Onboarding new employees is a time intensive, complicated and often tedious process for new employees and HR departments alike. Credit checks, new employee data gathering, ordering of new IT systems, orientation scheduling and payroll management are some of the preboarding paperwork required even before start day. Then there are the reams of forms that new employees inevitably find themselves filling in on their first day – not the most motivating start to any new job.
These issues could be eradicated by automating the whole process – but only 2% of organisations do¹. More worryingly, only 12% of employees strongly agree their company does a great job of onboarding². Something is clearly going wrong.
At AUTTO we help organisations to simplify their onboarding process easily and quickly. No special programming skills are required to use AUTTO so anyone can use it. We have seen the incredible benefits using automation can bring and want to share them with you – so here we present our top reasons why all HR departments should automate the onboarding process:
- Cuts vast amounts of wasted time
Forms, forms and more forms! Excessive paperwork in the hiring process is one of the problems for new hires and HR department alike. New personnel fill in lots of forms. Often on paper and often by hand. Typically, a new hire will be given 41 administrative tasks and 3 documents to complete³. The HR department needs to create and customise each of these forms for every new employee and then manually input all the information into their system. Dull and laborious for all we are sure you’ll agree. Automation can eliminate this waste of time. It can generate bespoke new hire forms from templates tailored for each new hire – each form can be cross populated with repetitive information, so your new staff member doesn’t have to repeatedly fill out the same information on different forms. Plus time is saved by your HR department as they no longer spend hours typing up the information.
- Ensure accuracy and speed
Streamline document processing. Usually, new hires will submit documentation by hand, via post or email, running the risk it gets lost, forgotten or even sent to the wrong place. These forms may contain information that needs to be passed along to other departments or organisations, such as equipment orders, desk allocation or IT setups. These run the same risk of being sent to the wrong place or buried in a busy inbox and all this too-ing and fro-ing significantly delays the whole process and the risk of human error increases.
Onboarding automation erases these delays and ensures accuracy — documentation is routed electronically, according to pre-set “rules”. Once forms are submitted, they’re automatically sent to the department or organisation that needs to complete the next step. If nothing happens then a reminder is generated and sent. Additionally, more time is saved and accuracy ensured as there’s no more manual data entry as everything uploads automatically.
- Automate hiring approvals to support regulatory needs
Onboarding new people comes with regulatory requirements – whether that be tax declarations, checking Right to Work or references and financial information. By taking the automation route, tax and other official forms are easily generated and if required sent to the new employee for information entry, digital signatures etc. A digital paper trail is created and saved centrally to meet regulatory requirements.
- Employee satisfaction from day one
Proper onboarding sets the tone. An effective and supportive onboarding experience for new employees can create loyalty from day one. Plus, HR staff stop spending vast amounts of time ‘paper pushing’, feel more valued and can focus their time and energies on more strategic HR issues. Overall staff who are happier and more satisfied in their roles are prepared to work and perform better. Importantly this makes them likely to speak more highly of your organisation – which in turn helps YOU attract top talent.
And given people who did NOT have a positive new hire user experience4 were twice as likely to seek a different opportunity in the near future, how can you afford not to automate your onboarding?
Get in touch with us to discuss all your automation needs – Let’s Chat
References:
¹ Experian HR Onboarding Trends report Nov 2019
² Sage “The Changing the Face of HR Research” report at gallup.com/workplace/242252/employee-experience.aspx
³ SaplingHR, 2021
4 Digitate survey – SUPER CIO: What the CIO sees—that other people don’t
