Customise your employee journey
A well-structured employee onboarding process is crucial for organisational success, as it enhances productivity, reduces turnover, ensures compliance, facilitates cultural integration, and strengthens employer branding. By equipping new hires with the necessary tools, knowledge, and resources, organisations can expedite their integration into the workforce, leading to swift productivity and alignment with organisational objectives.
Structured onboarding programs assist new employees in navigating their roles, responsibilities, and the organisational landscape more efficiently, minimising uncertainty and fostering their ability to contribute effectively from the outset. Moreover, a comprehensive onboarding process fosters a sense of belonging and engagement among new hires, diminishing early turnover and promoting long-term retention there by enhancing the organisation’s employer brand, attracting top talent and positioning it as an employer of choice within the industry.
Unfortunately, high employee turnover or attrition industries like Facility Management, Leisure & Hospitality, Retail Trade, Transportation, Warehousing & Utilities and others sectors, critical steps like background checks, payroll setup, induction and compliance training, IT access, workstations requests, application access, security cards, uniforms, etc., are often managed independently by different departments in the employee onboarding plans due to several reasons. Key challenges in employee onboarding include departmental silos, de-centralisation of responsibilities, limited oversight, and the complexity of managing tasks that are placed under dispersed responsibilities. Silos hinder effective communication and coordination among departments responsible for different onboarding tasks. The absence of centralised processes leads to fragmentation and oversight. Limited oversight and accountability may result in neglecting critical steps. Additionally, managing various onboarding components becomes complex, particularly in large organisations with higher turnover or new hire volumes, potentially leading to inefficiencies and oversights.
A customisable, role-based employee onboarding process offers several benefits for both the organisation and the new hires. Tailoring the onboarding process to specific roles ensures that new employees receive relevant information, guided onboarding experience and training that directly aligns with their job responsibilities. This personalised approach enhances engagement and helps new hires understand how their role fits into the larger organisation.
Customising and centralising the onboarding process based on job roles allows organisations to streamline the process by focusing on the most critical tasks and information for each role. This targeted approach increases efficiency and effectiveness, reducing the time and resources needed for onboarding while maximising the impact on new employees’ readiness to perform their job duties.
As organisational needs evolve or new roles are created, customisable onboarding processes can be easily adapted to accommodate these changes. By providing a flexible framework, organisations can ensure that the onboarding process remains relevant and effective for all employees, regardless of their role or position within the company.
Charting a fully customisable and centralised employee onboarding journey may feel like an overwhelming project. Fortunately this can easily be tackled through defining your existing process of onboarding and mapping to tools that is readily available through Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365). All of necessary parts are already available out of the box from your M365 Tenancy including SharePoint, PowerApps, PowerAutomate etc. Service Farm is excited to share a fully productised and packaged application to get off the blocks rapidly.
At the core of configuring the onboarding program, determine what all employees should be familiar with including Company culture and values, HR tasks like compensation and benefits, reference and other pre-employment checks, Company policies and processes, Team processes, Team structure and responsibilities.
For specific roles, define privileges or requirements like access to IT systems & Applications, access to specific sites and/or areas within the campus, setting up physical workspace, Uniforms, Security Access, Role based Induction among others. Chart out a list of meeting to make internal connections within and outside of the departments as required. Needless to say, it is important to consolidate all the activities to create an onboarding timeline which answers
- When will the onboarding process start?
- How long will the onboarding process and each step last?
- Who should be allocated to perform each step, in what order, how will they be notified, and how will they mark the step as completed.
- Who should be notified when each step is completed and once the overall process is completed?
- Where do we store content including HR forms, Employee handbook, Policy documents, and how would it be shared the new hire.
- For high staff turnover industries like Leisure & Hospitality, Facility Services, Transportation, Retail Trade, Warehousing & Utilities and Security services etc. a new hire may not have a company email, in which case, external access may need to be invoked with appropriate security to access internal assets.
Whilst an employee onboarding is critical to an organisation, the offboarding process is equally vital. Firstly, it impacts the company’s reputation, as departing employees’ experiences can influence their perception of and communication about the organisation. Secondly, offboarding facilitates knowledge transfer, ensuring critical institutional knowledge isn’t lost when employees leave. Legal compliance, including final payments and confidentiality agreements, is another crucial aspect, as neglecting these can lead to legal issues.
Security considerations are also paramount, with offboarding involving the revocation of access to prevent data breaches, loss of company assets and properties, Intellectual Property rights, site security compromise etc.
Additionally, a well-handled offboarding process maintains morale and productivity among remaining employees, who may feel unsettled by poor treatment of departing colleagues. Lastly, fostering positive relationships during offboarding can benefit the company in the long term, through alumni networks, potential rehires, and brand advocacy.
Employee offboarding is a shared responsibility between the manager and HR team. Your HR team should guide your offboarding employee through all the necessary legal processes and paperwork they need to fill out in order to transition away from the company. Employee’s manager should be present throughout the offboarding process the same way you were during onboarding.
- Capture institutional knowledge including current responsibilities, Knowledge transfer, transition them to replacement hires etc
- Similar to onboarding, an employee offboarding also require a well-coordinated set of tasks and paperwork.
- Notifying IT of the employee’s last day so they can revoke access IT privileges
- Alerting payroll for final pay checks.
- Connecting with HR to discuss benefits closure.
- Getting all paperwork signed including a letter of resignation and non-disclosure agreement, if needed.
- Returning id badges, laptops, and any other company property.
- Scheduling their exit interview
A checklist of offboarding tasks can be generated directly from the onboarding configuration which was recorded when the employee was inducted. Additional common and role-based tasks can similarly be defined for off boarding.
Service Farm is excited to publish this app to Microsoft AppSource which would be available for free download in the coming days. Reach out to us at info@service.farm if you need more information or how the app may be retrofitted into your existing organisational onboarding model.