“74% of organizations plan to permanently shift employees to remote work even after the COVID-19 crisis ends.”
-Gartner CFO Survey
While 2020 may be considered the year of remote work, it was just the beginning as the trend would continue in 2021 and beyond. According to an Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) report “the percentage of employees permanently working from home is expected to double in 2021”. However, one of the most challenging changes organizations are facing in the present remote working scenario is onboarding employees remotely.
Starting an employee’s journey in your organization off on the right foot is one of the most important processes to get right. The traditional employee onboarding processes are no longer relevant while welcoming employees in the remote working world. The lack of personal touch and absence of face-to-face interactions with team members on-premise makes it difficult for an organization to undertake employee onboarding processes. Consequently, most organizations are today exploring technology opportunities to revamp and overcome the challenges of the remote employee onboarding processes.
Importance of Effective Virtual Employee Onboarding
“4% of employees quit after a bad first day.”
– Deloitte Employee Perspective Survey
Let’s imagine a scenario where your organization has just hired a new team member who will be working remotely. This new employee was head and shoulders above the other candidates in terms of expertise, achievements, and career history. But if you can’t guarantee that their first experiences in their new role are satisfactory, you risk wasting your new talent and may even result in them rethinking their decision. Employee onboarding is the second touchpoint between the employer and the new hire, and it’s the one that makes a lasting impression. This process sets the tone for an employee’s career with your organization and that’s why it should be designed with care.
Benefits of an Effective Virtual Employee Onboarding
- Higher Employee Engagement: The first few weeks are crucial for an employee after joining your organization. This is the time that determines their engagement with the organization. If you successfully onboard the new employees, they will genuinely believe in your vision and feel motivated to log in to work every morning.
- Higher Employee Productivity: Higher engagement leads to higher employee productivity. When your new employees are motivated enough to work towards your organization’s vision, they will put in their best efforts in whatever they do, leading to increased productivity.
- Higher Employee Retention: Poor remote onboarding can result in new employees leaving your organization. One of the most critical factors affecting employee retention is holistic onboarding. If your employees are comfortable working with you and are getting along just fine with everyone in the company, they tend to stick around for long.
- Well-informed Employees: The last thing you would want a new employee to be is clueless and lost when joining your company. Effective onboarding helps you provide all relevant information to your employees about their roles, responsibilities, and the company they are working for. This allows them to be equipped and prepared from day one.
- Promoting Inclusiveness: When you onboard your employees effectively, it makes them feel a part of your corporate family and included in the team. An attribute that often goes unnoticed, a genuinely warm welcome to the new employees, promotes a culture of inclusiveness within your organization that lasts for an extended period.
- Building Healthy Relations with Existing Employees: Onboarding processes often provide managers and team leaders to establish healthy relations with their new employees. It is their responsibility to train the employees well and provide them with all relevant information to work effectively.
Why Automate Virtual Employee Onboarding?
As evident, employee onboarding is a vital process for any organization. However, onboarding new employees can be a tedious process involving a lot of people and resources. For just one candidate, an entire host of small tasks have to be completed as part of the employee onboarding checklist. An automated onboarding process is a sigh of relief for HR representatives who are entrusted with this process. Automation ensures that onboarding a new employee in the remote working world doesn’t have to be a groan-inducing process. An automated employee onboarding process ensures new employee satisfaction, performance, as well as the general efficiency of the organization.
For Organizations
- Reduces Costs: This is definitely something that the management board of every organization loves to hear. Onboarding automation eliminates the redundancy that paperwork brings to a process. On average, companies have about 15 to 20 forms and papers to read, review, and sign as part of standard employee onboarding procedures. Automation removes such hassles.
- Saves Time: Employee onboarding usually takes a toll on other administrative roles. Automation can accelerate and save a lot of time which would have otherwise gone into manually performing various onboarding tasks. The responsible HR personnel does not have to spend too much time with the new hires.
- Streamlines Data Collection: Automation enables organizations to collect data more efficiently. With an automated onboarding process, you can gather information about the new hires more efficiently. You can also store the collected data in SharePoint or integrate it with other HR software.
- Reduces Errors: Automation of new employee onboarding brings the precision of a machine to the process. There are set parameters to an automated process that largely eliminates the chances of errors.
- Ensures Data Security: Employee onboarding can be a sensitive process as it includes important employee data. With onboarding automation, organizations can ensure that all information collected from new employees stays confidential and locked in a virtual database and out of reach from any kind of physical access.
For New Employees
- Enables a Friendly System: Many new hires get overwhelmed in the absence of an efficient onboarding process. An automated process delivers the right kind of information to the new employee, at the right time.
- Delivers a Fulfilling Experience: The traditional onboarding process usually leads to an ugly imbalance where some new hires receive a great onboarding experience while others get a hurried walkthrough. An automated onboarding process ensures that the employee onboarding process is consistent for every new person that joins the team.
- Allows New Hires to Get Started: The faster the onboarding process is over, the sooner a new person can start working on a team. Automated onboarding shortens the time for a person to transition from training to start working on their very first assignment.
Leverage SharePoint to Automate Virtual Employee Onboarding
Does your organization leverage SharePoint? Even though SharePoint is glorified as an Intranet, information management, and enterprise collaboration solution, it can be leveraged by organizations to automate various manually handled and document-intensive routines. Today, SharePoint has evolved to be the most preferred choice among organizations to meet their HR needs. Apart from strengthening collaboration across various HR tasks, SharePoint is also being used by the department to automate and streamline various tedious tasks. And it can be utilized to transform new employee onboarding experience.
Change the Way You Onboard New Talent with QuickApps
QuickApps, a No-code solution that enables organizations to automate business processes rapidly on SharePoint, has been empowering various organizations to automate their remote employee onboarding process with its rich assortment of award-winning web apps and point-and-click configuration. With QuickApps, business users can swiftly and efficiently automate their cumbersome business processes on SharePoint and tackle the requirements of a remote working world. Contact us for a FREE TRIAL.