In this article, we’ll learn 10 tips that can help HR professionals improve the enterprise onboarding process.
As many readers already know, employee onboarding is an important procedure that can have a lasting effect on the workforce.
Effective onboarding can:
- Improve employees’ perception of the workplace
- Increase engagement and satisfaction
- Improve retention and longevity
- Enhance the overall work environment, by decreasing turnover, stress, and instability
There is no magic formula that can transform the onboarding process overnight.
However, with a structured approach and the right techniques, HR professionals can create an onboarding process that generates substantial results for the organization … and, incidentally, streamlines their own workflows.
Enterprise Onboarding: 10 Tips and Best Practices for HR Professionals
Here are 10 best practices and tips that can help HR professionals increase onboarding efficiency with minimal extra effort.
1. HR Software
The right HR software can make a world of difference when it comes to onboarding.
Here are a few tools that every HR professional should have in their digital office:
- HR platforms, which include many HR functions, such as payroll and document processing
- Online collaboration tools, such as chat programs
- Employee survey software
- Digital training platforms
Perhaps the most important tool to include is the digital adoption platform (DAP), covered next.
2. Digital Adoption Platforms
Digital adoption platforms are tools that automate training – a must-have function in today’s digital work environment.
The best digital adoption solutions:
- Offer contextualized learning directly inside the target software
- Allow trainers to create customized step-by-step walkthroughs
- Include software analytics that offer insight into employee behavior
- Can automate tedious tasks, freeing up employee time for more useful activities
The best digital adoption platform is from WalkMe, the company that pioneered the solution.
3. Automated Onboarding
Certain aspects of the employee onboarding process can be automated, such as:
- Product training, through digital adoption platforms
- Onboarding communications, through email automation tools, help desk software, and other enterprise communication software
- Orientation documentation, through HR platforms
The right HR automation tools can have a very positive impact on the onboarding process, dramatically increasing onboarding efficiency, while decreasing HR workloads.
4. Digitize Training
Digital adoption platforms are one of the best ways to automate onboarding training and product tours. But they are not the only way.
Other methods include:
- Learning management systems, which allow instructors to manage and distribute educational content digitally
- Knowledge bases, which allow employers to place training content online
- Multimedia courses, which can include multiple training formats, from video to audio
The more that employers can exploit digital technology, the more effectively they can onboard and train their workers.
5. Targeted Talent Management
There are several reasons to focus on talent management.
A strategic, systematic approach to managing talent does several things:
- Improves the organization’s talent pool
- Decreases turnover while increasing retention
- Boosts employee satisfaction
- Enhances the workplace culture
One of the end results of such an approach is that employers can spend less time recruiting, re-hiring, and re-training … and more time focusing on other HR tasks.
6. Employee Onboarding Templates
An employee onboarding template can make work much easier for HR professionals.
Templates allow HR professionals to:
- Quickly and easily plot out a new hire’s onboarding journey
- Save time and money
- Spend more time on other HR duties
HR personnel have enough on their plate as it is – using a template helps simplify the onboarding process and ensure that no tasks get left out or forgotten.
7. An Employee Experience Journey Map
The employee experience begins with recruitment and ends after the employee exits the organization.
A journey map will cover all the stages of the employee life cycle, including:
- Attracting new employees
- Hiring
- Onboarding
- Engagement
- Performance
- Development
- Departure
Each stage of this journey can then be optimized and analyzed through surveys, software data, discussions, and more.
All of that information, in turn, can be used to gain insight into – and improve – every stage of the journey, including onboarding.
8. A Structured Approach to Onboarding
There is one thing that all of the tips here have in common: they all take a structured approach to onboarding.
Taking a systematic, structured approach is crucial for several reasons:
- A structured, systematic methodology allows organizations to model and understand the employee experience
- HR professionals can only improve the employee experience if they can understand it
- Business processes, such as onboarding, produce far better results when they are structured, systematic, and documented
For more information on how to structure the onboarding process, consider researching existing onboarding strategies, then using those as a basis for further development.
9. Post-Exit Surveys
On the surface, post-exit surveys may seem to be very far removed – if not completely irrelevant to – enterprise onboarding.
However, post-exit surveys can be very valuable for a number of reasons.
For instance, employee surveys can help the organization learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the organization.
They can offer insight into every stage of the employee journey, including onboarding.
Over time, those surveys can also be improved to dig deeper into employees’ sentiments, uncovering more about their needs, why they left, and what can be improved in the future.
10. Continual Optimization
To keep an enterprise onboarding program relevant, an organization should:
- Continually collect data about the program
- Set targets and design strategies for improving those metrics
- Regularly make course adjustments
No process is perfect right out of the gate.
And even if a program gets excellent results today, it will likely become less relevant over time.
After all, employees and organizations continue to change, even if processes do not.
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WalkMe Team
WalkMe spearheaded the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) for associations to use the maximum capacity of their advanced resources. Utilizing man-made consciousness, AI, and context-oriented direction, WalkMe adds a powerful UI layer to raise the computerized proficiency, everything being equal.