Make a Flawless First Impression with Automated Onboarding

With the rise of remote work, HR managers are struggling to keep up with their ever-changing job responsibilities. From staying connected and organized in a virtual setting to finding new ways to engage employees, the pandemic and its lasting effects have certainly put HR pros’ skills to the test.

One way that companies can help relieve some of this burden is by automating onboarding processes for newly hired employees.

Manual vs. Automated Onboarding

Manual onboarding processes can cause issues for HR and new hires alike, with common pain points such as:

• Limited Personalization: Manual processes can make it difficult to tailor each new hire’s onboarding to their specific needs, potentially hindering their initial engagement and understanding of their role.

• Varied Quality and Inconsistency: The quality of manual onboarding experiences can differ based on the individual HR representative handling the process, leading to inconsistencies and potentially impacting employee satisfaction.

• Prone to Errors: Manually managing numerous details, especially if multiple new hires are being onboarded at the same time, increases the risk of errors and omissions in critical paperwork, compliance procedures, or access setups.

A poor onboarding experience can be detrimental to new hires’ success and longevity in their new position, with 25% of companies losing up to 60% of their entire workforce within a year, and only 12% of employees reporting that they feel their company does a good job at onboarding new hires.

That’s why modernizing and automating your onboarding process is so vital in creating an effective onboarding experience, with companies that automated their onboarding tasks seeing a 16% increase in retention rates for new hires and an 18% improvement in initial performance.

Automated onboarding not only helps streamline processes; it also increases manager satisfaction, saves time, and ensures that new hires have all of the information they need from day one – allowing them to hit the ground running!

Which Onboarding Tasks Can Be Automated?

At GoCo, we know how important smooth onboarding is for new hires, and orientation plays a major part in this process. What we also know is just how many tasks fall on HR managers to create a flawless first day.

Typical new hire onboarding tasks include:

Administrative Support

• Providing new hires with support on the I-9 form, W-4 form, employee consent forms, background check forms, direct deposit forms, and more.

• Assisting in teaching procedures around building entry, technology access. employee requests, and time off requests.

Company Policies

• Giving employees background on your company’s NDA, non-compete agreements, confidentiality agreements, and more.

• Reviewing and selecting benefits, stock options, employee wellness, and other perks.

• Providing an overview of the employee handbook, vacation policies, sick leave, and safety guidelines.

Introductions

• Connecting new hires to their manager, the HR team, the IT department, and all other departments.

• Scheduling meetings for new hires to get acquainted with colleagues

• Assigning mentors or buddies to help with any questions.

Work Set-Up

• Ensuring the new hire has access to all necessary equipment, from laptops to online tools.

• Scheduling demos and training.

That’s a lot of tasks and documents!

The great news is that all of these can be automated with GoCo. Automating your new hire orientation, especially when onboarding employees remotely, helps standardize the crucial components of onboarding while keeping everyone in sync along the way.

Want more info on how to build your onboarding process? Check out our full guide here.

Advantages of Automated Employee Onboarding

1. Make a Flawless First Impression

Automated onboarding empowers you to greet new recruits with personalized messages, automatically trigger task reminders, and build custom orientation workflows. This not only ensures a comprehensive introduction to your organization but eliminates the risk of crucial details getting lost in the shuffle. 

Setting new hires up for success from the start with a smooth and efficient process will give them a positive first impression from the very beginning, reassuring them of a positive overall employee experience and work environment.

2. Stay Consistent

Research has found that organizations with standard onboarding processes saw a 50% increase in productivity in new hires. By customizing and automating your new hire onboarding, you can be sure that the experience and materials presented to new hires remain consistent with standardized workflows and document management. 

3. Eliminate Paper-Based Processes

Eliminating paper-based processes from onboarding offers multiple advantages for both businesses and new hires, including time savings, reduction of manual errors and lost documents, and enhanced efficiency. 

With 81% of new hires reporting that they feel overwhelmed with information during the onboarding process, it is crucial that their onboarding is a streamlined process and not just a stack of paperwork.

4. Reduce Costs

Streamlined onboarding not only reduces manual labor but also requires less in-person training time and less time compiling information for every set of new hires. 

By automating onboarding, organizations also save the costs associated with manual data and compliance errors.

Want to see at a glance just how much money HR software can save your organization? Check out our ROI calculator!

How to Automate Your Onboarding Process

Now that we’ve covered the “what” and “why”, it’s time to take action. GoCo’s automated HR workflows feature makes it easy to build custom onboarding workflows for every team and role. Let’s examine exactly how you can automate onboarding tasks with GoCo.

1. Create a custom onboarding template

• Customize the collection of information for each type of employee – you can hide fields, require fields, and set default values to help save you time during hiring 

• Create tasks for company intros, tours, policy reviews, account provisioning, and more

• Group tasks by employee, manager, and department

• Assign tasks and due dates to the appropriate team members

• Configure standardized hiring packets for each type of new hire and collect electronic signatures or acknowledgments for all the most important policies and agreements

2. Start your new hire orientation workflow

• Once you’ve created custom templates, simply select the desired onboarding workflow any time you add a new team member to GoCo

• Once the workflow starts, tasks will trigger automatically, alerting them that action is needed and providing due dates

3. Track onboarding progress at-a-glance

• GoCo’s active workflow dashboard makes it easy for you to see which steps have been completed, where the process is getting stuck, and what’s left

• Trigger reminders for workflow tasks or incomplete documents

Ready to Automate Your Onboarding?

If you are interested in taking your onboarding to the next level, you don’t have to go it alone. GoCo offers a modern, all-in-one HR solution that streamlines and standardizes every aspect of the employee experience – from hire to retire. 

Ready to see what GoCo can do for you? Take a free self-guided tour today!

Updated 2/29/2024