How Sandvik Built an Innovative Employee Experience For Remote and On-Site Staff
Sandvik is a global, high-tech engineering group providing solutions that enhance productivity, profitability, and sustainability for the manufacturing, mining, and infrastructure industries.
Sandvik’s Results By the Numbers:
2 weeks to launch
New onboarding process launched in 2 weeks from design to go-live
1500 hours saved annually
Enboarder workflows save the Sandvik team roughly 5 hours per onboarded employee – nearly 2 months annually!
5 journeys
Sandvik uses Enboarder to improve onboarding, promotions, internal comms, employee referrals, and offboarding
⚙️ The Challenge: Inconsistent Onboarding Across a Deskless and On-Site Workforce
First impressions matter. And as with any global company with a diverse workforce, the quality of the employee onboarding process at Sandvik varied by hiring manager and job type. Sandvik’s workforce includes on-site engineers, service technicians, and customer service representatives out in the field, as well as corporate staff like HR and finance in offices throughout Australia.
Because managing logistics in remote Australia can be tricky, new starters would often show up on day one without the necessary technical equipment or personal protective equipment (PPE), wasting time for both the new starter and the hiring manager.
“We wanted to find a solution that would create a consistent onboarding process and a more welcoming experience,” says Kylie Cook, recruiting and talent manager at Sandvik. “Some of the managers were too busy or just didn’t know the onboarding process at Sandvik to provide that consistent experience.”
Kylie and the Sandvik team set out to find a tool that would quickly improve the onboarding experience by taking some of the load off hiring managers and providing automation so things like a laptop, e-mail address, and PPE were guaranteed on day one. Sandvik also needed a solution that would help the team be innovative and agile in solving other HR and communication challenges as the organization grows.
After looking at several different applications, Kylie landed on Enboarder: “I liked the freedom to build my own bespoke onboarding process, without having to go back to the Enboarder team for every minor change.” In addition to customization, Sandvik chose Enboarder for its ease of use: “It wasn’t another system people have to log into and remember a password … You don’t need any training.” That wasn’t the case with other systems the team considered.
💬 Real manager feedback
“The onboarding for my new hire has been really well tuned – Great job team!”
💡 The Solution: Wow on Day One and Far Beyond
Once the team had access to Enboarder, the new onboarding journey went live in just two weeks and helped solve many of Sandvik’s challenges.
The company-branded PPE we mentioned? The Enboarder journey automatically collects new hires’ sizes during pre-boarding and sends a link to the PPE purchasing website directly to hiring managers. It sounds simple, but with different PPE coming in different size standards, and with different regions purchasing from different suppliers, this step alone saved hours of work. Now everybody, no matter the circumstances, has their PPE ready to go for their first day.
Customization of the onboarding journey was quickly built out. Enboarder allows the team to alter the steps and content depending on role or location: “We have onboarding workflows for both corporate and deskless staff, and we have different content depending on location so we can cater to different cultures and preferences,” Kylie adds.
The next step was to build in even more efficiency with a Workday integration that automatically enters new hires into the right journey as soon as the offer is signed. This means the Sandvik team is saving time, no longer has to think about personalization of workflow selection, and is ready to scale. After Sandvik saw how easy it was to build and scale new journeys, they started using Enboarder to help connect employees to critical communications.
“For example, if there’s a flood and employees can’t come into the office, we’re communicating with them to give them updates,” says Kylie, “Enboarder gives us a really quick and easy way to get comms out.” And because communications can be sent via SMS, the team can quickly reach their deskless workers who may not have access to their laptops or are out of mobile data. And when HR or the marketing team needs to send out critical communications to employees, Enboarder helps here too. The team used Enboarder for a major union vote and a successful referral program was launched just last year. To this day, Sandvik keeps finding new ways to use Enboarder: “It’s a game changer,” says Kylie.
👑 The Results: Time Saved, Metrics Tracked, and Innovation Achieved
What is the business impact of partnering with Enboarder? “Our team obviously loves it because it takes so many manual tasks away,” says Kylie. In fact, she estimates that using Enboarder saves each employee involved in the onboarding process about five hours per new starter. And that doesn’t include the time and resources saved during offboarding by automating the return of mobile phones and laptops.
Kylie is using the Enboarder Dashboard to check in on engagement metrics every quarter for internal reporting and to continuously tweak and improve the journeys. The Dashboard even helps track feedback from all the forms in the different journeys, including regrettable leavers during offboarding. Now new hires are immediately connected to the Sandvik culture: “The candidates find the process so innovative … The managers have a similar response. We moved some [of their] intensive [onboarding] tasks and spread them across two or three weeks. They don’t have to think about it.”
💬 Real employee feedback
“I was nervous beginning work in such a different role and appreciated such a thorough and slick induction process provided by Sandvik which has quickly helped me adjust to the role, from the online learning modules to my colleagues here in Waihi. I have also appreciated the level of care given to me here from the provision of phone, laptop, PPE, time in the day to complete the job. Thanks team, thanks for making the start so smooth and enjoyable.
Long-time Sandvik employees reap the benefits too. Managers appreciate the nudges to have check-ins and performance conversations. The referral program gathered over 50 referrals within the first few months of launching. And employees who transition or are promoted into a new role are now supported by nudges and content from an Enboarder journey. These are all new touchpoints that foster human connection and build a solid foundation for the relationships employees have with each other and the organization.
“One of our core values is innovation,” says Kylie. “It is very much encouraged to be curious and think of ways to continuously improve processes. Enboarder has allowed us to be innovative. It’s allowed people to think more creatively in the business.”