Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to new work configurations ranging from hybrid-at-will to fully remote, more companies are leveraging technologies to improve their onboarding processes, especially preboarding and electronic onboarding. While it’s useful to explore the potential benefits of tools like gamification, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and the use of training apps, here we’ll focus on ways your organization can shift to electronic onboarding while maintaining the human element: emphasizing employee and employer engagement to create a personalized onboarding process that improves employee satisfaction, productivity, and employee retention.
Making Electronic Onboarding More Comprehensive and Engaging
One of the primary benefits of electronic onboarding is that it promises to morph what could be a lackluster in-person onboarding process into a more sustained, multifaceted, engaging, and efficient process. With traditional (non-electronic) onboarding, many companies limit the process to a single day or week. This can be overwhelming to new hires for practical reasons (front-loaded paperwork, as one example), but it can also feel impersonal, limit opportunities for socialization with coworkers, and create issues with acclimation to company culture.
For these and other reasons, more organizations are shifting to electronic onboarding that includes a preboarding process. Preboarding through electronic onboarding allows your organization to provide the employee handbook, digital welcome messages, tax forms, documents requiring e-signature, and job-specific training through one consolidated platform. This also gives your new hire much-needed breathing room to complete the onboarding process incrementally well before their official Day One start. Meanwhile, managers and supervisors who are using automated HR software for this process can monitor a new hire’s onboarding progress and receive notifications when tasks are completed, or can communicate quickly and efficiently if issues arise.
In conjunction with these practical benefits of preboarding, an electronic onboarding process allows managers and existing employees to connect with a new hire through one-on-one meetings, as well as more casual calls that could include virtual “happy hours” or “water cooler” sessions. As we mentioned, some companies are taking these processes a step further by using gamification, VR, AR, and training apps to grant new hires a virtual office tour, training in a virtual environment, or games that assist with understanding job responsibilities or gauging skill sets prior to starting work. There are demonstrable advantages to these approaches, but they should be seen as a complementary rather than primary means of improving your onboarding process. Ultimately, even the most innovative and promising tools require meaningful participation from the employer and employee to maximize their benefits.
When opportunities for connection, socialization, and employer-employee engagement are introduced even in the preboarding stage of electronic onboarding, it increases the likelihood that a new hire will begin their first day feeling familiar with their fellow team members, clearer on job expectations, and relieved of the typical Day One disorientation that results from HR paperwork, company acclimation, and much more being condensed into a much shorter period of time.
Electronic Onboarding - Beyond Day One
Once a new hire begins their first week of work, there are other strategies that your organization can apply to ensure that onboarding – including performance review, training, and workplace acclimation – is a more sustained and supportive process.
For instance, many companies are beginning to implement 30-60-90-day plans with their new employees to not only evaluate progress and productivity at designated points in time, but also to increase engagement between a manager and employee early in their tenure with the company. 30-60-90-day plans can be incredibly beneficial in terms of articulating key goals with early projects or job responsibilities, but they also create an opportunity for managers and supervisors to understand a new employee’s long-term goals and aspirations within the organization. This should be an important part of the first and subsequent meetings, especially because managers – with the information shared by the new employee – can use the electronic onboarding platform to provide the employee with applicable training, education, and career advancement opportunities that apply to their long-term goals.
To further leverage the electronic onboarding platform, managers and supervisors can also electronically send new employees alerts, notifications, follow-up reminders, how-to guides, policy information, questionnaires, and many other materials. In addition to the participation of a direct manager or supervisor, it’s also helpful to designate an onboarding “buddy” to answer questions or simply check-in periodically with a new hire for at least the first 30 days of employment. This can serve to complement the support of a manager or supervisor and encourage a new employee to request additional resources, ask clarifying questions, or even be introduced to other employees by the onboarding buddy.
Merging Technology with Employee and Employer Participation: Key Takeaways
At the heart of any electronic onboarding process is the participation of the new employee and multiple members of the organization: a direct manager, onboarding buddy, and other team members within the employee’s department. Here’s a checklist of approaches your organization can take to maximize the benefits of an electronic onboarding platform while staying personally and socially engaged in the new employee’s acclimation process.
- Capitalize on an integrated and automated HR platform to deliver key resources and training during the preboarding phase. Remember that using this type of platform should free up more time for you and your HR staff to connect socially and personally with the new hire. Whether it’s a welcome message or a casual group meeting two or three times before a new hire’s Day One start, these small gestures can go a long way to help new employees feel welcomed and comfortable.
- Monitor onboarding tasks through the electronic onboarding platform you choose. This will allow you to check for receipt of e-signatures, completed training, HR paperwork, and ensure any new hire is on-pace. You should develop an onboarding strategy that integrates 30-60-90-day plans (and related tasks) into the onboarding software so both managers and employees can continue to use a familiar and easy-to-use platform for communication, sharing updates, submitting completed materials, etc.
- Closely consider which tools you’d like to use beyond an automated onboarding platform to complement the onboarding process. Whether it’s VR, AR, training apps, or gamification tools, consider “demoing” these options and soliciting new hire and employee feedback about their efficacy and appeal as you weigh the implementation of any new tools.
- Consider creating a new-hire forum or social media network within your HR/onboarding platform to allow new employees to socialize, learn from each other, ask questions about job tasks, and more.
Optimize Electronic Onboarding with Cello HR
As onboarding strategies and tools evolve, it can be a challenge to develop an electronic onboarding process that is automated, efficient, personalized, and sustained enough to improve employee engagement, productivity, and employee retention. That’s why Cello HR offers a leading-edge HR and onboarding platform designed to help you efficiently streamline new hires, monitor their progress, and encourage connection throughout the employee lifecycle.
Contact Cello HR today to learn more about how we can help you leverage technology to streamline your onboarding process and increase employee engagement.