Paul Deur
Annual employee turnover in the US has jumped nearly 20% from pre-pandemic numbers according to Gartner, and even while layoffs are now rising, for companies focused on the long-term, there’s an opportunity to attract and retain key talent.
Technology plays a huge role in today’s hybrid working environment and IT can use it to deliver a proactive digital experience that begins on day one. A formal onboarding program can increase employee retention by 82% and new hire productivity by 70%.
Onboarding requires IT support and coordination across multiple departments, including HR and procurement, and access to the databases and systems they use. Add in the explosion of remote workforces, the growth in device complexity, and the adoption of ever more SaaS services and user onboarding and offboarding is more complex, time consuming, and error-prone than ever.
Unfortunately, onboarding users is typically managed manually via email and service tickets. IT spends endless hours gathering requirements for new employees, chasing down approvals, figuring out proper access controls, provisioning software, and coordinating distribution of hardware.
Managed manually, onboarding inflates IT labor costs and causes delays in enabling new employees to be productive.
By integrating systems and automating workflows, you can:
To refine your enterprise onboarding strategy, work with business leaders and HR to:
You should also document how and when workflows should be triggered, and identify task owners and the approval chains required for:
With onboarding processes in place, how easy is it going to be to follow them? A Forrester study found while companies are investing in automation only around a third of IT tasks are automated, leaving teams overwhelmed by the volume of work. Because of the many departments and systems involved in onboarding activities, coordination among them is required.
When managed manually, onboarding processes eat up valuable resource time as teams chase missing data as well as business and HR approvals. Any delays can impact the purchasing and shipping of equipment as well as the provisioning of access permissions, increasing the likelihood of users not having the tools they need to begin work.
“While companies are investing in automation only around a third of IT tasks are automated.”
- Forrester
Paperwork-heavy processes don’t just affect those teams in charge of coordinating activities, they can be a real turn-off for users, particularly new Gen Z’s entering the workplace. The average new hire must complete 41 administrative processes. By finding ways to automate workflows you could reduce the burden on them, as well as for departments across the company, and dramatically enhance the onboarding process.
The average new hire must complete 41 administrative processes |
Using a digital platform conductor (DPC), a tool cited in four Gartner hype cycles, you can ditch the manual processes. A DPC connects to all your disparate systems and management tools and collects new user requirements through configurable portals and forms to automate approvals and seamlessly manage onboarding requests:
Using a DPC you can use dates and events to orchestrate onboarding workflows. For example:
With all workflows digitally recorded, you can easily access reports for audit trails and compliance purposes.
ReadyWorks is a digital platform conductor. Book a demo to understand how ReadyWorks can automate user onboarding for your company.