How The Right Onboarding Software Can Boost Employee Engagement
Excited. Valued. Ready to hit the ground running. That’s just some of the ways HR managers who use employee onboarding software describe how their new hires feel. The secret? One part technology, one part humanity, and one part pure wizardry.
Gone are the days when you can simply hire people, throw them in the proverbial deep end, and expect them to remain engaged. A “sink or swim” onboarding strategy will just see your talented new hires leaving the pool.
Instead, there needs to be careful consideration of each new employee’s overall onboarding journey. But doing this manually can be really time-consuming, and is rarely practical. It’s time to automate and personalize the process with employee onboarding software.
Step 1: Create a human-centred onboarding journey with employee onboarding software
The next step is to use best-in-class employee onboarding software to realise your vision of an experience-driven onboarding program, where each step is personalised and happens at exactly the right moment – yet automated to minimise the amount of work you and your hiring managers have to do.
Here’s a handy visual example of what we’re talking about:
Once you have all of your steps in place, you’ll need someone to make them happen. This leads directly to our next step . . .
Step 2: Get managers supporting onboarding through virtual coaching from employee onboarding software
Managers are your most important touchpoint when it comes to best-practice-based employee onboarding. Their attitudes and interactions directly impact on the variation of employee engagement by at least 70%.
When managers engage, so do employees. Without your managers doing their share of the heavy lifting, successful onboarding will be an uphill struggle. That’s why good employee onboarding software is designed to virtually coach your managers along every step of the onboarding journey.
Features that support managers during onboarding include intelligent nudges to keep tasks on track (more about this in a minute); calendar synchronization for automatic meeting scheduling; and easy-to-action mechanisms for tasks like IT provisioning, and sending first-day instructions and welcome videos. As long as managers are easily engaged in their role of supporting the onboarding process, then employee onboarding software will guide them smoothly toward the finish line.
Good software keeps onboarding human-centric
The idea of technology keeping onboarding centred on humans might sound a bit counterintuitive, but there are a number of key things that employee onboarding software can do to take away the finicky parts of onboarding, so you and your people can focus on building relationships.
Build human-to-human connections with personalized communications
If you want employees to be highly engaged, then personalizing your communications with them is a basic requirement. However, manually personalizing communications is a very time-consuming process, especially with large intakes of new hires.
Employee onboarding software arms the manager with automated personalization. For example, by integrating your onboarding software with your HRIS and/or ATS you should be able to launch new hires into the correct onboarding experience for their location, position, department and more.
Your managers should also be able to quickly customize and send pre-written, pre-personalized welcome messages and instructions, making this part of onboarding a breeze.
Timely messaging
Not only can modern employee onboarding software make messages personal, but it also sends those messages on a just-in-time basis.
Employees receiving messages at the right time means they receive a constant trickle of supportive, instructional material that keeps engagement at its highest.
Managers also benefit from this. They are reminded of tasks precisely when they need to be actioned, which helps to maintain manager engagement thanks to the sense of urgency and immediate relevance that’s generated.
Using the just-in-time approach saves oodles of stress for managers and new hires. It cuts through the clutter of busy to-do lists and schedules, meaning there is much less opportunity for tasks and messages to slip through the cracks.
Frictionless communications
Having to download yet another app or remember the obscure login details to yet another portal just to complete simple tasks can be tedious, and encourages procrastination.
The issue here is that of friction.
Web-based employee onboarding software has the advantage of providing frictionless communications. This means it only uses channels of communications your new hires are already familiar with. And there are no apps to download, no accounts to set up, and no passwords to forget.
Using frictionless communications increases the responsiveness and engagement of everyone involved, with the added benefit of keeping the dialogue between managers and new hires as open as possible.
Bite-sized learning
Good employee onboarding software will have powerful content scheduling and trigger capabilities. This empowers you to break down onboarding tasks and the information you deliver into smaller, bite-sized pieces that can be delivered over time.
This not only improves engagement, but also makes onboarding a lot less overwhelming for both your new hires and managers.
New hires perform better, learn faster, and recall more when provided with their onboarding materials in a series of structured, easily digestible chunks.
Similarly, when managers are reminded of an onboarding task they can complete in less than a minute via their mobile device, they are far less likely to put it off until later.
Feedback collection and action
Finally, good employee onboarding software is 100% devoted to gathering meaningful feedback from employees on your onboarding process. This not only allows you to improve what you do, but it also gives you intelligent insights into each new hire’s engagement level, and will generate actions for your managers to take if anyone’s not faring so well.
Keeping a finger on the pulse of employee engagement in this manner is a great way to identify potential flight risks, and even just to keep your employees happy by identifying issues and responding with what they really need.
Are you ready to make your people your passion?
If you’re prepared to break the mould of traditional onboarding and futureproof your organisation with human-centric, experience-driven employee onboarding software, get in touch. We’d be delighted to show you how Enboarder, our best-in-class onboarding solution, blows the whistle on traditional onboarding and massively boosts employee engagement by treating everyone like a real person.
