The Associated General Contractors of America conducted a survey earlier this year and found that 80% of construction companies are unable to find enough qualified craft workers.

This construction worker shortage has led to two-thirds of companies increasing base pay rates for craft workers and 29% offering bonuses and incentives. To standout in this talent pool shortage, construction companies need to innovate to find better ways to engage their employees, retain them longer, and accelerate their productivity.

Modern onboarding is one of the best ways to combat this shortage. Here’s how:

Engage your employees

The backbone of modern onboarding is efficiency and making your new employees feel valued. This needs to start the moment they accept your offer, to ward off any lingering doubts or offers from competitors.

Think about your company’s mission, vision, and culture. Develop an engagement strategy around those pillars so your interactions with your employee, such as sending a welcome-to-the-team company branded hat and card, feel genuine to your company.

Onboarding technology enables you to automate this process, so it’s automatically triggered, and each new hire experience is consistent.

Retain them longer

Dedicate resources to developing your construction workers, providing on-site training programs, and supporting their ongoing growth. Demonstrate how invested you are in establishing long term relationships with your employees by including training possibilities and access in their onboarding. There could be training manuals, video modules, access to online training, and more.

Follow this up with ongoing conversations about their career – where they are today, where they want to go, and how the company can help them get there. Investing in the development of your people is one of the best ways to make them want to stay. As Richard Branson famously said, “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough, so they don’t want to.”

Accelerate their productivity

Your bottom-line hinges on the productivity of your laborers. Each minute spent on onboarding paperwork their first day is time inefficiently spent. A standardized, structured process ensures that each of your new construction workers undergoes each step of onboarding – from paperwork to safety to training – and is fully prepared to start adding value on the job site.

Leverage onboarding technology that enables your new hires to complete their onboarding ‘paperwork’ from their phone before their first day. Automating this process enables you to scale and fully maximize the power of great onboarding.

Next Steps

The construction worker shortage empowers skilled workers to choose their employer. Be an employer of choice by providing a modern onboarding experience that’s rooted in engagement and dedicated to your employee’s ongoing support and development.

If you would like to learn more about overcoming the construction worker shortage with best-in-class onboarding we’d love to chat.

Our platform simplifies onboarding with a mobile-first hub that your team can access from anywhere. We work together to set up customized workflows and automated triggers, so you can impress your new workers with a personalized onboarding experience.

How to Keep Your Company Values Aligned During Mass Hiring

From seasonal needs to surges in company growth, the reasons for mass hiring vary but the need to provide efficient onboarding to accelerate productivity, ensure compliance, and educate new employees about the company culture and values remains constant.

How is your team handling the strain of onboarding all those people? Are they drowning in paperwork and struggling with user errors, payroll issues, and compliance concerns? With all those very real business risks, it can be easy for the focus on company values during onboarding to fall by the wayside.

Which is more than a casual casualty as company values are the heart of an organization. They align all employees, regardless of position, toward a shared vision of interacting with customers, suppliers, and each other. The mass introduction of many new employees can easily dilute and distort the values, a whisper down the lane phenomenon.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution – embed the company values in your onboarding process and make it a required part of your onboarding standards.

4 Ways to Instill Company Values During Mass Hiring

1. Welcome and Values Email

Send a welcome note to the new hire right after they accept your offer and include the company values.

2. Values Video

Create a video featuring leaders and contributors from the organization sharing what the company values are and what they mean to them. Make this a required video to watch during the onboarding process.

3. Values Case Study / Infographic

Help new employees understand your company values by showcasing the values in action. Case studies and infographics are great ways to illustrate them in a memorable way.

4. Values Quiz

Hold new hires accountable by quizzing them on the company values.

The key to ensuring these four steps are completed is to automate the process so each part is automatically triggered when a new employee is hired. This guarantees new hires are well acquainted with the company values and busy hiring managers don’t have yet another item added to their overflowing plate.

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.