Employee Onboarding Business Process Checklist This checklist serves as a guide to make your employee onboarding experience even better than it already is!
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Summary Many organizations have business processes requiring active involvement from more than one person. A process as regular as onboarding new employees can quickly become an arduous task if there is no clear and efficient process. A consistent means for delivery of information and documents to the new employee required for onboarding is as important as how they transmit back information and signed documents along with their personal information to the organization is critical as well. What if a company grew tremendously in size, hiring hundreds of people and did absolutely nothing to streamline the process? The results are clear: chaos and miscommunication in the form of: digging through emails looking for that form or document that was emailed to them, checking to see if the documents were actually stored in a central repository only to discover the documents were stored on someone’s laptop, or even worse no checks and balances of which required information was actually captured from the new employee.
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Challenge In some organizations, there is no consistent means for how documents are sent, received, and stored. Other organizations may have one platform for storing documents, but are people actually following organization best practices or do they circumvent the established process in order to find a more “convenient� way of working? How long does it take on average to onboard a new employee? Is one person the choke point that holds up the entire process? Do people send over their documents in different formats, to different people, or exceed past deadlines?
Checklist Here is a checklist that can be used to validate and determine how your onboarding process can run smoothly: Identify if the entire onboarding process is clear to everyone involved and document the process. Often times, people who are not heavily involved in the process may get distracted with more pressing duties. Communicating and documenting the process will reinforce their limited, but active involvement is required. Walk through the process playing the role of the new employee so that their expectations and experience is crystal clear. This will also help the new employee transition well into the company versus experiencing roadblocks and challenges that prevent them from turning in documents and required information in a timely fashion. Identify who needs to be informed versus actively involved in the process. When unnecessary assignment of roles are placed on too many people or if too many roles are placed on one person, this may create unreasonable burden on people or people could very well ignore (intentionally or unintentionally) participating in processes. For example, is it absolutely necessary to have five levels of approval on behalf of the new employee or does it only require one level, which moves the process along faster? Identify any people that might be causing a bottleneck. Give new employees the ability to upload their own documents versus emailing the documents to HR. HR then has to remember to take those emailed documents and store them in a repository. This adds unnecessary additional work to HR’s workload. Identify if there are single person dependencies and have planned backups. If the main resource was removed from the entire process (meaning they were on vacation for an entire month) would the entire process fall apart? If so, more than one person should serve as a backup and the documentation mentioned above will level set expectations for the backup. Most importantly, be sure to identify risks for industry related audits. There are industries, such as medical, that has strict requirements on all employees working in the organization. Keeping track of deadlines, required documents, and audit history will be key for successful experience.
Technical Solutions These tools below have allowed Seisay IT Solutions to help transform our client’s processes into much more efficient means of keeping track of each employee’s onboarding experience along with checks and balances for the HR staff. SharePoint can be used as a means for allowing all new employees to upload and categorize their documents and fill out forms. If the organization uses SharePoint Online in Office 365, external sharing is available which allows people to gain access to document libraries with their personal email addresses until they are officially onboarded. The HR team can also have a checklist of items that each employee is required to submit along with lists of deadlines and timeframes. Dashboards give quick insight into where each employee is in the process of which documents were delivered and which are outstanding. Business process approvals and notifications of “Onboarding Complete” status or reminder emails to the employees can be captured using Microsoft Flow in Office365. Integration with document signing tools, such as Adobe Sign, DocuSign, HelloSign, etc. will allow for the capture of electronic signatures and to keep the process electronic eliminating the need to print documents for signatures. All these tools eliminate the guess work of which stage an employee is in during the process. Automated emails remove HR from having to follow up with people so that their time and attention are focused on more pressing matters. Finally, centrally storing all documents in SharePoint reduces the risk of losing files on personal devices and using Outlook as a means for retrieving information among thousands of emails.
Next Steps We’d love to hear your feedback, answer questions, or just hear overall perspectives on this checklist. Visit our website at https://www.seisayitsolutions.com. Submit your comments on our contact page: https://www.seisayitsolutions.com/contact/ Email us at contact@seisayitsolutions.com. Thanks for reading!