to ensure that they are consistently and effectively onboarding new employees at multiple locations. Here are a couple options:

Train Location Managers In Onboarding

Additional onboarding-related training for location managers could equip them with the skills to successfully handle new employee onboarding themselves. In a perfect world, managers would welcome and execute this with open arms, but in the real world it would be scoffed and scorned into oblivion (ain’t nobody got time for that).

Onboard In One Location

A more sophisticated, complex approach to onboarding could involve moving the process to one location. This would see new employees spending their first week at one location, learning the ropes, and then “graduating” to new locations after the onboarding period had ended. With perfect execution this could work too, but who’s to say that a new employee’s experience at the second location wouldn’t differ from her first?

Although the above approaches may work under certain circumstances, the introduction of onboarding software easily tops both.

Employee Onboarding Belly Flop

Cannonball!

To really make a splash during the new employee onboarding process, employers should seek to eliminate monotony and simplify complexity. Employee onboarding software can do this, and for organizations with employees at multiple locations, it has the added benefit of reducing the need for HR staff at every location. How?

By providing tools to digitally manage tasks, documents, and forms, employee onboarding software makes possible the following:

Enter Once, Populate Many

Once an employee enters information into a field, that information automatically populates other fields and documents that require it. No more entering your name and address multiple times.

Electronic Signatures

Collecting, counter-signing, and filing documents can be eliminated completely. Electronic signatures allow for documents and forms to be processed and stored digitally, saving time and resources–and avoiding the headaches of paper chasing.

Task Assignment and Completion Triggers

Schedule required onboarding tasks to be assigned contingent upon the completion of other tasks. This allows an organization to control the timing and pace of the process, which helps ensure that new hires feel comfortable and not overwhelmed.

E-Verify Integration

Onboarding software that features an E-Verify integration drastically reduces the time needed to verify the employment eligibility of new hires. Using information the employee submits electronically via the required Form I-9, software with this integration submits the information to E-Verify, where the information is checked against a federal database and a status returned almost immediately.

Bring The Employee Onboarding Process Alive!

Employee onboarding software succeeds in bringing consistency and quality to the new employee onboarding process by centralizing control of the process in the hands of the Human Resources Department. By automating many of the monotonous and complex tasks required of both new employees and HR, the software provides human resources professionals with the space and time to bring the employee onboarding process alive.

So the next time your organization is analyzing employee turnover metrics or brainstorming ideas for employee engagement and retention, take the time review your employee onboarding process. Are you inviting new hires to enjoy the cool, calm waters of your organization at reasonable, comfortable pace? Or are you bum rushing them into Uncle Larry’s wild pool party?

 

ExactHire offers hiring and employee onboarding software to growing small- to medium-sized businesses that are looking to efficiently attract, hire, and retain exceptional talent for continued growth. To learn more about ExactHire’s HR solutions, please submit a brief contact form.

Image credit: Document-management-workflow (Click on image/Press L for a full view) by Saad Faruque (contact)

No Lifeguard On Duty by Myrtle Beach TheDigitel (contact)

Belly Flop Contest by Steven Depolo (contact)

Pool Rules Girls Pool Party Lourdie by prayitnophotography (contact)

Payroll Providers, Distinguish Yourselves!

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For independent payroll providers it’s sometimes hard to stand out. Resources are limited and the expenses associated with advertising and expanding new services are prohibitive. For newly minted businesses, it might be all they can do just to get operations up and running efficiently. Meanwhile, very large and established providers (a.k.a. mega providers) are throwing big money into advertising and services in order to expand their market share. What’s a small, independent payroll provider to do?

Option 1: Invest In Marketing, Smartly

While the majority of advertising channels are too expensive for a small provider to consider, some digital marketing channels are nearly free. Great results can be achieved through the use of social media, search engine marketing, and email. But while these channels are free, they are also very competitive and that is why “free” becomes “nearly free.”

Being heard above the noise is no easy task, and so social networks, search engines, and even email platforms offer premium solutions to amplify an organization’s marketing efforts. Examples for each of these include:

  • Display ads (search)
  • Sponsored/promoted posts (social)
  • Targeting/segmentation/automation (email)

Individually, the solutions can be fairly affordable, but investing in premium solutions across multiple digital channels will quickly add up. So, again, the largest providers with more resources to invest will have an advantage over the independent providers.

Option 2: Invest In Your Services

Established independent payroll providers may be seeing their market share slowly recede each year. And unless their clients are going out of business or bringing services in-house, it’s likely that another provider has wooed them with ancillary HR services or software. So while it may have once been feasible for independent payroll providers to survive with the same technology and service offerings, today it’s a different story.

Small- to medium-sized business need more services and they don’t want to juggle dozens of vendors to get it–they want their current providers to offer more. The good news is that with today’s explosive growth and evolution of HR technology, independent payroll providers have an advantage over the mega payroll providers: their size and flexibility.

Envision a speed boat making a sharp turn; now, imagine a oil tanker changing course. As an independent payroll provider, you want to think “speed boat”. A speed boat cannot carry as many passengers as the tanker, but it can quickly change direction and get its people to their desired destination faster–and usually with a smile on their face.

Many mega payroll providers, seeking greater margins, opt to build their own HR software or utilize enterprise solutions for all clients–a one size fits all approach. This might work for some SMBs, but more often, the smaller organizations find the solutions to be a poor fit. Even when these solutions do work somewhat adequately, the technology is updated slowly and with little input or influence from the end-users at smaller organizations. The result is that many SMB clients are saddled with a poor solution that fails to meet their needs, and any improvements to the software are slow in coming.  This is “oil tanker.”

But by seeking partnerships with established, customer-centric HR software providers,  independent payroll providers can quickly offer their clients more of what they need without the overhead of expensive software or the headaches of an enterprise-level customer service department. Clients will enjoy the same efficient and responsive customer service with their HR software provider as they do with their payroll provider, which means that as a client’s needs change, the providers can act quickly to meet them. That is “speed boat.”

Distinguishing Yourself

Although a handful of mega payroll providers control between 50%-75% of the entire market, the remainder is hotly contested by other independent payroll providers. And perhaps it’s this competition that is your organization’s more immediate threat. This begs the question, then: are you distinguishable from the next independent provider?

Regardless of whether you believe that your market share is threatened by mega providers, the threat posed by other independent payroll providers when they partner with HR software companies will only increase in the coming years. Can your organization stand by while other providers are striking partnerships with HR software providers? Or is your organization content to watch your market share slowly slip away as more and more clients realize that they can get more value and better services from another provider?

For payroll providers who wish to distinguish themselves among the crowded field of competition–and to do it without losing any more market share–it is imperative that they start considering a partnership with an HR software provider now. To help, ExactHire has produced a free guide, How to Partner with an HR Software Provider, that walks decision makers through a step-by-step process for approaching, deciding on, and establishing a partnership with an HR software provider.

Now you have access to the information and tools you need to bring more value to your clients.

Your choice: will you be an “oil tanker” or a “speed boat?”

 

For nearly a decade, ExactHire has provided hiring solutions for hundreds of clients across North America and beyond. If your organization is interested in partnering with an innovative, customer-centric HR software provider, please contact us today.

HR Software Provider Partnership Guide

Feature Image Credit: apples-stand out by Flazingo (contact)

Rewrite Your Talent Onboarding Story In 7 Game-Changing Steps

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Once upon a time there was a talented, optimistic marketing professional named Simon. An exciting, fast-growth technology firm was fortunate enough to woo Simon during a flashy interviewing process and he was pleased to accept its offer of employment shortly thereafter. His new position would offer him more responsibility, more pay and a chance to learn some new technologies. Sounds like a storybook ending for Simon, right?

That’s what he thought, too, until he began to experience the firm’s employee onboarding process. While the tech firm had many things going for it, it had a few things to learn when it came to giving its new hires the best opportunity to be successful and productive in their working environment. Let’s see how Simon’s story unfolded and consider what the tech firm might have done differently to make a positive impression on him in the critical early days and months of his employment.

1 – Wait, What’s Pre-Boarding?

Once Simon accepted his offer, he still had to give his current employer a few weeks’ notice before finishing his job there. While his new employer was hiring frequently, and at such a pace that it often had employees start just days after accepting an offer, Simon was an anomaly in that he had some time to kill before his start date. Unfortunately, his new tech firm was radio silent during this period. Simon actually had to proactively reach out to confirm details like start date and arrival time. He wondered if his new company had forgotten about him.

Rewrite the Story: Simon’s new hiring manager could have called or emailed him to welcome him to the fold and prep him with some housekeeping details prior to his first day. This “pre-boarding” scenario (aka the period before official employee onboarding) is also a golden opportunity for an organization to send a welcome kit to a new hire with goodies like a prepared training schedule, visual organizational chart, fun facts about the company and some branded company swag.

A best practice during pre-boarding is to make sure that your company’s existing employees know about the forthcoming start date of your new employee so they can be ready to make him feel at home. This also gives the onboarding process stakeholders a chance to update recurring meeting requests and email distribution lists to include the new employee. Otherwise, Simon might feel silly if he was the only one that didn’t know to show up to the monthly corporate meeting.

2 – Learning the Unwritten Rules

Simon was an organized guy and liked to be prepared. During his interview, they told him that they had a relaxed dress code, but he still hadn’t seen any evidence of that and didn’t want to be the only guy in jeans on his first day. So, he showed up in business casual to be safe meanwhile contemplating the extent of the company’s flexibility when it came to the “flexible work schedule.” In addition, he was still in limbo with how daycare arrangements would work for his daughter, too. He would continue to feel a little stressed about that until he could adjust her drop-off and pick-up times to accommodate his new schedule. Of course his nerves weren’t helped when a bunch of his new co-workers asked him why he was so dressed up for his first day.

Rewrite the Story: Starting a new job is stressful enough; don’t make it worse by keeping your new hires guessing. At a minimum send new hires a Q&A sheet of commonly asked company culture-related questions before their first day.

  • Go the extra mile by pairing a new employee with a mentor buddy who can give him the real dish, and
  • assembling an attractive book or website full of pictures of your employees enjoying the unique aspects of your culture (for example, hitting the gong to celebrate a goal achievement or modeling work-appropriate attire).

Better yet, create a video office tour in which you interview employees that answer these burning company culture questions. Give employees like Simon the confidence to know when it’s actually okay to play ping-pong during work hours.

3 – You Mean I Don’t Even Get a Red Stapler?

Once Simon was shown to his working space, it was remarkably bare. While thankfully his laptop was awaiting him, there wasn’t much else other than tedious employment paperwork. His cube neighbor said that the supplies he needed were around, and that he could show him the office cabinet. So, Simon grabbed some sticky notes, a pen and a notepad since he wasn’t sure how much was appropriate to take. Back at his desk, he passed the time waiting for further direction (his boss was in a meeting on the morning of his first day) by investigating a new “twiddle your thumbs” finger workout on his smartphone…or at least he felt like that was what he was doing.

Rewrite the Story: Not having supplies ready on a new hire’s first day is frustrating and makes a poor first impression on a new employee. Stock a new hire’s space with all the essentials…have email setup, browsers downloaded and include a handy guide to applications that will be used on a regular basis. Complete the staging with a thoughtful welcome sign with the employee’s name. To make this setup easy on existing employees, too, have a basic onboarding checklist or template in place that can be quickly customized based on departmental needs. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every new hire.

Identify additional employee onboarding best practices like implementing software to automate both the workflow-related checklists for existing employees, as well as the actual paperwork completed by new employees. Instead of taking up two hours of a new hire’s first few days on the job with boring, redundant paperwork, give him a web-based portal to enter that data in about fifteen minutes. Make sure your onboarding process brand matches the sleek corporate brand that people have come to expect from a fast-growth tech firm.

4 – Be More Innovative Than Lunch

Simon was pleased to learn that he wouldn’t have to figure out lunch on his first day. His manager, as well as some other members of his department, did take him out to a nice restaurant to get to know him better. There’s nothing wrong with lunch as long as that’s not all you do to learn about new hires.

Rewrite the Story: Use your organization’s industry, resources and/or culture to create a unique experience for your new employees. For example, a technology firm might have a space for all employees to share their favorite mobile app along with comments about why each app was selected. A design firm with graphic artists on staff might choose to commemorate the arrival of newer employees by adding their caricature to a wall of fame after 90 days. An organization of travel buffs could have a giant world map and invite new employees to mark the exotic places to which they have traveled with pushpins. Be imaginative and discover each employee’s passion.

5 – My Brain is Only So Spongy

Once his first few days had passed, Simon had to admit that his training schedule did become quite rigorous…full of people to meet all day everyday. He was hustled from one office to another, desperately trying to absorb all the information he heard like the latest chamois cloth mop from QVC. Alas, cramming isn’t generally effective; however, sometimes employers still feel compelled to fill all the gaps in the first few week’s of an employee’s training schedule. While the firm did gain some points for doing its best to expose Simon to a number of areas in the hopes that he’d be more productive sooner, they should have allowed some time for his early foundational knowledge to soak in and then solidify.

Rewrite the Story: Consider a shortened training schedule for the early days of a new hire’s employment. By empowering an individual to train and shadow with others for just part of the day, you enable him to take the rest of the day to reflect and absorb the information gleaned. He can form questions, review the most recent lessons and be better prepared to be a true participant in the rest of his training activities. Incorporate gamification elements into the training and orientation phase by creating company- and/or department-specific quizzes to assess the employee’s learning while also providing entertaining education.

6 – That’s the End?

A month into his employment experience, Simon was starting to feel like a member of the team. Especially when he was thrown into the training mix for three newer hires that were starting the coming week. That’s right, Simon’s fifteen minutes of new hire fame were already up. And while it’s not a bad idea to help new hires hit the ground running by involving them in improving the onboarding process for future hires, you also don’t want to let your hair down too early with your newer employees. The firm was riding on its own cultural coat tails too aggressively. Keeping employees for the long-term requires a learning and development culture that doesn’t end after a new employee’s first three weeks on the job.

Rewrite the Story: Chart an onboarding course for the long haul and remember that the good stuff happens at milestones you intentionally plan for new hires along their entire employment journey…whether it is three weeks or one year into employment. Beyond new hire paperwork and software login credentials, build in triggers for activities like

  • more advanced learning “courses” once initial onboarding prerequisites are met,
  • exposure to other departments to better learn how one’s own job impacts others,
  • individual assessment in order to uncover opportunities for synergy between the newer employee, his hiring manager and/or other department members,
  • succession planning conversations, and
  • personal achievement recognition at notable anniversary dates.

7 – Get What You Expect

Being organized and self-motivated, Simon already had his own ideas about what he wanted to accomplish in his career with the tech firm. He certainly knew his own job responsibilities and had a vague idea of the potential career path available; however, he was foggy on his firm’s expectations when it came to targeting dates for specific skills mastery and project completions. He was looking forward to really producing now that he had a few months behind him, but he would have appreciated more detail about what success had meant for other top performers in the past.

Rewrite the Story: Having a culture of performance management doesn’t mean forcing a performance review every 90 days, or perhaps ever. But, it does mean having candid, personalized conversations with employees about their passions, developmental goals and the organization’s expectations for achievement. Create a job success factors document for all positions so that new and existing employees alike have a benchmark for comparing their own performance to the model for success for their role. Include details about initial job priorities, expected time frames for project completion and resources available from the organization to support the employee. Then, work with employees to align their strengths and passions with opportunities for increasing responsibility and rewards. Providing a map to success will set employees up to have a true sense of accomplishment once they’ve reached important job milestones.

Where Will Simon’s Story Take Him?

Is your organization guilty of any of the onboarding oversights that befell Simon in his new position? If so, take action now so that when your newer employees get a recruiter InMail message after seven months on the job they politely decline the chance to learn more about the next exciting, fast-growth tech firm.

This blog originally appeared on elementthree.com/blog.

Image credit: Swoosh Goes Swish by slgckgc (contact)

The Onboarding Game

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Employee onboarding is no game; it’s serious business. But sometimes our well-planned processes breakdown, and it seems as though employee onboarding experiences are determined by a roll of the dice. Will everyone on our onboarding team execute this time??

*fingers crossed*

It can be maddening for HR professionals when inconsistencies creep into the onboarding process. I like to compare it to the board game, Chutes & Ladders. So in the spirit of that classic board game, I’d like to offer 5 dangerous ”Onboarding Chutes” and 5 helpful “Onboarding Ladders” that can determine whether your onboarding process is a winner.

The Chute: Weak Pre-Boarding

This is the first mistake you can make with a new hire–and it could also be your last. You’ve put so much time and effort into finding the right candidates. It was a hard decision. But after coming to an agreement on compensation, you finally hired the perfect fit for your organization. You’ve come so far!

But now, you decide to take it easy and relax. You go radio silent with your new hire for the next two weeks.  Your “perfect fit” hire is left wondering whether your organization is really the perfect fit for them.

The Ladder: Bridging The Gap

Rather than leaving new hires out in the cold for two weeks, invite them in as soon as they accept your offer. The time between job offer acceptance and the first day can be used to strengthen the employer-employee relationship and get a jumpstart on required HR tasks.

Determine which forms or documents can legally be completed before an employee’s first day, and then offer the new hire the opportunity to complete these ahead of the first day. If you use onboarding software, many of these tasks can be done from home–without paper and pen. This will free up the new hire’s first day to include exciting and engaging activities.

Beyond paperwork, organizations can bridge the gap with creative welcoming gestures. A “welcome card” signed by future co-workers arriving via mail? An invite to a company after-work social? A quick, quirky “welcome video” shot with an iphone? Grand or tiny, welcoming gestures that occur before the first day will elicit excitement from new hires.

The Chute: No Written Training Schedule

Your new hire has arrived! Yay! You pull out all the stops for your new hire in those first few hours: bagels and coffee, grand facility tour, co-worker glad-handing, and big-wig sit-downs. The whirlwind welcome ends with the new hire arriving at a clean, nicely appointed desk. The computer is ready. Email is set up. Now what?

If the new hire’s next five hours and the remainder of the week are characterized by a hodgepodge of ad hoc meetings and supervisor drop-ins, then your impressive welcome may be all for naught. New hires need to learn and do a lot quickly–this can hardly be avoided. But to leave them in the dark is a step–or several steps–in the wrong direction.

The Ladder: Proactive Transparency

A written training schedule sets expectations–expectations for the organization and expectations for the new hire. This provides context and confidence for new hires, as they are able to see the big picture and anticipate how best to manage their free time. It also reflects well on the organization, in that it illustrates thoughtful planning and adds transparency to the onboarding process.

A training schedule can cover the first few days, weeks, or even months. The length will vary based upon the unique needs of the position and organization. The important thing is that it’s designed to be accurate and useful; otherwise, the schedule will confuse new hires–the exact opposite of its intended purpose.

How to present it? Hard copy schedules will work, but electronic documents that are hyperlinked to relevant digital resources will save time, paper, and money for your organization. Going paperless will also provide a more seamless experience for your new hire. Bonus points!

Download ExactHire's Employee Onboarding Checklist

The Chute: Internal Communication Breakdown

So everything is sailing right along with the onboarding of your new hire. A warm, enthusiastic welcome? Check. A written training schedule that outlines the new hire’s next few weeks and is in the hands of said new hire? Check.

The blue ribbon is as good as yours!

But then something quite unexpected happens. Larry from IT forgot to order and set up your new hire’s computer before leaving for his month-long spiritual trek in Nepal. Larry from IT!!!

Apparently, Larry didn’t get the memo or email, or hear in the weekly stand-up meeting, that a new hire was coming onboard during his absence. Whether it was the mode of communication or Larry’s understanding of his role in onboarding, the ball was dropped.

The Ladder: Clarity In Role and Expectations

Too often, employee onboarding is looked at as an HR function. True, HR takes the lead in creating, reviewing, and improving the process. But employee onboarding must be owned by everyone in the organization–especially Larry in IT.

Communication breakdowns are the result of either an ineffective mode–email, memo, voicemail, etc.–or unclear roles and expectations. Barring technical difficulties, it’s most often the latter.

Building an efficient and effective onboarding process is not enough on its own. All stakeholders in the process must understand the role they play and the expectations that come with that role. And when it comes to expectations, these need to be as specific as possible–meaning deadline driven. Namaste, Larry in IT.

The Chute: All Work And No Play

With a fine-tuned onboarding process, your mind might explode with ideas for leveraging new efficiencies. Some onboarding stakeholders may set their eyes on the time-to-productivity metric and urge you to pack in more time for training. This makes sense; the faster a new hire is up to speed, the sooner your bottom line benefits. But there is a danger in that approach.

If you work your new hires to the bone, you might find that another important metric is negatively impacted–your employee turnover rate.

The Ladder: Work Hard, Play Hard

With the cost of re-hiring equal to roughly 20% of a new hire’s salary, HR professionals are wise to consider leveraging onboarding efficiency to provide opportunities for training (work) and social interaction (play). This approach balances the two important metrics of time-to-productivity and employee turnover rate.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

The Chute: Monotonous Inefficiency

Sometimes organizations boast very consistent and reliable onboarding processes that result in adequate outcomes. And adequate is good. But don’t you want to be the best? Number one?!

If your onboarding process consistently and reliably provides new hires with a tower of forms and documents to read, sign, and submit…you’re good.

If your onboarding process is characterized by co-workers who consistently and reliably request, remind, and follow-up on required onboarding tasks via email…you’re good.

But if your process consistently and reliably results in a “meh” experience for new hires…you’re not the best.

The Ladder: Paperless HR

A paperless onboarding process is characterized by efficiency and highlighted with excitement.

When you eliminate stacks of paper, automate form completion, and enable e-signatures, new hires spend less time on monotonous tasks.  Similarly, when you eliminate document production, automate task reminders, and enable e-countersignatures, your onboarding stakeholders save time too. That’s where the excitement comes in!

With all the time saved through the use of onboarding software, there is now the opportunity to inject more fun into the the onboarding process. And if you have an efficient, consistent and reliable process that is FUN…you’re looking at “best” status.

Competent HR professionals understand how vital the onboarding process is to maintaining a healthy employee lifecycle–one that spans years and not mere months. However, too often an organization’s well-planned employee onboarding process morphs into a real-life game of Chutes & Ladders. Sure, even the best organizations will have unforeseen circumstances (chutes) that cause process inefficiency, but when those chutes outnumber proactive, value-added measures (ladders), the organization risks being the loser.

Onboarding success should not be a game of chance. Success can be ensured when organizations take the time to plan and gain employee buy-in for an onboarding process that engages and inspires new hires early and often.

ExactHire offers HR technology to help small- to medium-sized business recruit, hire, and retain top talent for their organizations. To learn how you can add efficiency and excitement to your employee onboarding process, contact us today!

Feature Image Credit: Chutes and Ladders by Thor(contact)

Ready to Improve Your Onboarding Process – Where Do You Start?

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Congratulations! You’ve successfully made a business case to get the resources to improve your onboarding process. And, as a result of demonstrating its compelling potential ROI, you even received upper management’s blessing to implement onboarding software to infuse technology into your new hire experience. So, you’re ready to get started…but where should you start?

In this blog, I’ll outline four key strategies for ensuring that your onboarding process change effort will result in marked improvement for your organization’s business outcomes.

1 – Get stakeholder buy-in

If it has been some time since you’ve examined your onboarding process and enacted changes, then now is the time to invite others to participate…those who haven’t previously been involved in the design of this critical new hire process. Modern onboarding calls for the inclusion and engagement of a wide variety of stakeholders, and by involving them from the early stages of process re-engineering, the probability of them carrying out onboarding tasks willingly and successfully later greatly increases.

Demonstrate how an improved framework for welcoming and acclimating new employees will benefit stakeholders. While you’ve already shown senior management how your planned key performance indicators will be positively influenced by the change, and therefore have a positive impact on business outcomes, your peers (other hiring managers and administrative employees) may not have heard your case yet. Show them the numbers…especially how they impact their respective department areas, if possible.

Department heads, in particular, should appreciate the new plan’s aim to reduce turnover and shorten time to productivity, as it should prevent them from spending as much time interviewing replacements in the future. Additionally, the use of employee onboarding software will automate reminder notifications so important process milestones aren’t forgotten (i.e. periodic progress meeting reminders, benefit enrollment meetings, alerts to request future training sessions). Take it a step further and build in opportunities to have conversations with new employees that further set expectations with them about job responsibilities and performance expectations.

Having a system in place that alleviates any concern about forgetting tasks removes the urgency for managers to tell a new employee every little thing in the first week. Avoid forcing new hires to “drink from the water hose” the first few days. As a result, realize the benefit of improved knowledge retention due to more digestible information sessions being spread out over a longer period of time. Allocate the time saved by automatic software notifications toward strategic elements of the onboarding process that make a new hire comfortable and more likely to stay with your business for years to come.

2 – Make it easy for upper management to support the effort

The hard part (that is, getting the blessing of senior directors) is behind you. However, to maximize the potential success of your new plan you still need their ongoing support. Make it easy for them to give that support by telling them how they can be helpful, and giving them the information they need to convey success. In doing so, make sure their public involvement in supporting your objectives is done in such a way that aligns your improved onboarding process with the company’s image and culture. For example, if your organization is somewhat transparent and regularly shares certain aspects of financial information and goal progress with employees, then share a dashboard of your onboarding process metrics with staff members, as well. Or, if your smaller business prides itself on personalized service (including thank you notes to new customers), then ask your CEO to send hand-written notes to new employees before their first day on the job.

Other ideas for visible senior management support include:

  • public recognition of new employees via social media
  • an email to the entire company from the president welcoming a new hire
  • a 1-on-1 lunch with a new teammate during the first week on the job
  • public acknowledgment of newly-hired employees during the next company meeting

3 – Note the importance of sound documentation

The greatest plans will fail to deliver if they aren’t recorded properly…particularly employee onboarding process checklists which have multiple moving parts. Start by researching and confirming the required paperwork that should be presented to a new employee. This will most certainly vary by country, state and even municipality if you operate in a number of different geographic locations. If you’re unsure of requirements, it’s always a good idea to involve a trusted employment law attorney.

Along with the required tax and employment eligibility paperwork based on your location and industry, document which other forms and policy acknowledgments should be included in your new hire packet(s), and how it will vary based by role, division and/or location of employee. Effective onboarding software should allow you to create many different new hire packets, and then automatically present the appropriate packet to a new employee within the onboarding dashboard based on his/her employment characteristics (again…role, division and location).

Next, assign stakeholders to responsibilities for each step of the onboarding process. Have conversations with these individuals so they have an opportunity to volunteer, consent, ask questions and/or decline based on their understanding of the assignment. During this exercise, map out how stakeholders’ assignment to different tasks within the onboarding process could affect a new employee’s onboarding experience. For example, don’t accidentally assign an individual in your corporate office to be the Form I-9 approver for new hires in your production plant two states away. If possible, have more than one individual available to handle certain types of onboarding roles so that each geographic area has an appointed person in all of the critical roles. However, if for example, new employee equipment orders are centralized in your corporate office, it’s okay to have a single person in that equipment provisioning role regardless of new employee location.

Brainstorm other onboarding tasks that could add value with your stakeholders. If they’ve not previously been involved in this group effort, you may be surprised about the innovative ideas they bring to the table. As you vet other tasks for potential inclusion, determine where they should fall in the process, and whether any other tasks should happen as prerequisites beforehand. Assign owners to each of these tasks, as well.

4 – Create an onboarding roadmap to communicate expectations

Take your documentation efforts a step further by creating a visual resource for both your process stakeholders, as well as your other teammates. Share this roadmap with your new hires before their first day on the job, as well. It is okay to have a pared down version of your regular roadmap for your newest employees.

Make a detailed version of this resource available as a handout for stakeholders, and if possible, have an attractive summary version posted as a banner on a wall inside your offices and/or on your intranet, as well. Its prominent appearance will be a constant reminder for all employees to support the onboarding process in order to make it successful.

Your roadmap might be as simple as a flowchart showing the order of tasks and time during which they are executed; or, it may be a chance to get more creative and literally illustrate the “road” to new hire success…complete with pit stops and task milestone markers along the way. What works for you will depend on the culture and resources available within your organization.

This visual representation sets expectations for all stakeholders and clearly depicts assigned responsibilities by person. It is a mechanism to document minimum accepted timeframes for task completion and therefore helps to bring context to the dashboard on which you track onboarding-related KPIs. In fact, consider including a roadmap milestone that documents how frequently you conduct lessons learned sessions with stakeholders, and check on KPIs.

The roadmap helps to make clear which employee onboarding tasks need to be addressed at what time, and this frequent familiarity with the onboarding process and KPI dashboard is key in demonstrating how process improvement does in fact drive business outcomes.

If you’re ready to include employee onboarding software as a critical driver in your organization’s process change efforts, please contact ExactHire to schedule a live demo today.

 
Image credit: Harvard University by Tim Green aka atoach (contact)

How to Make a Business Case for Onboarding Process Improvement

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You know it’s time to do something better with your employee onboarding process. Your HR-intuition is on full alert after spotting the tell tale signs: high employee turnover; low workforce morale; lagging time to productivity statistics; and perhaps even lengthening time to fill trends for open positions.

But is your boss convinced that the new hire onboarding pain is palpable enough yet? As a person charged with human resources activities within your organization, it is your job to convince upper management that they need to care about this process and take action. To do so, you must make a business case for onboarding process improvement…and it starts with a discussion on how change can make the company more profitable.

Focus on KPIs that impact business outcomes

Key performance indicators for any organization are always tied to people. So, to help connect the dots between profitability and your plans for employee onboarding nirvana, you’ll need to identify and track the onboarding-related metrics that will most impact business outcomes. This means moving from a conversation that was once focused only on efficiencies gained or staff time saved…to one that illuminates the direct impact those efficiencies can have on your organization’s revenue growth and profitability.

In addition to your trusty turnover and time to productivity metrics, introduce ratios such as revenue per employee and profit per employee to the discussion with senior management. The latter metrics are more easily tracked and benchmarked, and more clearly affect the bottom line…a factor that will cause ownership to take notice when a process improvement effort can move that needle.

Next, paint the picture on how those business outcomes can be positively changed as the result of onboarding process re-engineering:

  • Automating the management of onboarding process tasks using employee onboarding software makes it easier for new employees and onboarding process stakeholders to address administrative items quickly and correctly
  • Allowing employees and managers to electronically sign and approve completed forms (vs. paper statutory forms and organizational documents) from any web-based device requires fewer HR business partners to be involved in document review in the instance of an organization with multiple branches/offices.
  • Leveraging automatic email notifications for onboarding process task reminders allows the human resources team to focus on the more strategic process elements such as culture assimilation, training excellence, fostering a sound mentoring program, and continuous analysis of new hire feedback…even with a potentially greater number of new employees and/or stakeholders involved in the process
  • Focusing more effort and enabling all stakeholders to spend more time with new employees leads to retaining teammates…teammates who are excited to be a part of the organization as a result of the attention, assistance and expectations offered in a revamped onboarding process
  • Engaged employees are likely to become productive more quickly, stay with your company longer and be better performers
  • This domino effect improves your customer satisfaction statistics, reduces operating costs, improves business output, and drives more revenue per employee in part due to the use of technology to automate the more tactical aspects of the process

Record benchmarks for current levels

During the process of identifying which quantitative KPIs are critical to your company’s success, be sure and note their current levels so that benchmarks may be established and compared against future metrics. Only by doing this will you be able to realize the extent to which your ongoing onboarding process improvements have an impact on business outcomes.

Meet with other process stakeholders to determine, in advance, where KPIs will be collected and reported; as well as, who is responsible for monitoring them, and how often.

To increase awareness of your re-engineering efforts, and to illustrate the importance of this endeavor with the rest of your organization, consider making highly visible dashboards available…either via a web-based portal/Intranet and/or in frequently-trafficked areas of your office(s). The added benefit of this approach is that it further commits all stakeholders to staying accountable to the goal for onboarding improvement. There’s no hiding from the onboarding scoreboard!

Organize your findings

Set yourself up for success when making your request for support and resources to senior management. By now you will have identified which KPIs will resonate with ownership, but also remember that your best approach is to come to management with a solution…not just a problem that needs fixing because a bunch of numbers are looking scary.

Think about the types of activities that will result in positive outcome change for your business. A helpful exercise is to organize potential items in a SWOT (Strengths – Weaknesses – Opportunities – Threats) four-square grid. This format helps to flesh out which items are the most critical objectives…as upon completing the grid, items that are truly top priorities are often redundantly referenced across more than one of the four squares. Additionally, a SWOT can help demonstrate that you are thinking outside the change’s impact on your department, and more broadly at an organizational level.

Grab your bullhorn and spread the word

In addition to presenting the raw numbers and proposed action steps to company ownership, it’s important to garner support from peers within the organization, as well. While you will need the head honchos to wave the green flag, it’s vitally important to make your peers aware of the forthcoming change effort, as well. The more you can engage them to offer feedback on how the process might work more effectively, the better your chances of future business outcomes being positively impacted. After all, you will continue to rely on these stakeholders to buy-in to the change so they are willing to help you execute the plan moving forward.

Do focus groups and/or surveys with existing employees for insight on what works or doesn’t work with your current employee onboarding process. Solicit feedback (and also communicate future progress) via many different avenues:

  • internal company newsletter
  • email
  • social media (particularly if you wish to also include feedback from your vendors and/or customers)
  • word of mouth
  • periodic company and/or department meetings
  • company dashboards/intranet

Stay the course

Approval for significant onboarding process improvement may not happen overnight in your organization, but continuing to speak the language of senior management will at least keep the lines of communication open (while you continue to amass data that supports your cause) and improve your perceived value to the organization (icing on the cake).

ExactHire’s employee onboarding software makes the otherwise tedious administrative activities involved with hiring new employees paperless and painless. For more information about our software application, please visit our resources section, try our pricing estimator tool and/or contact us today.

Image credit: Photographers expand horizons in 2010 Army Digital Photography Contest 110311 by familymwr (contact)

Time-Saving Strategies for Employee Onboarding

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“I need more hours in the day to get everything done,” is something I used to constantly think. For Human Resources professionals, this thought often comes to mind during the onboarding phase of a new hire. There is so much to do, and so little time to do it.

The only way to get more hours in a day is to shed current “time-consumer” activities or to sleep less–and let’s be clear, my sleep hours are protected like Fort Knox. That leaves shedding current time-consumers, and even that doesn’t seem like a logical solution because those things still need to get done. So what’s the solution?

You need to have a strategy for approaching your work and optimizing your time. My two favorite time-saving strategies are called “One Touch” and the “4 D’s”.

One Touch

The One Touch strategy is something that most frequently applies to paperwork. It’s a way to cut through clutter. When you encounter a piece of paper, your goal is to touch it once. I like to think about it like my mailbox: when I get an item, I either toss it into the trash before entering the house, put the mail in the “to be paid” tray, or take action on it immediately. Same thing can be said for the papers that land on my desk or in my inbox.

4D’s

Most people consider “4D’s” and “One Touch” the same strategy, but whichever strategy works for you, and whatever you would like to call it is a-okay by me. Here are the 4D’s:

  1. Do it. These are typically important and urgent items with short-term deadlines. Take care of it and mark it DONE. Think of someone who brings you a completed I-9. That’s a “Do It” task.
  2. Dump it. These items are unnecessary clutter and unimportant. Think of sales fliers for items your company will not partake or purchase. Take that to the trash.
  3. Delegate it. If someone else possesses the skill set to handle an item, pass that item on. Think of an IT competency questionnaire that will result in the IT department training a new employee. Delegate the submission and scheduling of the IT training directly to the IT department.
  4. Defer it. This is an item that you need to do, no one else can do it, and the deadline is not soon. Make sure that by deferring an item, you do not become a bottleneck in the process. Think of a new hire that submits an apparel form, but you only order new hire apparel once a month. You defer this item until the regularly scheduled moment.

To help manage your employee onboarding process a bit better, implement one of the above strategies. Whichever strategy you choose will be better than none at all. For extra assistance in implementing these strategies, consider investing in technology as part of your total time-saving solution. Onboarding Software can help with workflow and reminders, and it will require fewer touches of virtual pieces of paper.

 

ExactHire works with small- and medium-sized organizations to help them leverage technology in hiring. For more information about our employee onboarding software, try our pricing estimator and/or schedule a live demo with us today.

Image credit: Clock on East Montague by North Charleston (contact)

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