by Click Boarding | Jun 20, 2020 | Employee Experience, New Hire Onboarding, Onboarding Solutions
Okay, so you have a great new hire and you’re excited about getting them to work at your company. You have a wonderful work culture, fantastic benefits and you can’t wait to get them onboarded. But what does that mean? What should you include in your new employee onboarding checklist? At Click Boarding, we know a thing or two about that topic, so we’ve come up with a new employee onboarding checklist to help your new employee have their best first day.
A Warm Welcome
Before you begin unloading the all the necessary forms on your new hires, make sure to begin your new employee onboarding checklist with a formal welcome message. The higher up the person who gives it to them, the better. Don’t talk about what they’ll have to do on the job, or everything they’ll have to get through today. Just let them know you’re excited about them being here, and to make sure they have someone to talk to in case they have any questions. This will put them at ease and make the rest of the process feel less daunting.
Make sure to add: Important email addresses, “unwritten” office etiquette and the name of their mentor team or line manager.
A Proper Profile
A recent Aberdeen survey showed that 83% of high-performing companies begin their onboarding process before an employee’s first day. This usually means they’re having their employees fill out the forms online, and this means creating an online profile that will make that process a lot easier. When you have your new hire create an online signature as part of your new employee onboarding checklist, you centralize the online onboarding process, making the rest of it easier to do and easier to track, to boot.
Make sure to add: Small touches like letting the new hire know how much you appreciate them before they walk in the door. “We’re so excited to meet you,” from future team members can go a long way.
An Official Offer
Salary.com reports that 19% of employees said they’ve lost a job because they decided to negotiate a job offer. This can happen when either side mismanages their communication, and you can avoid a lot of those headaches with a formal job offer, preferably one the employee can see and review as part of their new employee onboarding checklist. When both sides understand what’s on the table, they’re better able to communicate what they need from each other, leading to a happier new employee.
Make sure to add: Any benefits information (and when the new employee is eligible for benefits) along with offer letter and compensation information.
A Clear Community
Along with a formal offer, 73% of employees want to review company policies as part of their new employee onboarding checklist. This can also include a lot of the community outreach and donation efforts the new hire can take part in, such as donating a portion of their paycheck to one of the charities the company supports (or better yet, you can have the employee pick their own!) This helps make your new hire more active at your company outside of their job, and keys them into your company culture.
Make sure to add: The values that underscore why your company donates to these causes. This leads to focused employee alignment with the organizational values.
Some Faster Forms
Finally, we have those pesky forms to fill out. They may be tedious, but they don’t have to be slow, especially if you’re going paperless. And you should: if you’re in IT, especially, document printing can take up 10% of your operation costs. Paperless forms make filling out paperwork much faster, especially if you have an online profile set up (like we discussed earlier!) The faster you get through the paperwork, the more at home your new employee will feel.
Make sure to add: An option to sign electronically.
A Fantastic First Day
One thing every new employee onboarding checklist should have is a clear schedule of what an employee’s first day should look like. This might seem trivial, but it’s a vital part of making sure everyone at your company knows what their responsibilities are when it comes to approaching new hires, and will help develop of a better sense of employee development in the long term. And when you don’t have a new employee’s onboarding planned out, it could be so disastrous that it causes 4% of your new hires to quit after the first day. Is that a chance you want to take simply because you didn’t want to create a short schedule and delegate some tasks? We didn’t think so.
Make sure to add: Breaks for the new hire to process what he or she is learning. You don’t want to burn them out!
That about covers it — your full new employee onboarding checklist. By hitting all these bases, you’re guaranteeing that your new hire will have everything filled out, know what they’re getting into, and quickly step into their role at your company.
Click Boarding’s six-step process makes onboarding simple, fast and effective. Sign up for a demo today and see how paperless onboarding is the way to go.
by Julie Kuepers | Jun 4, 2020 | New Hire Onboarding, Onboarding Solutions
How has the pandemic changed the way we onboard employees?
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything: how we live, how we communicate and ultimately how we interact with one another. It was a cataclysmic event that forever changed the way we look at work and employment, not to mention virtually everything we do on a daily basis. Now, everyone is adjusting to the “new normal.”
Since the pandemic began, statistics show that over 30 million people have filed for unemployment, with countless businesses of every size impacted by this global situation. One area most companies are experiencing significant metamorphosis is Human Resources. Due to many state and federal mandates, HR professionals were faced with the inability of employees to return to work because of COVID-19. Not necessarily because they didn’t want to return to work, but rather “stay safe” orders or “stay at home” orders left many with no other choice. Possibly even worse was the introduction of “essential” and “non-essential” workers.
Click Boarding’s Chief Revenue Officer Christine Marino says she’s witnessed firsthand how the pandemic is transforming the way organizations onboard their new hires. “COVID-19 and its long-ranging implications have forced companies to reevaluate what they’re doing internally for new hire recruitment and employee engagement. I think they’re coming to terms with the fact that what we’ve done in the past needs to change dramatically for the future.”
Rethinking “normal”
“The majority of companies didn’t have a choice. They were forced to respond to the drastic change and challenged to do things very differently as a result of the new working-from-home workforce. They had to figure out — and fast — how to manage some or all of their remote employees along with onboarding new hires,” Marino explained. As the pandemic went on, companies had to offboard employees, many in mass quantities. The timing of these layoffs forced many companies to do this virtually. The stories shared were heart breaking.
What they’re doing is “kicking the tires” of onboarding, knowing yesterday’s solution must change for tomorrow. HR departments are searching for a new solution to efficiently and effectively onboard their new hires within the parameters of everyone’s new normal.
Changes with the biggest impact
What types of changes were most prevalent? “Mobile first is a critical driver which isn’t a surprise; everyone lives off their cell phones today,” Marino commented. Even at a Federal level, Marino says companies had to change the process of completing and submitting I-9 forms. Because of the pandemic, new hire candidates could no longer complete this type of documentation face to face as they had done in the past. What it did was force companies to adapt during the midst of a global crisis.
“In addition, it helped organizations realize the fundamental need to drastically improve how they bring talent onboard. The pandemic caused us to lose millions to unemployment, and it wasn’t by choice. Companies had to let really good people go because of the uncertainty. Once things settle down, the fight for great employees will certainly commence again.”
Engage new hires & protect your reputation
Now more than ever, Marino explained, company reputations are on the line. “When you look at the impact of how you reacted to the pandemic as an organization, it reflects your conviction to the problem and finding a viable solution,” she said.
Now that folks are returning to work, companies must make a cognitive decision to offer a more fostering environment for employees. Everyone has real feelings about the state of the world, post COVID-19. The emotional impact of this is tantamount to your talent and your brand. Why? Because everything your organization is doing during this time will be closely scrutinized from both new and existing employees alike.
How do you ensure your company is on track for this brave, new world?
Depend on a leader. Click Boarding has expanded our solutions suite to help organizations respond to COVID-19. Our platform delivers a guided experience that removes HR burdens and minimizes employee anxiety related to any transition or internal mobility, from being a new hire, to being promoted, to changing roles or offboarding. Whatever your needs, Click Boarding can help. We’d love to hear how you responded to this global crisis and share how we have as well.
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by Click Boarding | May 30, 2020 | New Hire Onboarding, Onboarding Solutions
The Benefits of a New Hire Process Flow Chart
How do you know whether you’ve covered all of the onboarding-related tasks you need to do with a recently hired employee? You can read guides, take lessons and buy onboarding platforms. But at some point, your process needs to be unique to your company. It’s up to you to make sure you have touched on everything so you can move on from each step without having to think about it.
Make sure you don’t miss a step in the onboarding process when you create your organization’s new hire process flow chart. It should include all of the steps you need to ensure your latest new hire ends up as one of your best.
But what steps go into a new hire process flow chart? Glad you asked!
Our awesome employee journey experts here at Click Boarding have provided the framework for you to start your process flow outline. Now it’s up to you (and your team) to fill in the blanks!
Step 1
Integrate it into Your Hiring Process
This might sound like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many companies don’t think about their onboarding procedures until after they hire their first employee. Before you hire someone, make sure you’ve included onboarding. When you build the hiring process with onboarding as an integral facet, it makes it easier to file the necessary paperwork. Onboarding is such an essential part of the hiring process that the University of California Riverside, for example, includes it in their new hire process flow chart.
Step 2
Take Care of the Legal Stuff Ahead of Time
No one wants to wade through all the forms and minutiae to make sure a new hire’s legally allowed to work for you, but it’s a necessary part of any new hire process flow chart. There’s no way around it, but there are a few things you can do to make sure the process is as painless as possible. One thing you can do is ensure your onboarding forms are covered before day one, before the employee ever enters the office. It’s what as many as 83% of companies in a recent SHRM poll do, and for good reason. When all of these things are taken care of, you’re free to move on to more important matters, like:
Step 3
Introduce them to the Company
Clearly, onboarding is an essential part of the new hire process flow chart if we’ve only just arrived at the company introduction. This doesn’t make it any less important, however; a good new hire process flow chart puts a big emphasis on that first impression. When you properly introduce your employee to the company, you get better employees. According to the SHRM survey, 66% of companies with an onboarding process more successfully assimilate new employees into their employee culture. It doesn’t seem like that big a deal, but trust us when we say you want this as part of your flowchart.
Step 4
Plan for a Whole Week
Chances are your employee won’t know everything about your company after their first day. So when you’re planning out your new hire process flow chart, make sure you factor in a full introduction schedule, based around the first week. What’s more, make sure you’re not letting employees sit idly for too long. Maynard Webb, Chairman at Yahoo, suggests managers keep tabs on new employees regularly during their first week.
“Take 20 minutes every day for the first week or two to investigate how it is going. You can instantly tell if someone is struggling or succeeding and iterate to make things work more smoothly. Always ask, ‘What do you need from me?’”
Step 5
The Rest of the First Year
When writing up your new hire process flowchart, don’t write “and then we’re done” anywhere on it. Onboarding, the process of teaching an employee the intricacies of the job they’ve been hired to do spans far longer than just that first week. Since employees who went through a structured onboarding program are 58% more likely to stick with a company for more than three years, you can plan milestones and yearly goals with confidence. So give your new hires something to aim for on a regular basis, whether it’s being more productive or getting a big project off the ground before the end of their first year.
There’s more to onboarding than these five steps, especially when you start breaking down each of these steps into all the questions they bring (just how do you introduce an employee to your company culture, anyway?). But flow charts aren’t about details; they’re about letting your employees know that you have a plan for their arrival, and that you care enough to make sure they do become the excellent employees they want to be.
Let Click Boarding get you started on simplifying your onboarding process. Our employee onboarding software can be your recruiting team’s personal flow chart to help track and manage the onboarding steps from the time an offer is sent to a candidate to their first day. Contact us for a demo to see how we can help!
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by Christine Marino | Apr 20, 2020 | Onboarding Solutions
What makes for a successful employee onboarding software? Is it a slick interface that makes everything look shiny, clean and simple? It will help people feel better about using it, but it’s not always the most important part. Is it that it’s saving you money? That’s great, but if you still don’t have a good onboarding process after using cheap software, you’re not really saving money.
When looking for a new employee onboarding software or system, be careful about falling for flashy designs and low prices. Instead, focus on these four essential traits, and you won’t go wrong.
1. A More Formal Introduction
Some companies like to make the work environment relaxing. Smaller companies, especially. They’ll plop a new hire down, have some fun chats about what it’s going to be like to work for them, introduce them to the team, and have them fill out forms. That’s fine in some cases, but most candidates, even if they want to work in a loose environment, want new hire onboarding to be a process, not a single meeting. In fact, 52% of new hires want to receive organized, relevant and well-timed content as part of their onboarding process, likely making it the biggest area talent acquisition can improve on.
So while you may not want to bog down a new hire with lots of information on their first day, they want to have at least some idea of what their job will be like. Additionally, having a more formal talk about the job, the company, and their place within both will make you look more professional, and make the hire more confident in their new job. Your employee onboarding software should scale to your company’s specific onboarding needs and not be a thoughtless add-on to your current technology stack.
2. A Simple and Intuitive Interface
The first day of a new job has enough stress associated with it without trying to wrangle complex technology in the middle of it. Around 33% of new hires quit their jobs after just 90 days. Help your new employee avoid the morass of frustrating screens and lengthy and extensive onboarding by providing them with a simple solution. If your onboarding needs are more complex, try selecting a solution that provides tool tips, in-app training, or a dedicated service team to assist when needed.
Many companies frustrate candidates they spent months wooing with an antiquated and disorganized system that just happened to come in the box with their ATS or HRIS. Unfortunately, these aren’t always the best options for onboarding new employees (as often this software is written for HR Pros used to navigating its intricacies). Keep this user-friendliness in mind when shopping for employee onboarding software.
3. Easy Integration
The last thing you want to do when you find an incredible onboarding solution is to try and stick it on to your existing technology and find it doesn’t, fit. When you find just the right tool and integrate into your current workflow, you’ll see a bump in productivity.
Instead of hoping your new purchase will work with your existing processes, build these questions into your employee onboarding software buying process. Find out which integrations your onboarding platform offers and whether or not they are open to an integration with other software platforms. If it’s proprietary or doesn’t play well with others, move on.
4. A Distinct Lack of Paper
Paper new hire forms are slowing everything down, not just onboarding. When you need to fill out new employee forms multiple times to file them with different departments (those multicolored forms help, but not as much as you’d like them to), and have to fill in the same fields over and over again, you can’t help but begin looking for a better way to get all that info to the right place. And it’s not just onboarding that benefits from going paperless. Estimates say banks can reduce their audits and validations efforts by almost 80% when they cut out paper. Just imagine what it can do for your onboarding process.
This one’s a no-brainer. If you’re selecting an employee onboarding software, it has to be paperless. Your new hires will appreciate how much time (and wrist pain) you’re saving them by using software that fills in fields on every form they fill out after having done it only once, and your company will appreciate that the same, accurate information is on every new hire form. Outlining onboarding best practices helps avoid compliance issues and risk exposure for your HR department and creates a “paper” trail for any future investigations into your hiring practices.
There’s obviously more to consider when scouting out your perfect onboarding program, but these four pillars of onboarding are crucial. When you formalize your process with the right software, it gives your company a competitive edge. When your employee onboarding software helps integrate on-the-job training into the onboarding process, you get more productive employees. And when you remove paper from the equation, everything runs just a bit smoother. With these guidelines in mind, you’ll choose the best employee onboarding software, and help make new hires feel right at home faster than ever.
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by Click Boarding | Mar 24, 2020 | Onboarding Solutions
You see resources out the wazoo on how to recruit the best candidates and the latest performance management best practices, but there is too little discussed about the time in between. The irony is it’s during the new hire onboarding process that companies are most vulnerable to losing their newest employees. In fact, research by the Aberdeen Group found 86% of new employees decide whether to stay or quit a new job within their first 6 months.
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by Click Boarding | Feb 25, 2020 | Onboarding Solutions
We know, change is hard. Especially with thousands of employees, multiple locations, and many systems.
Click Boarding’s clients have shared similar fears before choosing our mobile-first onboarding platform. They were worried about employee data security, integration with their current HRIS and ATS, and how much time and effort it would take from their team to make the change.
Their HRIS had been instrumental in so many ways – including scheduling, training, time-off, and more. They wanted to know how Click Boarding’s onboarding platform could complement their system and if it could truly seamlessly integrate into it.
If this sounds familiar, read on:
Employee Data Security
As soon as you hire an employee you become responsible for their sensitive personal data. We understand the magnitude and risk of that. Leaks break trust and damage company reputations. Bloomberg Law reports that in 2020, California will be the first state to have a law imposing statutory damages against employers for employee data breaches.
It’s important to consider the following questions regarding your employee’s data:
– Where is your data stored?
– How is it stored
– How is it entered?
– Who can access it?
– How is it protected from hackers, data miners, viruses, and malicious intent?
– Can you delete if they ask?
Click Boarding’s platform securely manages new employee information. New employees receive a link to directly enter their personal information into the secure portal. Once entered, all employee information is stored in a secure, centralized, cloud-based location that is SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR compliant.
HRIS & ATS Integration
Integrating a new system is fraught with very real concerns. Will information seamlessly flow? Will it be buggy? As you consider your onboarding platform options, we encourage you to look for something that’s standard, flexible, and configurable and a partner who is invested in your success.
Click Boarding’s platform directly integrates with over 250 common HR systems and has a dedicated implementation and support team.
Effort
Implementing a new system, especially one that handles sensitive employee information, is challenging and benefits from expert guidance.
Click Boarding has dedicated implementation specialists to oversee the process – from start to finish. They work directly with your team to establish a plan, support your team, and answer questions as they (inevitably) come up.
If you would like to learn more about enhancing or automating your onboarding program we’d love to chat.
Click Boarding offers a modern onboarding platform that energizes HR and new hires by blending employee engagement, forms and digital process workflow and unified data integrations into smooth, flexible and compliant solutions. Delivering a day one smile on every new hire’s face.
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