Where’s the hire?

Where’s the Hire? Key Pitfalls you must avoid in your Employee Onboarding Process

One of the best ways you can increase the effectiveness of your new hires is by having them hit the ground running. Hiring new employees is complicated and time-consuming, and onboarding enables the social, cultural, and professional integration of new hires. But the art of instituting the best onboarding process can introduce a lot of guesswork that can cost you time, money, and the best team members.
Talya Bauer with the SHRM has found that in Fortune 500 companies alone, about 500,000 managers take on new roles each year. With a large portion of the workforce making constant career transitions, you don’t have time or money to waste. Best-in-class companies attribute the happiness and retention of new employees to their onboarding processes. However, neglecting your onboarding process can lead to an uninspiring working culture.

The paper chase
Pieces of paper can get lost or misplaced: when they contain employee data or approval requests, you also lose time and money. Furthermore, if the right approvers or delegates aren’t available, that paperwork is now stuck. This stops you from knowing how far your requests are in the approval process.
Instead, having a central location, either local or cloud-based, for storage of all onboarding forms and requests can help avoid los-ing valuable time and paperwork. Seeing all your onboarding requests organized by status and maintaining proper audit trails helps you establish the best visibility of the approval process.
Inefficient processes
Success of approval processes depends on finding the right approvers at the right time. But if you can’t spot the bottlenecks in your process, you will consistently find yourself getting stuck at the same places. Manual onboarding processes prohibit you from firmly knowing where you need to make changes.
Avoid losing employees to inefficient and bulky processes by using reporting tools to collect the right kind of statistics about your process’ health. Mitigating inefficiencies at the right time will provide oversight that can help you stay on top of your processes.
Loss of productivity
According to research from Willis Towers Watson, some of your best employees are a high retention risk if they don’t feel engaged at their jobs: Low engagement means less productivity. Maintaining proper communication within departments is crucial to enable higher engagement. When communication is not maintained properly, it can lead to increased administration efforts from all the departments involved. Avoid losing valuable time by making sure the correct departments are notified when their approvals are needed.

Long lead time approvals
Nothing is more demoralizing for a new hire than showing up on day one and not having their workstation or equipment set up. Waiting to get key approvals to establish the new hire’s workspace not only causes stress to your employees but also to you. Even something as simple as having access levels and employee accounts needs to be ready by the time your employ-ees report in. Avoid missing high priority approvals by escalating requests as the start date nears.
High cost of materials
Onboarding materials can range from forms that employees must fill out to training and orientation packages. Printing these forms not only adds cost, but also makes it difficult to manage in larger volumes. Avoid high cost of materials by using digital forms that can be stored centrally and accessed globally.
In a talent-driven market, you need to assemble the best team to ensure your long-term success. Manual onboarding pro-cesses can get in the way if you consistently experience some of its pitfalls. Are your new hires leaving too soon? Are your employees not feeling productive and engaged when they start? Is there money you could be saving if not for inefficiencies in your manual onboarding process? Automating your onboarding process can help you get there.