Creating a More Efficient Onboarding Process

Every organization needs a way to effectively manage its employee base, and human capital management (HCM) systems can be invaluable in helping teams achieve a variety of outcomes, including recruitment, performance management, and onboarding. Efficient onboarding is critical so that new hires can transition into their responsibilities faster and become productive team members on an accelerated timeline. Additionally, for organizations looking to introduce new digital tools to their existing employees, an efficient onboarding process is important so that users can achieve productivity on the new platforms quickly.

Analyzing the success of onboarding processes can help executives identify where employees are finding success, where they are encountering difficulties, and where improvements can be made. Some HCM tools can be used to gather these analytics on successful and challenging experiences, giving executives the data that they need to make smart, informed decisions.

Enabling personalized experiences can also improve employee performance and the overall onboarding process. Tools that provide customized assistance and recommendations throughout application-specific onboarding processes can mitigate potential problem areas, such as underutilized features, improving the employee’s chances of successfully adopting the tool and achieving better productivity and overall knowledge of the organization’s tools and platforms.

While establishing a strong training process for new employees or employees adopting new tools is critical, leaders must also enhance employee engagement to make sure the messages, protocols, and techniques shared in the training sessions resonate and are retained. This can be done through personalized, custom guidance within the training, as well as on-demand assistance to make sure employees have a strong understanding of the concepts and processes.

Leaders may find that adoption is their organization’s largest challenge in the implementation and rollout of new digital tools. Without employee participation or successful onboarding onto the platform, it will be difficult to maximize ROI, and budget and company resources may have been used in vain. As organizations pursue broader employee engagement and tool adoption, digital adoption platforms, or DAPs, can help accelerate this process and provide a more seamless experience for both employees and employers.

Before deploying new digital tools and platforms, organizations need to work behind the scenes to realign internal processes, manuals, and resource libraries to equip their employees for success. Questionnaires and surveys to gauge sentiment can help keep employees motivated and receptive throughout the process. A digital adoption platform can also provide ongoing support after the employee’s initial training.

Leaders must ensure that their current onboarding processes are able to properly facilitate scale and provide a seamless user experience for existing employees. As the company grows, this enables more employees to learn how to use and gain value from new digital tools. If existing procedures are lacking, changes must be made to address and resolve shortcomings.

Learning must happen in the flow of work, without pulling employees from their work environment. Learning also needs to be continuous and personalized at scale, as this will improve knowledge retention. This cannot be a disjointed experience: it must go beyond single tasks and actions at any given time and instead connect end-to-end processes to deliver integrated experiences that accelerate employees’ productivity.

Finally, it is important that the onboarding process does not interfere with the employees’ other tasks and responsibilities. This provides a less intrusive experience and lets the employees immerse themselves in their roles and achieve higher productivity without negative distractions.

Increasing employee efficiency is critical for leaders, as this will result in maximizing the ROI on their organization’s software tools, help employees elevate skill sets, and improve overall company productivity. By establishing an efficient onboarding process and making the most of their HCM tools, executives can ensure their teams can perform to the best of their abilities.