HR teams know too well that hiring someone is just the first step in onboarding. Engagement, employee satisfaction, retention, assimilation, and efficiency are just a few of the many responsibilities linked to onboarding. But employee onboarding is a necessity every new hire should be led through, and the best way to do this is with well-planned HR onboarding solutions.
The employee onboarding isn’t a one-step process that can be streamlined with a play-by-play rulebook. It’s different for every company, every hire, and every department.
Take a comprehensive approach to onboarding with Kissflow HR Cloud
Kissflow HR Cloud takes a personal approach to onboarding. Its employee onboarding module improves employee retention and engagement by offering an array of cutting-edge features.
1. Automated checklists guide the HR, the manager, and the new hire through all the steps to deliver a consistent employee onboarding process every time
2. Online documentation enables organizations to onboard with zero paperwork thus eliminating redundancy and improving data accuracy
3. Employee self-service empowers new employees to upload their documents, manage their user profile, connect with their teammates, and more
4. DocuSign connector helps businesses ensure legal compliance in their onboarding and HR documentation process with digital signature
5. Integration allows organizations to seamlessly connect their onboarding process with other HR processes—like performance, training—and reduce the ramp time of new hires and turn them into productive employees quickly.
Best practices of employee onboarding
Think of it as a puzzle: you get parts of a solution that add up to an entire system. These tailored practices become your own HR onboarding solutions and are designed to solve your problems.
Knowing which pieces to craft is part of understanding onboarding solutions. To shed some light on this, below are the top five practices any kind of company could use to bring new hires up to speed:
1. Throw a formal welcome
First-day jitters will always be a part of our lives no matter how experienced we become; in a new working environment, these nervous feelings are almost inevitable. To avoid this, a primary aspect of effective employee onboarding software is a proper introduction. Break down all the barriers separating the new hire from the rest of the team and quicken the transition from stranger to team member, in a setting outside of the workplace.
Formal welcomes usually come in the form of first-day orientation, where all the fresh hires are welcomed and introduced. This example of onboarding solutions can jumpstart the socialization process and is an opportunity for you to indoctrinate employees into the office’s culture, mission-vision, expectations, and work ethic.
2. Lay the philosophical groundwork
Another key practice in employee onboarding solutions is to immediately introduce the employee to the company philosophy. Does your company have a certain way of doing things, looking at things, understanding things? The goal is to synchronize the employee’s workflow into the company’s organic system.
A favorite creative exercise among HR reps is reimagining the company as a person. The goal of the employee, then, is to fit into the molds of that person, to be the company. Not only does this act as a fun activity for both the new hire and the team members around him or her, but it also allows them to visualize what the company stands for in ways that can be clearly understood.
3. Facilitate mentorship
HR departments aren’t the only ones who get peeved with developing onboarding solutions; onboarding can also feel abysmal to the employee. One method to brighten this experience on both sides is to create a mentorship program, turning the employee onboarding program into a sort of buddy system.
A senior team member will act as a personal help-desk to the new hire. Questions and tasks can be intimately monitored by the mentor, giving the new hire a safety net for potential costly mistakes, which in turn creates more comfort on those first few days.
Personal training with a seasoned member will also boost performance and confidence. Mentorship is one of the best HR employee onboarding solutions because it’s incredibly easy for those involved to track their progress and assess effectiveness.
4. Design operational flowcharts
Time is of the essence when creating powerful employee onboarding solutions. One way to save time for both the HR team and the new recruit is by creating intuitive and easy-to-digest content in the form of operational flowchart. Basically, simple visual aids.
These visual aids should be designed with one question in mind: how do I help an outsider becomes an insider? Flowcharts centered on key operations should readily provide applicable knowledge on processes, as well as information on department heads.
A criterion in creating a stand-alone flowchart should answer this primary question: can a new employee use this independently from other onboarding solutions? If the answer isn’t yes, start from scratch and design again.
5. Impose a schedule
Anyone who says there’s no such thing as too much information has obviously never tried to design their own employee onboarding workflow. Unlike machines, people can’t be fed thousands of pieces of data and be expected to work without malfunctioning.
Creating a schedule is important in a system. Set a schedule for tasks, meetings, modules, and classes in order to track the employee’s progress. Not only does this give the new employee insight on proper workflow habits and more understanding on how things are done in the office, it also offers the new hire constant opportunities for interaction without feeling like he or she is being crowded. By imposing a schedule you impose a routine, and only through routine can the new hire easily transition into a team member.
Taking your onboarding solution to the next level with Kissflow
There’s one weak spot to these five onboarding best practices: it takes away time and resources. Good team members dedicate their time to putting new ones up to speed and ultimately means one thing: less work done. And more and more companies are realizing this, the ultimate disadvantage to these practices.
But there’s an easy solution: onboarding automation. More companies are opting towards adopting automated onboarding solutions, shifting the tiresome onboarding responsibilities to platform-based, paperless, interactive HR software like Kissflow HR Cloud.
With Kissflow HR Cloud, businesses can eliminate redundancy and manual effort without impacting process compliance and efficiency. It allows organizations allot assets, schedule team introduction, assign mentorship, create training plans, and more.
Kissflow HR Cloud integrates the administrative aspects of onboarding (documentation, orientation, and more) with the tactical (compliance) and strategic aspects (engagement and self-service) to deliver a memorable onboarding experience that delivers business results.
Looking for a way to improve your new hire retention and speed up their time to productivity? Sign up for a free trial of Kissflow HR Cloud and see how it can improve your bottom line!
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