How These 10 Employee Onboarding Software Features Will Drive Engagement Through the Roof
As you continue to hire new people, is your chosen employee onboarding software helping or hurting engagement with your new hires and your managers? Our answer: look at the feature set.
#10: Seamless integration with your existing systems
There’s nothing less engaging than a clumsy onboarding process. Don't expect your new hires to be engaged or productive if your onboarding process makes them feel neglected. It’s time to work smart, and cut down on data entry. You want information to flow smoothly and automatically between the different parts of your HR tech stack.
That means your employee onboarding software should:
- Automatically put new people into the correct onboarding journey once the candidate has signed and returned the offer
- Automatically adjust the new hire onboarding experience according to their preferences and start date
- Work with the systems used by your IT department to streamline IT setup and provisioning as part of the onboarding workflow
- Integrate with your collaboration and scheduling systems to connect managers and their new hires
#9: Pre-boarding for first days that “wow”
Being able to pre-board is absolutely critical to onboarding success. Your employee onboarding software should allow you to effectively engage with your new people before Day One:
- Help busy managers connect with newbies prior to Day One with pre-written welcome messages they can personalize
- Welcome new hires with team introduction videos, and help them find their way with embedded Google maps
- Give the team the opportunity to make the new hire feel special through capturing and sharing some of their personal preferences
- Gather payroll and tax information from incoming employees during the pre-boarding phase, so Day One can be spent on fostering team connection
#8: Paperless onboarding is a basic feature
Paperless onboarding should be a basic feature when we are talking about employee onboarding software. So at a bare minimum, we’re looking at software that:
- Simplifies or eliminates common paperwork-related issues with e-signing and e-forms
- Replaces corporate welcome documents with personalized and interactive messages
- Replaces long induction manuals with e-learning and micro-learning sequences
#7: Automatically personalized onboarding experiences
When you think of “personalized”, two things come to mind:
- Manual personalization with a HR person customizing the materials you send to every new hire
- Some kind of mail merge type arrangement
The first kind of personalized isn’t scalable, consistent or future-ready, while the second seems...well, lacklustre.
What we’re looking for is consistent, scalable onboarding that still creates experiences that “wow”. So your employee onboarding software needs to:
- Be flexible so you can customize onboarding experiences depending on the location, business division and role of your new starters
- Maintain consistent onboarding experiences, while empowering the new hire’s managers, mentors, buddies and teammates to insert their own human touches
- Be intelligent enough to deliver different messaging, tasks and notifications to both the new hires and their managers depending on the behaviour and responses of the new hires
#6: Allow frictionless communications
What’s your preferred way of communicating? Are you more likely to notice if you get an SMS, than if you get an email? Or perhaps you prefer chatting over a particular platform?
The secret to engaging with new hires and helping busy managers keep abreast of their onboarding tasks, is to use channels they are already attentive to.
Employee onboarding software should be designed around this:
- Minimize friction by making it easy to action tasks, without having to log in to a portal or download an app
- Be flexible enough to deliver notifications, reminders and nudges via your employees’ and managers’ preferred channels, like mobile SMS, Slack and email.
- For more in-depth content, use a browser-based approach, so content can be easily accessed via links from the notification messages
- Be proactive in pushing information and notifications to nudge new hires and managers into action
No matter how fancy they sound, portals and apps depend on the users logging in and/or downloading before they can deliver information. This additional friction can have a real impact on engagement levels.
#5: Keeping managers engaged while onboarding new hires
Let’s be honest. Onboarding a new crew member probably isn’t the top priority for your busy managers. Your employee onboarding software needs to make it ridiculously easy for managers to do what’s required of them. For instance, it should:
- Provide just-in-time tips and nudges to remind managers of tasks to do
- Help managers stave off the temptation to procrastinate on their onboarding tasks, by making them small, easily actionable items that they can do straight away on their phone
- Help time-poor managers connect with their new hires – e.g. a single click to send pre-written, best-practice welcome messages to the newcomer; integrate with calendars to allow quick scheduling of one-on-one catch ups
- Help managers choose the equipment and services needed and start the IT provisioning process within minutes using convenient forms and automation
#4: A focus on the onboarding experience
To truly deliver onboarding experiences that both your new hires and managers will love, your employee onboarding software needs to ensure every step is easily comprehensible and quickly actionable by those responsible. The software should:
- Break down the onboarding journey into bite-sized, actionable chunks for managers and new hires
- Provide backend logic allowing you to trigger tasks based on time, or the completion of a previous task
- Reduce the risk of information overload by nudging managers and new hires with tasks and information as they are ready for them.
#3: Empower HR to make awesome onboarding content
The onboarding experience needs to be fluid, flexible, scalable. The key here is self-service: empowering your people to create the onboarding content they need, without requiring specialised skills. Your employee onboarding software should:
- Allow HR practitioners and managers to build and update onboarding journeys easily, with no coding or design work required
- Offer the flexibility to quickly correct typos, change brand colors, and update legal documents yourself – no need to wait for a developer or the vendor
- Instantly reflect changes you make in the onboarding journey, so your new hires always have the latest information
- Have an intuitive user interface for ease of use
#2: Measure engagement and success
That which isn’t measured (and measured the right way) can’t be improved. Your employee onboarding software should:
- Measure the engagement level of both managers and new hires during your onboarding process by tracking completed tasks for managers and using surveys and eNPS scoring for employees.
- Set up alerts for signs of disengagement, incomplete tasks, and low eNPS scores so HR or the hiring manager can manage any issues early
- Quickly spot areas for improvement
#1: Quickly go live with experience-driven onboarding
There’s nothing worse than paying for a service or a solution, and then not being able to use it or see the results for months. Your employee onboarding software should be engineered to allow fast implementation. Good onboarding software will:
- Require little to no downtime for installation
- Have an intuitive interface, so HR can quickly and easily build and deploy onboarding journeys
- Provide best-practice, pre-built onboarding material that you can customize and use, even if you don’t have existing assets
- Allow you to get up to speed ASAP with a dedicated team of onboarding experts that will provide hands-on support, training and advice
In fact, with the right software, it’s possible to implement and go live with your shiny new onboarding journey in as little as just one afternoon.
Want to learn more about our feature-packed employee onboarding software that's been built from the ground up for engagement?
Enboarder is designed from the ground up to deliver outstanding experience-driven onboarding journeys that'll have your managers raving, and turn your new employees into your most passionate advocates. Book your demo of what might just be the most game-changing employee onboarding software you’ll ever use.
