Streamlining your onboarding process to make it as smooth and stress-free as possible is guaranteed to leave a better taste in your new employees’ mouths. Throw in some gifts like a t-shirt with your company logo, or an inspirational book in their welcome kit, and you’re onto a winner, writes Brad Newton.

Let’s face it. The employee onboarding process is anything but simple, and has become even more complex as Australians work remotely due to COVID-19. There are forms to fill out, contracts to sign, security cards to allocate – all items that need to be scanned over. All this paper-pushing can become incredibly cumbersome and inefficient and creates a pretty bad experience for your nervous new employee. 

Streamlining your onboarding process to make it as smooth and stress-free as possible is guaranteed to leave a better taste in your new employees’ mouths.

First impressions really count

Aside from initial interviews – where candidates are more focused on leaving a good impression than forming an impression – the onboarding process is likely the first time that a new employee gets a sense of what it will be like to work for you. It’s during these early days of filling out forms, reading through policy manuals and setting up work devices that your new employee will either think, “Wow, this place makes everything so easy!” or “Yikes, what have I got myself into?”

Obviously, you’ll want to fall into the former camp. In fact, these first impressions can positively impact the bottom line, helping you avoid costly attrition as well as getting your new employee up to speed faster. Research from Glassdoor shows that a positive onboarding experience improves new-hire retention rates by 82 per cent and boosts productivity. What’s more, as cited by Digitate, employees who have had a negative onboarding experience are twice as likely to look for new opportunities in the near future. Ouch.

Onboarding meets automation

So, what can you do about it? As a first step, you’ll want to eliminate as much of the painful, paper-based form-filling as you can. Streamlining your onboarding process to make it as smooth and stress-free as possible is guaranteed to leave a better taste in your new employees’ mouths. Throw in some gifts like a t-shirt with your company logo, or an inspirational book in their welcome kit, and you’re onto a winner.

Next, it’s key to invest in digital HR programs to help streamline the document-heavy process and eliminate some of the bottlenecks that might frustrate new employees. Did you know that three out of five (59 per cent) employees think automation may benefit a company when it comes to HR? By automating workflows, enabling eSignatures, and keeping everything in one central place, you can eliminate stacks of paperwork and instead get forms filled out in a few simple clicks. Those digital forms can then land with IT, security and whoever else needs to know about the new hire, so they can set the wheels in motion for a laptop, phone, security pass, and whatever else the employee needs. It all happens swiftly and seamlessly.

Using ID Verification to take things one step further

As our world has become increasingly remote and heavily regulated, you may find yourself needing to verify your new employee’s identity before they receive a bunch of onboarding forms. To simplify this process, digital identification tools like DocuSign Identify are key. Through these tools, you can simply ask an employee to show their Australian driver’s license and the smart system knows exactly what to look for to ensure the document is not fraudulent.

From an employee’s perspective, the benefit of using tools such as these is the ease with which they can upload a picture of their driver’s license to have it verified. No messy photocopying, scanning, and emailing – in most cases, they can simply do it all from their phone. It really is that easy and gives your company a professional edge.

Employees who have had a negative onboarding experience are twice as likely to look for new opportunities in the near future. 

Implementing contract management technology can be done in incremental, easily manageable steps. For example, you might want to start with candidate offer letters – digitising this one step at the outset (because, after all, it’s all about that first impression, right?) could help you get offers out faster and win the top talent.

Then, you might want to think about integrations at the back end, so your HR staff can complete the entire onboarding process within a single platform to save time and reduce errors.

With the help of a digitised solution, it won’t be long before you are managing all candidate applications and onboarding documents electronically, which is guaranteed to be a win all around.