How Onboarding Automation Reduces Employee Turnover

According to industry data, new employees are poised to look for opportunities elsewhere if they experience a bad onboarding process. As onboarding is a complex process, onboarding automation can be a method for ensuring a more streamlined process, and more rewarding onboarding experiences. Moreover, onboarding automation is also a great asset for implementing virtual onboarding.

This article discusses onboarding automation. We will address on some key questions. What parts of onboarding can you automate? How does onboarding automation improve the onboarding experience of new employees? How does onboarding automation impact employee turnover of an organisation?

If you are interested in a sample onboarding plan for new employees, we have prepared one for you here: sample onboarding plan for new employees.

What is Onboarding Automation?

Onboarding automation refers to integrating new hires into an organisation, by leveraging automated onboarding software. Onboarding is a complex process, which involves many different people across departments. Additionally, it involves processes multiple types of onboarding documentation and procedures.

Thus, onboarding automation has one clear objective. Implementing a consistent and high quality onboarding within a business organisation that ensures high new hire retention rates. The need for consistency is especially crucial for large enterprises with multiple departments and multiple global locations.

With onboarding automation, employers are assured of bringing onboard their new hires with ease and creating an effective workflow that yields improved learning, increased motivation, improved employee experience, and clear communication within the team and management. This lays the foundation to a positive and long employee lifecycle.

However, research from Kronos and the Human Capital Institute revealed that three-fourths of survey respondents report that onboarding practices are underutilised. Moreover, 36% of companies have insufficient technology to automate or organise the onboarding process.

Therefore, to improve the onboarding process of business organisations, the management should strive to achieve onboarding automation to create an onboarding process that resonates and spur you to greater productivity.

5 Essential Benefits of an Automated Onboarding Process

An automated employee onboarding software will ensure business firms of seamless integration of new hires. An automation onboarding process will brings out the best in new hires, create a positive impression, and prevent early employee turnover.

Let’s review more in detail the values that HR onboarding automation brings to any business organisation.

Seamless Integration of New Hires & Less Errors

The use of onboarding automation software simplifies the integration of new employees in a workplace. An automated employee onboarding process aids the new hires come to speed and master the operational ethics and culture of an employer.

In traditional onboarding, new hires do not necessarily receive all needed attention and support. Moreover, a manual onboarding process is more susceptible to mistakes. Maybe HR did not coordinate all stakeholders properly. Maybe someone did not get the memo about your arrival on your onboarding day. Nobody wants to assist to a team scrambling to make onboarding happen for them.

However, through onboarding automation, you and all fellow new hires are ensured the support and necessary information. For example, with an onboarding flowchart all stakeholders stay informed of the process and their specific roles.

A More Rewarding Process

New hires are always bored when bombarded with unnecessary paperwork. The onboarding process should be devoid of stress. This will help establish the right impression in the minds of the new workers. Employee onboarding automation empowers you with what you need to feel comfortable on their job. This means gaining access to tools, knowledge and the proper teaching mechanisms. Teaching can take the form of job shadowing, mentoring, e-learning.

A streamlined process focused on your needs will help you attain mastery of roles and responsibilities. There is no need to waste time on irrelevant activities. Thus, onboarding automation can contribute to a reduced time-to-productivity for new hires.

Better Resource Use & Reduced Operational Cost

An automated employee software ensures that HR professional do not have to perform the same procedures for each individual new hire.

Let’s just think about the paperwork specific for starting a new job. Collecting all information and documents manually leads to heavier workloads for HR professionals. This can be replaced with preset onboarding workflows that are triggered one you sign your contract. You will receive notifications and reminders whenever something is missing, automatically. Nobody will need to manually file documentation and fill-up documents. Instead, HR can invest time and efforts into creating more rewarding onboarding experiences. For example, allocating a larger share of the onboarding process to cultural integration

Additionally, onboarding automation facilitates cooperation across departments. Thus, it helps remove the inter-departmental inconsistencies synonymous with a traditional onboarding process. Also, it promotes effective collaboration and communication between the company’s departments.

Reducing Costs Associated with New Hire Turnover

An employer spends an average of $4.000 and a considerable amount of time onboarding a new hire. Additionally, it costs an employer about 33% of the worker’s annual salary to replace an employee. Without mincing words, this is high, and organisations should aim to avoid incurring such expenses repeatedly. Yet, 20% of new hires leave in the first 45 day.

But there is hope. 64% of invested onboardees report decreased turnover. Thus, there is a clear correlation between the quality of your onboarding and the willingness to leave or keep the job.

A successful onboarding process improves your confidence at the beginning of your career within a new company. New hires that become engaged to the company from the onboarding stage report better talent outcomes and are twice as likely to report faster times to proficiency. This is only making you want to stay in your job longer.

Onboarding Automation is an Asset for Virtual Onboarding

Onboarding automation helps get the best out of a virtual onboarding exercise. By streamlining the logistical and adminitrative elements of onboarding, you have more time and space for socialisation. This will make you get it right from the start and understand the company’s culture and values.

It also ensures stakeholder coordination regardless of where each individual is localised.

Implementing Onboarding Automation: What Areas to Start with?

An automated onboarding process improves the onboarding workflow and collaboration between the employees and the organisation. In the following section, we will highlight a few common applications of an automated onboarding process.

Assign Relevant Documents Automatically

Assigning relevant documents automatically provides a huge effort relief for HR professionals. The process involves creating a schedule of file assignments for the new hires. Through automation, employers keep track of when action completion. Additionally, you employer can check whether you opened the messages or not and send reminders accordingly.

An example of documents needing handling is enrollment benefits. Here, an automated email is sent, explaining the benefits package and instructions on how to complete necessary forms electronically. The enrollment benefits can include retirement and a health plan.

Tracking the Onboarding Journey & Essential KPIs

Through onboarding automation, your employer can easily review the progress of your journey. For example, this journey can include e-learning modules. Each learning module can be accompanied by a quiz. This will ensure your employer that you are successful in acquiring new knowledge. Later on, this knowledge will be instrumental in your performing tour job successfully.

Just like in the case of filing documents, you will receive notifications for any deadlines for completing e-learning courses.

According to BusinessWire, 36% of HR professionals stated that the inability to implement onboarding automation into their onboarding processes negatively impacts the training of their new employees. Hence, business organisations need automation to harness the full potential of their new hires.

Tracking your onboarding KPIs might be another priority for your employer. Your onboarding plan ca automated checklist of every task and goal that you have to complete. Also, it includes setting deadlines for the tasks and identifying the essential metrics to measure the tasks completed to ensure optimum productivity. Your onboarding platform will track your progress and milestones.

Feedback Collection

Your employer might want to continuously gauge your satisfaction and overall feelings regarding your onboarding journey. Through onboarding automation, they can easily implement onboarding surveys.

Onboarding surveys can be managed as an automated new hire process. The collection of the new hires’ feedback about their job satisfaction and engagement will help identify any potential problems hindering their process.

Employee Onboarding Automation: Conclusions

Organisations should not limit their automation efforts to employee onboarding alone because offboarding is also vital to the public perception of a company. Hence, they should endeavor to automate the onboarding and offloading process to achieve successful integration and departure from an organisation. (You can read more here about Onboarding vs Offboarding: A Beginning-to-End Employee Journey.)

Effective onboarding automation can be achieved with the right employee onboarding software such as introdus. It will streamline the onboarding process and empower you with the confidence to perform optimally. 

The introdus platform is embedded with various multimedia content to enhance your capacity to hit the ground running. Create the best onboarding programme and ensure the best employee onboarding experiences.