How AA New Zealand Implemented Best Practice Onboarding Across Their Diverse Organisation
The New Zealand Automobile Association (AA New Zealand) provides a range of services to its members including motoring advice, insurance, finance, breakdown services, vehicle repairs, driver licensing, driver training and more. With over 900 employees in a variety of locations, they service over 1.7 million members across New Zealand.
The Problem
AA New Zealand’s decision to improve their onboarding processes was driven by a new vision from their HR team - to build a great candidate and new hire experience.
Challenge one - visibility
The original onboarding experience comprised of a manual form that managers had to find on the intranet, download, print and complete in order to organise the basic necessities for a new hire. AA New Zealand’s Employer Brand and Talent Manager, Aman Dhaliwal comments:
“The process placed the entire onus on our managers to manage onboarding on their own volition. There was no way to track if and when the process was being implemented, and our team had no visibility over it. We would only be made aware of issues if a new hire proactively escalated a problem.”
There were no touchpoints set up for HR, and so there was no insight into candidate experience for each new hire and no way to know if the right tools and support would be organised for day one.
“We didn’t have enough data to really understand what was happening with onboarding and what the pain points were.”
Challenge two - manual processes
AA New Zealand has office locations and customer service centres located across the country with new hires starting each week in a wide variety of roles and locations, from customer service and team leaders in contact centres, to insurance consultants and regional managers in retail teams and more.
The original manual process placed all the responsibility on the hiring manager to do what was needed for all of these different roles.
“The managers in our contact centres would sometimes need to set up ten different system log ins for each new hire, so ten separate system requests for each person. Given the high hiring velocity in that area of the business, the process was unsustainable and counter productive.”
“We did look at other onboarding solutions but Enboarder was more customisable, easier to use, and easier to implement. It could integrate with our ATS and overall offered greater value for money.”
The Solution
AA New Zealand’s HR team integrated Enboarder with their ATS SnapHire, enabling a seamless flow between recruitment and onboarding.
They also left their options open to allow them to scale the use of Enboarder, including adding workflows for offboarding, internal communications for performance management and parental leave.
Their onboarding workflows are set up to ensure a consistent experience for all new hires. The onboarding experiences are also customised according to the different locations and roles. The HR team ensured their touch points are set up to maximise engagement, starting with the preboarding experience, through to day one and throughout a new starter’s first 90 days with the organisation.
Another major consideration for AA New Zealand was to ensure return on investment. This was a focus from the start, when they were building the business case for Enboarder. According to the team, Enboarder had all the features they wanted, and they were confident it would deliver greater efficiencies and reduce the time that was being spent on manual tasks.
“We did look at other onboarding solutions but Enboarder was more customisable, easier to use, and easier to implement. It could integrate with our ATS and overall offered greater value for money.”
The Results
“You don’t understand the power of Enboarder until you’re using it - it can do so much more than you realise.”
The HR team reported that the time needed for managers to onboard a new hire has reduced significantly. Managers in their contact centres estimate that they are saving more than 10 hours per month compared to trying to navigate the previous manual onboarding process.
New hires are also becoming productive in a shorter amount of time, and the HR team are now able to properly measure engagement levels during the onboarding process for the first time.
The AA has onboarded 129 new starters in the past 12 months, and have maintained strong employee NPS of 78 and manager engagement, which is at 86%.
When asked what they enjoy most about using Enboarder, this is what their managers had to say:
Having used Enboarder for over a year now, the AA’s HR team can see the difference it has made.
“Our systems talk to each other and we have access to engagement data at the click of a button, and that’s how we know that we’re doing a great job delivering consistent best practice onboarding to our new hires.”
“Enboarder has enabled us to work better within our business, which is not something many service providers can actually do.”
Managers in their contact centres estimate that they are saving more than 10 hours per month compared to trying to navigate the previous manual onboarding process.
“Our systems talk to each other and we have access to engagement data at the click of a button, and that’s how we know that we’re doing a great job delivering consistent best practice onboarding to our new hires.”