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A survey of 350 HR leaders in the U.S. found that 76 percent of respondents’ workplaces1 are not effectively onboarding their new hires. A delayed or uncoordinated onboarding can result in lost productivity, low employee morale and, in extreme cases, unplanned attrition. Similarly, missing key steps in offboarding can increase your compliance, litigation and reputation risk.
Several studies have been conducted that point to the need to paying closer attention to employee onboarding and offboarding and investing in HR automation. For example:
- More than 50 percent of job seekers checked a company’s job reviews on Glassdoor before applying for a job.
- Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.
- Employees who have negative new hire onboarding experiences are twice as likely to look for new opportunities in the near future
- 88% of employees think their employer did a poor job with the onboarding process
The challenges of onboarding and offboarding
The average new hire has 54 activities to complete during their onboarding experience which makes it one of the most complex HR processes. Therefore, it is not surprising that the main reason for neglecting onboarding includes managers not having the time to undertake it (57 percent), the absence of tools to measure its effectiveness (55 percent) and the lack of digital onboarding technology to automate the process (39 percent).
Today's workforce is made up of digital consumers, and they expect the same conveniences of on-demand, flexible, and simple processes and innovation at work that they experience in their personal lives. More recently, the COVID 19 pandemic has forced several organizations to maintain a high level of flexibility with their staffing plans, resulting in higher-than-normal level of termination, hiring, and rehiring. This has increased the HR onboarding and offboarding workload on an already lean HR organization.
At most organizations, onboarding and offboarding of employees touches multiple departments and sometimes, external entities. The end result is typically an onboarding and offboarding process that is both complex and unique. As a result, a cookie cutter approach and off the shelf software tools rarely gets the job done. What is more is that HR policies can change as can the needs of the hiring manager. Not only is it important for these critical HR processes to be tailored but they also need to be agile and responsive to the changing needs.
How to improve the employee onboarding and offboarding process
Given the complex nature of the onboarding and offboarding processes, HR organizations need a way to build tailored processes quickly and easily adjust them as their requirements change to create a positive onboarding journey for new employees. Similarly, because the HR teams are burdened with an overflowing to do list, they need access to intuitive dashboards and reports that inform them and alert them about deadlines, processes and resources.
A low code onboarding and offboarding platform is a better technology to build and automate your process compared to either building such a workflow as a custom application from scratch or a rigid off the shelf application. A low code onboarding and offboarding platform is like a set of Lego blocks that can be quickly assembled to create a tailored workflow. In addition, the right onboarding and offboarding platform should have the following key capabilities:
- Easy to install and upgrade.
- Low code – no coding knowledge required.
- Rich integration capabilities that make it easy to coordinate the HR onboarding and offboarding process across multiple departments.
- Strong in audit tracking of the activities which can be critical for certain industries.
- Powerful process modeling capabilities allow clients to model complex processes with ease
- Ability to proactively identify potential delays and recommend corrective action to ensure timely onboarding.
- Gain 70% in cost savings
- Improve internal team productivity by 40%+
- Reduce in process time (5 to 10 times faster)
Take decisive action now
Click here to learn more about how some of your colleagues are using a low-code platform to address the unique challenges posed by onboarding and offboarding. In particular, how they are quickly assembling tailored onboarding and offboarding processes to improve their employee retention and relieve the HR team from administrative tasks at an affordable cost and in a short timeframe.
