Onboarding is the most frequent task HR teams take on. This activity is crucial for service companies with a lot of employee attrition. Career transitions typically happen every two to three years for the general workforce, so reducing onboarding costs and time is a critical aspect of a successful HR team. Here we provide the steps to help your company to simplify the onboarding process and increase HR's productivity.

Onboarding Pain Points

The onboarding process usually involves time consuming tasks for both the new employee and the HR professional helping them. The filing and storage of repetitive information can make onboarding a huge chore. It is estimated that the mid-level onboarding time is around seven to 10 days. Some pain points HR professionals cite are:

• The amount of time it takes to onboard employees
• Keeping track of information such as phone numbers and email addresses of onboarding employees
• Using paper-based forms that need to be filled out by the employee, making record keeping tedious and increasing the risk of potential data losses
• Forcing employees to file several documents with the same information gives a bad first impression of the company
• Many documents in separate emails make the documents more difficult for employees to complete
• The dreaded days before weekly (or bi-weekly) payroll
• The time it takes to keep track of the steps in communication with employees

Unfortunately, 32 percent of global executives say the onboarding they experienced was poor"

-Pomeroy Inc.

The Solution? HR Onboarding Automation

In order to get rid of these pain points, companies can implement Automation of the  Onboarding process. HR automation offers a cloud-based solution that integrates all third-party systems, and automates all the processes within it. This provides an opportunity for HR professionals to monitor all status updates and changes on one central dashboard.

With HR Onboarding Automation, HR can simply enter the preliminary information and give access to employees for self-service. The employee dashboard allows them to fill out their information in a single form, which then enables everything else to be filed automatically. This saves the HR team time and effort, and employees as well. Above all, HR Onboarding Automation increases the employee experience, satisfaction, and engagement levels.

Increasing employee engagement investments by 10% can increase profits by $2,400 per employee, per year.”

-Workplace Research Foundation

HR Automation’s benefits include

For the HR Professional:

• Assigning onboarding documents with one click

• Benefits are auto-enrolled upon employee’s selection of requirements, reducing HR’s involvement

• Payroll is auto-generated to the account provided by the employee, simplifying HR efforts

• Onboarding duties within other departments are simplified as well

• The transparency of employee onboarding is better and can be tracked on the custom HR portal

• Changes in employee profile, data, or elections can all be completed in the same user-friendly interface

• Each employee’s documents are all auto-saved, saving organization efforts

• All communication with the employee is located in one location

• Various reports can be generated based on defined KPIs for HR

• Offboarding is automated and secure

• A better onboarding experience for employees enables HR to lessen employee turnover costs

(Want to learn how a lack of HR Automation can lead to high employee turnover? Click here.)

For the Onboarding Employee:

• Tasks are easy to complete from the HR portal

• No need to fill out the same information multiple times, as it’s stored within the portal

• Self-service makes it easy to change information, make requests, etc. to HR

• Easy to use HR portal

• Employees can raise HR cases via the portal, email, phone, chat, or a virtual HR agent

• Easy to access knowledge base

• Activities can be searched

• Chatbots can fulfill the most common requests 24/7

HR Onboarding Automation can result in a reduction of onboarding times by up to 50 percent, compared to a manual process. HR gains an estimated effort savings of up to 70 percent. Furthermore, HR Onboarding Automation helps HR teams create the best possible workplace environment for their teams, and for onboarding employees.