Properly conducted onboarding will allow your company to reap the benefits of hiring a new employee faster, and you will also be perceived by them as a professional. For that, mistakes made during the onboarding stage of a newly recruited person can cost you a lot – and not only in terms of image!
Onboarding is the introduction of an employee to a new job. It involves informing him how the company operates, what values are held in the company, and familiarizing him with policies and internal regulations. It also includes giving him access codes to the equipment used in the company, training in health and safety, and informing him about non-wage benefits.
This is an important process, because it gives the employee more than just basic information about the company’s operations. It reassures him that he is important to the organization and that the company cares about making him feel comfortable in the new place. The sooner he acclimates, the sooner he will start working effectively, which will translate into company profits.
Properly conducted onboarding consists of a number of smaller activities. For the human resources department, which is usually responsible for the process, this is a burden, especially if the company takes on many new employees at once.
Fortunately, it can be automated, which benefits not only the company, but also the new employee. HR IT systems, which provide a platform for information exchange, serve this purpose. Why is it worth it?
Ability to accurately plan the onboarding process
Modern HR programs allow you to create a checklist, which is used to list the next elements of onboarding and tick off those that have already been done. This allows HR to know at what stage of onboarding an employee is, so what information has already been provided to him and what training he has taken part in. Also, the new employee has an overview of the “progress data.”
Checking that all stages of onboarding have already been carried out is especially important when there are activities involved without which the employee cannot be allowed to perform his duties, or physically cannot undertake them because he has not been given some information or access.
Before taking up daily duties, an employee should take tests and be trained in health and safety. It can happen that in the chaos of change this is not taken care of.
If an employee suffers an accident while performing his duties, the employer may be liable for allowing a person to work without training.
As you can see, planning is important and helps you avoid trouble!
Positive impression made on new employee
Of course, onboarding can be planned even without using an IT system. In the basic variant, the new employee gets a folder with the most important materials (access codes, the HR department’s email address and possibly the address of the intranet, if the company has one).
He has to familiarize himself with the information, and he is supposed to find out about the layout of the building, the rules for reserving meeting rooms or possible access to parking spaces from colleagues.
Sooner or later the new employee will find the answers to all the questions on his own, but won’t this put the company in a bad light? Such an unprofessional act may even alienate new employees from the organization – especially those who previously worked in very well-managed companies and have a comparison of what the implementation looked like there. It is not without reason that it is said that first impressions cannot be repeated..
Faster onboarding of new employees
Onboarding should go smoothly. Neither the employee cares about prolonged procedures, nor is it in the interest of the company. The employee should receive clear information, pick up the equipment with access codes, and be trained and start working.
Prolonged onboarding can have various causes. It can be the result of the fact that no person has been designated responsible for the implementation of the new employee and “in their spare time” various people from the human resources department undertake it. What does the employee then do? He waits and feels that he is expendable in the organization.
Delays may also be due to the fact that the company has not developed rules for implementation and HR employees act intuitively. They lack the knowledge of how to carry out the process.
This chaos can be avoided if there is an implementation plan (as already mentioned) and the ability to tick off tasks already completed (checklist).
The process will go well, and the new employee will start his daily duties without delay, equipped with a set of information.
Effective and thorough induction of new employees
An effective onboarding is one that provides the employee with the maximum amount of knowledge in a short period of time (which does not mean that it can be carried out “in a nutshell” – it’s not a race!).
As a result, the employee does not feel lost. He understands the way the company works, knows his way around the building, can log into the company’s systems right away. He doesn’t have to ask new colleagues about everything, nor will he refuse to perform a task just because he hasn’t been introduced to something.
Effective onboarding also pays dividends in the long run. It will be a failure for the entire onboarding system in place at the company if an employee admits that for several months he was unable to fully spread his wings because he lacked some basic, as it turned out after time, information. Unfortunately, the effects of improper implementation can make themselves known even long after employment.
Less workload for the person implementing the new employee
In most companies, onboarding new employees is the job of human resources, although in smaller companies a manager or supervisor may be responsible for it. Regardless of who handles it, onboarding takes time and pulls the person doing it away from other tasks.
This is especially difficult when a company is taking on many new employees at the same time. While some of the activities can be carried out for a larger group (e.g., health and safety training), it is good for everyone involved to ask questions and be heard.
Onboarding also consists of activities that the employee does not see, which are primarily related to reporting. The more you can relieve the HR employee of the burden of completing tables, filling out paperwork and controlling which activities have already been carried out and which are still pending, the better.
He will be able to use the time he saves to talk to employees or complete other tasks. This will increase the comfort of his work – after all, no one likes to work in a hurry and stress! – and you, as an employer, will also save money.
Ability to transparently analyze the progress of the onboarding process
Ideally, the entire process is automated and in a specially designed system, tailored to the needs of a particular company, the progress of the implementation can be monitored (the aforementioned checklist, which shows at what stage of onboarding the employee is).
The new employee should have access to this list (preferably through an app on his phone) so that he can independently monitor whether a set of information, documents and codes has already been provided to him.
Thanks to the fact that the HR department has access to the system, it does not have to ask the employee what stage of implementation he is in. He has all the data at his fingertips.
As you can see, a properly executed implementation is invaluable. It streamlines procedures and avoids mistakes that the company will ultimately pay for anyway.
There are many programs available on the market to support the onboarding process. What should guide your choice? It is worth reaching for a system that has been proven by hundreds of companies. Such a system is HR Panorama.
For the past 15 years, it has marketed state-of-the-art human resources programs that facilitate employee management, time accounting, and support recruitment and onboarding of new employees.
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