Despise The Employee Onboarding Process? Automate It.

Everyone hates the onboarding process. 

You, the new-hire, the HR department—everyone agrees onboarding is like pulling teeth.  

Onboarding is your first impression, your chance to showcase your company’s culture and values to the new employees. You're there to convince them they made the right decision by choosing you, which is a hard ticket to sell if everything is bumping into each other. 

In the wake of such high turnover in the last three years, and the growing cost of hiring new employees, businesses need to invest in improving their problem areas. Onboarding, no matter who you are, is almost always the best place to start because of how needlessly manual it is.  

Why is onboarding such a pain?  

We’re only human, and we only have so many hands (and opposable thumbs). 

Documents get lost or take forever to process, accounts must be set up and authenticated, background checks conducted, keys made and tracked, you name it. Something always happens that plugs the bottleneck, and everyone suffers and starts pointing fingers at each other. It’s not pretty or productive. 

HR is on fire enough as it is! They’re in charge of overseeing the workplace environment, conducting training, safeguarding employee information, and more. Onboarding is another lengthy, grueling beast they somehow must get done with their already limited time. 

Throw your HR department a bone, here—automate employee onboarding. 

The benefits of automated onboarding. 

Besides saving everyone the headache, it lets your people focus on what matters most instead of chasing around volumes of paperwork. 

Automation is, by definition, the practice of completing tasks without the need for human intervention. More nuanced objectives, like meetings and strategy, can’t be done by a machine. But storing away information and sending emails via a triggered action? Absolutely. 

The benefits of automating your onboarding process include: 

Money saved and time earned  

Listen, fewer errors and time lost in the paperwork wormhole makes everyone feel better at the end of the day. No more repeats or redoes. No more blaming and shaming because someone entered a “1” instead of an “L.” Let’s all spend more time doing the work we excel at rather than a human pretending to be a computer.  

Increased regulatory compliance 

Onboarding new hires involves collecting and storing lots of private and confidential information, which requires compliance with regulatory requirements. Improved protection goes hand in hand with a predictable, repeatable process that automation consistently delivers.  

Improved employee experience  

Who doesn’t enjoy spending the first 1-3 days on the job filling out rote paperwork that gets misfiled, misread, or just plain missed? Literally, NO ONE. In fact, it’s the best way to make your new hire doubt their decision to work for you. Stop sowing the seeds of doubt with a messy, labor-intensive process – just automate it. Then, spend all that time you saved getting the new person hitting the ground faster and better?  

You have the budget to automate onboarding—we guarantee it. 

This is not an advertisement. 

We’re not here to sell you $100K in superfluous technology. The tools you already have are highly likely to be more than enough to streamline employee onboarding. If you know how to use them with more of an idea of their true capabilities, you’ll be able to work more strategically and efficiently. 

Everyone might be a little happier now that they’re out of the onboarding wormhole faster, too.  

Tools you’ll need to automate onboarding. 

Does your company have a Microsoft 365 subscription? If so, you already have the tools you need.  Key Microsoft software we recommend for automating the onboarding process are: 

• MS Planner  

• MS Teams 

• MS Power Automate (Formerly known as MS Flow) 

If your company doesn’t have an MS 365 subscription, worry not! There are plenty of other cost-effective project management software and programs out there that can be used to automate employee onboarding.  

How to get started. 

It’s time to get your new hires to their desks faster. 

The right tools are a powerful asset in eliminating wasted time on mundane, repetitive tasks without consuming your IT budget. In fact, if you have Microsoft 365, you already have everything you need to automate. This webinar will help you better understand the lay of the automation land. 

However, think twice before launching into automating your onboarding process without expert guidance. Instead, check out our business automation page to learn more about getting started. We’ll gladly help you automate the processes your business needs but dreads doing.