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Streamlined Success: Your Guide to Automated Onboarding
November 21, 2024
Automated onboarding simplifies life for HR and new hires, saving time and cutting costs. Here’s how to go digital — while keeping it personal.
Onboarding is a new hire’s first impression of an organization. Yet it’s often bogged down by repetitive tasks and endless paperwork, overshadowing what should be an inspiring and engaging start.
Automating parts of the onboarding process can shift the focus back to what really matters: welcoming new talent, building connections, and setting up a foundation for long-term success.
Here’s how automation can transform onboarding from a chore into a strategic advantage.
Key Takeaways:
- Onboarding automation streamlines the integration of new employees, enhancing the onboarding experience for both new hires and internal staff.
- To implement automation, organizations must standardize their process, set clear goals, and identify repeatable tasks that are great candidates for workflows, such as document management and training.
- Just because onboarding is automated doesn’t mean it has to lack a personal touch. Onboarding buddies, videos, and personalized swag can make a digital experience a human one, too.
What is Onboarding Automation?
Onboarding automation is the process of leveraging technology to streamline and simplify the employee onboarding experience. It transforms what can often be a lengthy, paperwork-heavy process into an efficient, engaging journey.
Traditionally, onboarding involved a series of manual steps — paperwork, account setup, and document sharing — that consumed time for both new hires and HR teams. With automation, these repetitive tasks are managed by software, freeing HR professionals to focus on the more strategic and personal aspects of welcoming new employees.
Automated onboarding solutions create workflows that guide new employees through essential steps, provide resources, and track progress to ensure every item is completed accurately and on time. This reduces administrative burdens and minimizes the risk of errors and overlooked details, setting up both the employee and the company for a smoother start.
Learn More: What is HR Automation? Examples, Benefits, and Challenges
The Benefits of an Automated Onboarding Process
Automated onboarding is essential for organizations looking to maintain the best possible employee introduction experience at scale.
Automated onboarding can:
- Increase efficiency: Automated onboarding reduces manual paperwork and data entry for employees, streamlining repetitive processes and tasks. An automated process can save new hires time and energy, allowing them to complete necessary tasks faster.
- Improve consistency: Automated onboarding ensures that all new hires receive the same information and standardizes the onboarding experience across departments.
- Enhance the employee experience: Automated onboarding can provide a smooth, professional first impression, delivering personalized content based on role and department.
- Foster better compliance: An automated system ensures all necessary legal documents are completed and stored properly. Additionally, automation platforms often track the completion of mandatory training modules and provide an audit trail for regulatory purposes.
- Provide data-driven insights: Many onboarding software platforms collect metrics on process efficiency and identify bottlenecks or areas for improvement.
- Support scalability: Unlike manually handling onboarding, the right automation software can easily handle fluctuations in hiring volume and supports onboarding across multiple locations or remote work settings.
How Phoenix Senior Living Achieved Six-Figure Savings by Automating Their Onboarding
Phoenix Senior Living relied on manual workarounds before having a unified, automated onboarding process. “We handed new hires a stack of paper to read, plus a printed handbook and benefits guide. It wasn’t a great experience for them,” explains Vice President of Human Resources Dean Slye.
And in the case of I-9 Forms, manual processes created significant risk.
“When we found we could digitize onboarding, it was like the angels were singing! New hires can now complete I-9 employment eligibility checks on their phone, adding pictures of their identification documents, before Paylocity authenticates everything,” adds Dean. “That will help minimize our exposure to regulatory risks.”
How to Automate the Onboarding Process in 3 Steps
With automation in place, onboarding becomes a breeze. But a bit of prep work is essential to make it truly effective for your organization.
Start with these key steps to lay the groundwork for an automated onboarding experience that benefits you and your new hires.
1. Standardize Your Onboarding Process
Many organizations that manually onboard employees don’t have a consistent process for new hires, making automation difficult.
If that sounds like your organization, break down your onboarding process into key stages: pre-boarding, orientation, training, HR compliance, team integration, and ongoing support. Document each task, the responsible stakeholders, and the timing of each step.
Once you have a clear picture of the onboarding process, it will be much easier to design standardized workflows.
Download Now: Onboarding Checklist for New Employees
2. Define Goals
When deciding to automate your onboarding process, you’ll also want to clearly understand the “why” behind it. This will help you hone in on the most important pieces to automate and what they should look like.
In clarifying what you want to achieve with automation, consider goals like:
- Reducing onboarding time.
- Improving new hire engagement and retention.
- Bolstering training completion rates.
- Reducing onboarding costs.
When establishing goals, make sure you identify the key metrics associated with each goal and have a means of measuring progress. For example, you could look at headcount data for the first month's retention rate, or survey new hires to determine engagement levels.
3. Identify Opportunities for Automation
Once you’ve mapped out your onboarding process, you’ll want to look for specific moments in your process that might be well suited for automation, including:
- Pain points: Survey your HR, IT, and hiring teams to understand bottlenecks and pain points in the current onboarding process. Is HR pinned down by manual data entry? Are new hires waiting too long for IT setup? Pinpoint the areas that cause delays or inefficiencies.
- Repetitive and manual tasks: Look for manually performed tasks or those requiring heavy administrative work. These are prime candidates for automation. For example, generating documents, sending follow-up emails, or scheduling orientation sessions.
You’ll most likely find that several parts of the onboarding process come up, like:
- Document management: Collecting signatures, requesting documents, and searching for specific onboarding documents.
- Training assignments: Assigning employee trainings, setting due dates for courses, and monitoring completions.
- Access management: Giving new hires immediate software access so they can become productive faster.
Can You Automate Remote Onboarding?
Yes, an automated onboarding process can be fully remote — and it’s become increasingly popular as more organizations embrace hybrid and remote work policies.
HR technology is essential for automating the more labor-intensive aspects of onboarding, particularly for remote employees. Since remote workers already rely on a digital platform to connect with your organization, embedding onboarding capabilities within this tech simplifies the process from the start.
Ideally, both remote and in-person employees should onboard through the same system. This will reduce management complexity for HR and create a consistent, seamless experience for all new hires.
How to Maintain Human Connection Throughout the Onboarding Process
Many organizations believe that automating their onboarding will prevent them from making a human connection with new hires.
That’s not necessarily true. Automating repetitive and administrative tasks can actually enhance human connection by freeing up time for meaningful interactions.
To humanize your automated onboarding, be sure to:
- Personalize communication: Use dynamic fields to tailor communications (e.g., using the new hire’s name, role, and team) and include a personal note from their manager or team leader.
- Use hybrid approaches: While you can automate the scheduling of introductory meetings or team coffee chats, the interactions themselves should be live and personal when possible. Schedule face-to-face meetings or video calls between the new hire and key team members early in the process.
- Leverage videos: Instead of relying solely on text-based communication, include personalized welcome videos from leadership, the new hire’s team, and other key colleagues. These can be pre-recorded and feel much more personal and warm.
- Assign buddies or mentors: Harvard Business Review found that new hires are 23% more satisfied [SH1] when they have an onboarding buddy for their
- Create tailored learning paths: Use automation to assign different learning modules or training materials based on their department or previous experience. This ensures that automation doesn’t create a “one-size-fits-all” experience but instead feels relevant and customized.
- Ensure human follow-ups: Automate reminders for managers or HR reps to check in with new hires at key intervals (e.g., end of the first week, 30 days in, 60 days in). These check-ins should be personal conversations where new hires can share feedback and ask questions.
- Send surveys: Send automated pulse surveys to new hires to collect feedback on their onboarding experience. If concerns arise, ensure a human follows up.
- Go the extra mile: Send thoughtful, personalized touches like a welcome package, branded swag, or a handwritten note.
Learn More: How to Improve Employee Connections in the Workplace
Automate your Employee Onboarding Experience with Paylocity
Automating the employee onboarding experience is one of the best ways to save your organization time and money and create a seamless experience that new talent will love.
Ditch manual processes with Paylocity’s all-in-one HR and payroll solution. Our onboarding platform is designed to make the new hire experience a breeze with features like:
- Use ready-made workflows for everyday tasks or create custom templates. Use dynamic, adaptable filters to determine who's included in workflows and when.
- Automatically collect feedback on employee engagement and retention. Plus, share relevant insights with leadership and managers, enabling them to create action plans to drive accountability.
- Empower new hires to complete pre-boarding tasks from anywhere with the Paylocity Mobile App.
- Ready to jump on board? Request a demo today.
Make Your First Impression Count
An impactful employee experience begins before day one. Make data collection, tax paperwork, and direct deposit setup seamless so you can begin engaging your new employees immediately with our onboarding tool. Help make your new hire’s first day memorable in the best way possible with less process and more human connection.
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