The faster your new hire feels welcome and prepared for their new job, the faster that employee can start contributing to your company’s overall success. How you achieve this comes down in no small measure to the quality of your onboarding program and your new hire’s experience in those early days, weeks and months. These days, a quality onboarding program is a digital onboarding program.
Get your onboarding program wrong, and it’s unlikely that your new starter will stick around. Bersin by Deloitte research shows something like 4% of new starters don’t come back for their second day!
A quality digital onboarding program
It’s not so much about a one-size-fits-all approach, but providing an enriching, yet simple experience. Driven by a self-explanatory task-driven workflow, you can customise your digital onboarding program to your specific employee depending on their career level and job function.
Helping you streamline all the important paperwork, a digital onboarding program ensures your new hire’s first day and beyond is about immersing themselves in your culture, not filling out forms.
If you’re still using traditional paper-based ways to onboard new hires, here are seven reasons why switching to a digital onboarding program really makes sense.
1. Complete paperwork ahead of time
Enabling your new hires to complete the new starter formalities online empowers them to take care of all paperwork ahead of time. From signing their letter of engagement to acknowledging your workplace policies, and completing payroll paperwork digitally before they start ensures they are not greeted with a stack of paperwork on their first day. This ensures their first day can be dedicated to meeting their team and learning about their role which makes for a more memorable first day on the job.
2. Minimise manual process-driven tasks
Using a digital onboarding program is also a bonus for you and your staff as you free up resources from repetitive paperwork, and you minimise the potential for human error. As an example, at beauty retailer Sephora, it used to take two people two weeks to complete onboarding paperwork. With Flare’s digital onboarding platform, their entire process is now paperless, and takes just 60 seconds!
3. Automate meetings and introductions
Another important factor in helping a new hire settle into their roles is building rapport with their new colleagues. All new hires need a support network to help show them the ropes and provide guidance.
Using a digital onboarding program, you can automate the workflow so you trigger all the necessary team introductions and check-ins, and even assign a buddy or mentor. This allows you to keep your new hires busy with a highly-structured schedule without having to personally check schedules and individually set up meetings with their team.
4. Set objectives and timelines
Setting expectations and introducing goal setting for your new hire’s first 30, 60 and 90 days at your company is fundamental to them truly settling in.
Rather than leaving them to figure out what is expected and how they can be successful in their new workplace, make it plain as part of your digital onboarding program. You can create content that explains how they can best achieve these goals, trigger training modules, and connect them with the staff members who can help them along the way.
A quality digital onboarding platform also provides the means for you to easily track the progress and status of their training since it’s all in front of you online. You can also use the software to set up regular check-ins to see how they are settling in and where they should be focusing their efforts.
5. Make it personal and engaging
To help engage your new starters, you can use interactive video or games as a fun way to get your new hires in the know as to any behaviours and language that are unique to your way of working. Include practical things like seating layout and names and descriptions of team members. Having your new hires interact with the information via your onboarding platform will help them remember the information.
6. Create a paper trail
As everything is handled online, you create a digital paper trail. This allows you to quickly identify any documents you may need to chase an employee to sign, or confirm when information has been sent and accessed. This is particularly useful if you’re handling a large number of candidates, as you can log in or run reports to see what you need to action with each individual new starter.
7. Gain compliance peace of mind
With all your new hire documents, policies, and training documented online, a digital onboarding program helps you maintain employee confidentiality and compliance. By centralising all new hire paperwork digitally and online, this sensitive information is secure though easy to access in the event of an audit, or when you need it. In fact, workplace regulations company Employsure uses our platform as an end-to-end employee onboarding process to track employees throughout their tenure.
Save time and money
Of course, a digital Onboarding program allows you to save money on costly paper HR packets and make life easier for your staff by integrating with your company’s other platforms such as HRIS and payroll. More importantly, though, it helps makes day one so much easier and more exciting for your new employees
Launch your own digital Onboarding program
With technology from Flare, you can make digital Onboarding part of your HR toolkit. Book in for a demo, and see how easy it is to deliver a world class Onboarding experience for all your new starters.
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