How to Automate Employee Onboarding the Right Way

A recent study by Gallup, found that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees.

Onboarding is often the first official taste of your company’s culture. Make a great first impression by welcoming your new employees with a cohesive, automated onboarding program. In fact, streamlining and automating your employee onboarding with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) can provide a host of benefits for both your next new employee and your company. 

The Benefits of ECM Solutions

ECM helps companies store, organize and better manage their data. Leveraging this stored and searchable data can increase efficiencies, improve compliance and assist your organization to make more strategic decisions.

Human Resource departments have found ECM to be beneficial in managing new employee onboarding and even for the entire employee records management lifecycle.

Here’s some of the benefits of automating your employee onboarding with ECM: 

• Helps your new employees get excited about working for your company
• Provides additional ways for new employees to socialize with their department and other organizational staff.
• Inspires new employees to become advocates of your organization
• Saves time for hiring managers and HR staff
• Allows searchable files instead of misplaced paperwork – better protection against security risks.
• Gives your organization a competitive edge in the hiring market by being viewed as an industry leader in promoting positive corporate culture. 

ECM solutions help to connect all of the separate pieces of your onboarding process, into one “electronic checklist” or workflow that keeps everyone accountable.

This can be tailored to a new employee’s role and responsibilities. For example, an onboarding workflow for a customer service associate could look a little different from one designed for onboarding a new department manager.

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How To Automate Your Employee Onboarding Process 

When you are ready to dig into the specifics of your organizational onboarding structure and create your step-by-step checklist.

The first step is to identify the specific processes needed to effectively onboard a new employee. Take note of which of these are currently done manually and which are already automated. If automated, include details about the software and how it is used.

Next, you’ll want to conduct a discussion or distribute a survey to hiring managers, asking for their departmental onboarding needs. This review is an opportunity to help hiring managers streamline the transition of new employees into their day-to-day roles. Examples of this, include scheduling a departmental lunch, shadowing colleagues to “learn the ropes” of the job or other standardized training needs.

Finally, you’ll work with your IT team to build the automation and connect these pieces together.

Alternatively, you could work with an ECM partner to conduct a business technology needs assessment, as well as construct and install an automation plan for you. 

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5 Ways to Automate Your Employee Onboarding 

Need some ideas on where to start? Here’s some typical tasks that could be automated and streamlined for employee onboarding.

1. Streamline New Employee Onboarding Forms 

• I-9 documents
• W-4 form
• Direct deposit form
• Benefits enrollment
• Company-specific paperwork (e.g., non-disclosure, compliance, etc.) 

2. Give Insight into Your Corporate Culture 

• Send a “Welcome Kit” before the new employee’s first day
• Create a series of introductory organization videos to give insight into the company’s history, mission/vision/values, employee events, culture and other highlights
• Explain the dress code
• Match the new hire with a mentor
• Assign security and/or company-specific online training 

3. Assign Computer Desktop Configuration Access

• Servers
• Standard office applications
• Other company tools (e.g., CRM, productivity apps, etc.) 

4. Create Online Groups for Mentorship and Collaboration

• New hires
• Department
• Specialized work groups

5. Introduce Your New Employee to the Organization 

Send a message to your entire organization with some information about your new hire. Encourage others to introduce themselves and make your new employee feel welcome.

ECM is a great tool to use to streamline your employee onboarding and have a searchable record to check that all necessary elements are in place for the arrival of your new employee. It’s also handy as a record to show that all required forms and training have been completed.

Want to learn more about ECM and how it can capture and streamline data to further benefit your hiring efforts? Click the link below to access our guide, 4 Keys to Successful ECM Implementation, to understand how ECM works and how it can help you fix broken processes, save time and money, and increase your employee satisfaction.