Employee experience eats employee engagement for breakfast

How your onboarding processes can make
or break the employee experience.

We all know the value and significance of employee engagement, a concept that’s been around for decades. But what about employee experience, the new kid on the block?

Employee experience, like customer experience, is about companies considering all the steps an employee would progress through and redesigning each one to create the best experience for the individual. If you apply this same methodology to recruitment it would mean creating the best recruitment experience for the candidate, and this doesn’t just end with a job offer. The recruitment experience also includes onboarding, a super important part of the journey that’s often overlooked which can lead to a poor impression of the new employee’s company.

So how to fix this? Think about what happens after you offer the candidate their dream role. Are you responsible for the next stage or do you hand it over to someone else in the HR department who has no connection with the individual? Does the candidate receive a bulky, unfriendly package in the mail that requires hours of their time reviewing, signing and mailing it back? What if you could take control and the recruiter handled the entire process, end to end just like the candidate’s personal account manager. Enter the onboarding system.

 

 

An onboarding system is an online platform that can automate many of the processes involved in contract administration. For example, instead of manually editing a template for every new starter, a contract can be created in a few seconds that’s linked to your recruitment system with pre-populated data. An employment pack, all from within the system can then be attached to the contract and sent electronically to the candidate for their review and electronic signing. No more printing and mailing of old-fashioned new starter packs, and best of all no reprinting of information when the package mysteriously gets lost in the mail.
Your recruitment team can easily be trained on how to use the onboarding system, creating a fast and personal service for your new employees and removing the need to hand over this stage of the employee experience to someone unknown to the candidate.

What are the main elements of digital onboarding? Automation, digital signing, smart online forms, internal workflows and the candidate portal are key aspects of an onboarding system.

It could also be quite simply continuing their positive recruitment experience through using smart digital technology to make the onboarding process as short and painless as possible.

Onboarding, of course, isn’t just about contracts. It’s also about setting up the employee in your other company systems, particularly where systems are not integrated. It’s about notifying key people in your business about the new employee’s start date and making sure their desk, computer, phone, business cards, orientation, etc. is organised and ready to go from the moment they arrive. This is another aspect where your onboarding system can really add value to the employee experience. All of these features are inbuilt in many onboarding systems and can easily be integrated into your business. Not only does this enrich the process for the new employee but also for your IT, Payroll and HR teams where manual processes and double handling can be eliminated.

So if you want to get on the Employee Experience bandwagon, it’s time to seriously think about your current onboarding practices and what you can do to re-engineer the process to create the ultimate experience for your new employee.