Top 5 Reasons Consulting Firms need Modern Onboarding

One of the challenges of consulting is handling onboarding with each new client, as every client requires something different. Information and paperwork, such as background checks, drug tests, NDA’s, and W-9’s are often needed. Data security and sensitivity, including HIPAA regulations, GDPR, insider trading, and other industry-specific data requirements are common. Not to mention location, dress-code, and company culture concerns.

Each new client engagement is a minefield of risk – from data breaches and fines to irreparable reputation damage.

Modern onboarding is the key to getting your project team off to a good start, impressing your client, and being compliant with the regulations of that industry. 

Top 5 reasons consulting firms need modern onboarding

1. Productivity Acceleration

Not to be a cliché but time is money, especially in the consulting world. Don’t let your team members dither away precious time with a poorly planned and executed onboarding process and mountains of paperwork.  

Enable your team to be immediately productive with the client by providing a modular, mobile-first guided onboarding process that walks them through every step of the process. Include where to go on the first day, the dress code, and information about the client.

2. Compliance

You can stack your team with the best possible contributors, without being bound by geographic constraints, if you have a system capable of handling ever-changing state and local regulations. 

3. Scalability

Sustainable, automated onboarding and offboarding drives scalability. By eliminating manual intervention from your onboarding process your ability to take on new clients quickly expands.  

 4. Knowledge Advantage

Equipping your team members with information about the company culture enables them to excel from the start. You could provide videos, fact sheets, and more during the automated onboarding process – anything that will help them easily integrate with the new client.

5. Offboarding

Seamless offboarding is sure to impress your clients – as you systematically turn off security access, return ID badges and assets, and end the engagement with all loose ends tied into a nice bow. 

Great Onboarding in the Gig Economy

The gig economy is booming. With 57 million* Americans engaged in nontraditional work and a 22% increase** since 2000, the gig economy is a powerful and growing force.

How is your organization treating these nontraditional workers? So well that they can’t wait to return next time there’s an opportunity? Or so aloofly that they’re rushing to post a negative review on Glassdoor.com?

Many organizations struggle to effectively integrate non-W2 employees, lacking the internal processes to find, onboard, equip, pay, and offboard them. Oh, and make them actually want to come back for another gig when you need them next. They bring on freelancers without an intuitive, seamless process – making the process cumbersome for both the internal team and the new hire.

The gig economy is only going to continue to grow; the figurative genie is literally out of the bottle! Your organization needs a way to easily integrate and offboard nontraditional workers, manage ever-changing local and regional requirements and regulations, and make sure talented workers want to return when needed in the future. Your team also needs a way to easily manage the administrative side for these workers, so they’re not lost in a mind-numbing abyss of persistent and time-consuming (wasting?) on- and offboarding paperwork.

With a couple of simple steps, your organization can easily onboard, integrate, and offboard freelancers –making life easier for your team and strengthening your company’s brand in the talent pool marketplace.

Three easy steps:

1. Establish a Cross-functional Process with Automated Triggers

Your freelancer is going to need some combination of equipment, security clearance, and system access. By establishing an internal process with all the departments that are involved – such as HR, the hiring manager, security, and finance – you can ensure that your new worker has everything needed to be productive from day one.

Include automated triggers so your freelancer doesn’t show up on the first day without a username and password to access the system or a computer to use. It’s also important to have a seamless invoice and payment process in place for your temporary workers.

2. Streamline Compliance

Keep things simple by providing all the necessary compliance documentation in a mobile-first guided platform. This could include information about the office, all compliance documentation, the payment process, and requests for paperwork – such as NDA’s, W-9’s. Your new hire, HR, and hiring manager will appreciate how this simple step eliminates the back and forth typically required to gather all this information.

Ensure your system has accounted for local variations and regulations – from tax differences to data compliance concerns (i.e. GDPR).

3. Offboard Them Well

Close the loop on the short-term employee’s engagement with an intelligent, automated offboarding process. Create a cross-functional process and triggers to set off a cascade of events. This could include turning off system access, ensuring they’ve been paid, and requesting feedback on their experience with your organization.

This final interaction will linger with your temporary employees – an important consideration as they share their experience with others and consider returning to work with you in the future.

*https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2018/08/31/57-million-u-s-workers-are-part-of-the-gig-economy/amp/

**https://jobble.com/45-eye-popping-stats-about-the-gig-economy/

Unleash Conference

We are thrilled to be returning to the Unleash Conference May 14-15, 2019 in Las Vegas. UNLEASH America is the #1 gathering place for all those who thrive on the Work Revolution and HR Technology. UNLEASH attracts an exclusive community of leaders, innovators, influencers and workforce technology buyers helping transformational organizations identify and apply the right technologies and solutions for the Future of Work.

Last year, we won the startup competition and this year we’ll be part of the judging panel to select the next great start-up!

You won’t want to miss our very own Scott Poeschl on the main stage giving a demo presentation titled “Onboarding that Rocks So Much Employees Will Want To Do It Again.” You can catch Scott’s presentation on Tuesday, May 14 at 11:35am PT.

Finally, we have a few surprises and announcements that you won’t want to miss. Be sure to stop by booth 606 and say hello!

3 Easy Ways to Make Hiring Managers the Stars of Onboarding

Hiring managers are in a tricky position – juggling a mountain of work while trying to find the perfect candidate to help manage the workload. Once they find the ideal person, they typically need them to dive in and be productive right away. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for the relationship-building intangibles of onboarding – the parts that make new employees feel welcomed and valued.

Which is a pity because the pre-boarding and onboarding experiences can make or break a new employee’s decision to stay with the company.

Within the first 90 days, most new employees decide whether to stay or go.  

Fortunately, you can make it easy for hiring managers to make new employees feel welcome by creating automated systems and processes. This enables hiring managers to shine — without the extra work.

1. Make it easy for your hiring managers to coordinate a welcoming committee

Create a template to inform the team about new employees and automated reminders to schedule a welcome lunch. Include key information in the template like the new employee’s name, role, start date, and contact information. You can also include fun facts like their alma mater or previous employer.

By sharing this information, your team can be prepared for the new hire’s arrival and join in the welcoming lunch, an important part of the onboarding process.

2. Provide pre-printed welcome-to-the-team note cards

Create welcome cards that embody your company’s culture and keep a stack of them on-site. Include text like, “Welcome to the team! We’re so glad you’re here.” With this readily available card and a two-second signature, the hiring manager can make the new team member feel very welcome, right from the start.

It also never hurts to give a treat or some company swag along with the card. Walking into a new office and sitting down at a desk with a welcome card and treats is sure to make a new employee feel valued.  

Make it super easy for the hiring manager by having the note cards available and creating an automated process that gently reminds them of this step.

3. Create templates

New employees are walking into an office of uncertainty. They don’t know what to wear the first day or where to go. They also don’t know what’s expected of them in the first 30, 60, 90 days.

Create templates for a welcome letter, what to expect on their first day, and a guided questionnaire to establish what success looks like in their first 90 days. These templates enable hiring managers to engage new hires and manage expectations — critical parts of successful onboarding.

Congratulations! You convinced leadership that when it comes to onboarding, paper needs to go. Everyone is on board with the fact that automating new hire onboarding  will reduce the burden on HR, your new hires, and current employees while driving engagement and improving the overall experience. Your team is pumped, you’re over-the-moon excited, and everyone can’t wait to get started!!

So you start shopping. You start digging into platforms and requirements and processes and prices. You see lots of shiny new bells and whistles, some so amazing you’re sure you need them – even though they were nowhere on your scratchpad of business requirements when you started. Then there’s budget; you’d hate to go over it, but if the platform pays for itself….and how will you know when it has? What does success look like, anyway? And don’t forget technology requirements. Bet you didn’t know you needed a crash course on API integrations in your search for an onboarding solution did you?

Don’t panic. Slow the roll.

Switching a manual process to an automated one is exciting – don’t get me wrong. And it does take elbow grease upfront if you want to do it once and do it right. Slowing down, being clear about the benefits you expect to receive, reducing scope to achieve those benefits (no more, no less), and defining how you’ll measure them are keys to success when it comes to selecting the right solution and partner.

A partner that can bring you the benefits you expect…

• Reduced HR overtime
• Reduced time-to-hire
• Reduced compliance costs
• Increased new hire productivity
• Improved employee experience
• Streamlined and consistent processes

…just to name a few.

If this is your nirvana, rest assured it’s worth your effort and easier than you might think. Take a minute and check out this list of 6 things to do before automating HR.

Run through your current processes from hire to retire – and from hire to fire – as an employee. Run through it again from the HR perspective. What stages exist and what are the requirements? What data is collected and how is it processed?

• Be sure to map it out as-is. RESIST the urge to make tweaks or improvements. I know it’s hard, but trust me on this one.
  • Unless you’re in danger of falling out of compliance or causing serious harm. If that’s the case, fix away, my friend!

Highlight all the manual bits and evaluate the time needed to complete the processes from an applicant/candidate/employee view as well as an HR/hiring manager/payroll view.

• For example: How long does it take for a new hire to manually fill out the required onboarding paperwork? How long does it take for HR to prepare, review and approve it?
  • Hint: The answer is almost always way too long.

Take a look at how much time HR actually spends interacting with applicants, candidates, and employees at each step from hire to retire and hire to fire. Survey these user groups when they complete the process. Any discernible patterns?

• Look for spikes, dips, and patterns of engagement. Backtrack to the cause. Was it 1:1 contact, forms and information, or something else entirely? Once again, resist the urge to improve! That part will come soon enough, I promise.

Determine what parts of the process can be optimized, standardized and streamlined to improve employee engagement time requirements.

• Areas with data collection, compliance and maintenance are great starting points. Once you get those automated, you can see higher levels of data accuracy and more face time between HR, applicants, candidates, and employees.

Clearly define your biggest pain points, your goals for the new process, and the KPIs you’ll need to track in order to determine success.

• This is where you start strategy. By pinpointing your actual pain points and determining how to measure the success of the solution, you can narrow your scope to products with features that fit your needs rather than wasting your time on “solutions” that don’t.

Build your ideal lifecycle for an employee from talent acquisition to talent management based on the information collected. Clearly outline which processes are manual, which processes are automated, and how the information has to flow between them. This will give you a great idea as to which platforms work best for your organization.

If you follow these steps, invest in due diligence upfront, and have a solid understanding of your organization’s processes and needs, you put yourself in a position to make an educated decision on the best platform to drive the business outcomes you need and realize the greatest ROI.

Want to learn more about how onboarding connects talent acquisition and talent management? Let’s talk!