Onboarding is one of the most important things you can do to nurture employees, reduce turnover and have to fill fewer empty positions. With the staggering amount of open jobs in the United States right now, those are likely some of the biggest priorities for businesses of all sizes.
Unfortunately, onboarding tends to go under the radar because it can consume time and other resources. It can put a burden on your other employees and reduce productivity if it’s not done properly.
By automating certain parts of your onboarding, you can utilize fewer resources, get more return on your investment and have better outcomes.
Top 6 Employee Onboarding Automation Best Practices
The following are six tips for automating your onboarding, or at least parts of it.
1. Tech Assets
One of the best places to start automating onboarding is with tech assets.
Your IT team should create an automated process where employees get access to what they need to do their jobs. Create self-serve documents and repositories of information for setting up passwords and credentials.
Automating IT setup for new employees has a couple of key advantages. It makes your onboarding process more streamlined, but it also frees up your IT team, so they aren’t dealing with monotonous tasks.
Your onboarding experience is better, and your IT team is more productive.
You can assign access according to the role of the employee, and tasks can be linked to the member of your team who’s responsible for access provision.
2. Automatic Scheduling
The first day is an important one. On an employee’s first day, automatically schedule the meetings they need to participate in.
For example, you can schedule a brief introduction between the new employee and their direct supervisor, as well as the people on their team.
You can also schedule training sessions and general introduction meetings.
Each employee can then get a customized itinerary highlighting what’s required of them on the first day or during their first week.
3. Benefits Enrollment
Automating benefits enrollment is simple and saves a lot of time.
Employees like it because they can get it out of the way and get started with their enrollment faster.
You can send out an automated email, and within that should be a detailed and customized explanation of benefits.
Then, include instructions on how to electronically complete all documents.
You can also set up the system so that automatic reminders are sent out with deadlines.
4. Use AI for Feedback
Feedback is an important part of onboarding. Employees appreciate it because it helps them know if they’re heading in the right direction, and it can give them more confidence in what they’re doing.
What’s great is that there are ways to automate this feedback and reduce the workload on managers and other employees, but it’s still an integral part of your onboarding.
You might be wondering how to automate something like feedback.
First, you can send out surveys to your new employee at various points. For example, you could send one after their first day, then after their first month, and so on.
Then, artificial intelligence can assess the employee responses on the survey and determine if there’s a problem or even if an employee might be at risk of leaving.
If problems are identified, you can address them proactively, rather than waiting for them to grow out of control or for the employee to leave.
Using AI in feedback is one of the best ways to improve overall efficiency, and you can use it beyond onboarding.
5. Create a Plan
Perhaps before you even do the steps above, it’s important to have a plan for everything with your onboarding.
You should sit down with all key stakeholders.
Go over everything from documents to training, and make lists of what an employee will need during onboarding.
Then you can go through it and decide what should be automated and what you might want to continue to do in a more personal way.
6. Training
Onboarding involves a lot of training, which with the use of options like a learning management system, can also be automated.
You create the training once, and then employees can log in and move through it at their own pace.
You can include assessments that will provide you with an alert if a new employee isn’t grasping a concept the way they should so that you can assign someone to work with them.
With self-paced training, employees tend to retain the information and be able to better apply it to their job.
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