There are so many different mistakes a small business owner can make when growing their new enterprise. Do you know what pitfalls and complications to avoid when expanding your business? If you don’t, you could be putting yourself and your stability at great risk.
Failing to plan for growth is one issue that proves to be a problem for a huge amount of business owners. Not planning for growth properly could actually run what seemed like an exciting business into the ground.
Looking into employee onboarding automation is a great way to help plan for growth and create an efficient growth system. What do you need to worry about when it comes to hiring employees?
Read on and we’ll walk you through everything you need to know.
Why Manual Onboarding Can Be Difficult
When it comes to business growth, onboarding new employees can be one area that impacts the bottom line of a business in a serious way. Onboarding can be expensive and time-consuming. Also, if you don’t do a good job, it can impact the eventual performance of your employees.
What are some of the reasons that manual onboarding goes wrong? Getting familiar with these issues can give you a sense of what to avoid when taking on new staff at your own place of business.
Manual Onboarding Could Lead To Decreased Efficiency
The whole goal of onboarding should be to get your new team members into the loop of your working process as soon as possible. The more you can shorten the distance between newbie and seasoned team members, the better your business will run overall.
Manual onboarding can lead to a lot of potential issues and errors that can deepen the gap between these two sides of the equation. Your new team members might have many questions, uncertainties, and needs during their first few weeks on the job.
Without an automated onboarding system in place? They may spend far too much time digging around for answers, doing things incorrectly, or pulling out employees from other tasks to help them out.
It can decrease the efficiency of your overall business operations and delay the true integration of this new person into your team.
Manually providing the access new team members need to facilities, programs, applications, and equipment can be time-consuming. In fact, at a certain size, the task might start to feel impossible.
Manual Onboarding Puts You At Risk
Repeating this process manually over and over also puts your business at risk. It leaves the opportunity open for mistakes that could impact everything from company security to employee performance.
What would happen if a brand new employee got access to confidential company materials? The level of risk is dangerous for your business, and not something you’ll want to have to face.
Automating your onboarding process and keeping things consistent across the company can help to bring down the level of risk your company will be facing.
What is Automated Onboarding?
Automated employee onboarding is the best system to have in place after hiring employees. If your business is growing to a degree where you’ll be bringing on new team members quite often? Having an automated system in place can provide an endless bevy of benefits.
Onboarding automation is a term that refers to the use of computer software when it comes to completing a number of employee onboarding tasks.
The idea is that these tasks will get completed without requiring the help of a human HR department. These tasks could be wide and varied and would differ depending on the business in question. It could include things such as sending e-mails, providing access, updating routing or status information, and much more.
Generating documentation and collecting signatures is another big automation task. It is one that your HR team is likely to be content with having passed off to a computer system.
Some automated onboarding systems are even more robust and complex. Self-service portals are a common example of robust automation systems – these programs allow employees to log on, enter information, and essentially get themselves set up at your business all on their own.
These self-service portals can take on multiple tasks at once.
It’s a great place to collect important information and documentation from new employees, yes. But it can also be a great place to educate them on company culture, rules, and other important elements of your company.
The automated onboarding workflow will be more seamless than any manual version could provide. It provides a consistent onboarding model that will remain consistent for all employees.
Benefits of Automated Employee Onboarding
As a small business owner, you’re always looking for ways to improve the way your business runs – taking advantage of automated employee onboarding can provide this in a great many ways.
Helps Reduce Risk and Lessen Mistakes
Why consider an onboarding automation program like WorkMonger? It’s a great way to lessen your overall risk burden at work.
Much of the onboarding process requires your team to take on highly repetitive and dull tasks.
It’s far too easy when doing this kind of work to let the mind drift and make an innocent but potentially damaging mistake. Studies have shown that repetitive work can lead to poor performance.
Steps can be skipped, new hires are confused, or communication between departments can falter.
When you set up an automated onboarding system, you don’t have to spend too much time worrying about what could go wrong – it will all run as it should be based on your needs and desires.
Better Communication Between Teams
Putting your onboarding process onto a centralized system allows your entire team to check in on the onboarding process. Every stakeholder in the situation can retain full visibility when it comes to new employees.
This can help each of the various departments of your business run with more efficiency, allowing them to see certain needs or opportunities coming down the pipeline.
It will also benefit communication between departments, allowing everyone to be on the same page at all times when it comes to new hires.
Improved Efficiency and Consistency
As we already mentioned, the work required to perform regular onboarding can be expensive and time-consuming.
Your HR team can get overwhelmed when trying to handle onboarding work manually. The process can slow down the proper integration of new talent.
Allowing for automated onboarding in your workflow can help free up time and money. This will create a much more efficient workflow for your company. Your HR team can use this freed-up time to better focus on tasks that may need their attention.
You’ll also be able to free up more of your own time and focus in on the kind of work that could actually benefit your new hires the most (as opposed to all the needless paperwork).
Having a standardized, consistent workflow can also reduce the chance of unlikely surprises and help your team have easy expectations in place.
How Onboarding Automation Works
Automating your onboarding process is actually much more simple than it likely sounds.
All you need to do is to map out the various steps to a successful onboarding at your place of work. Identify the needs and departments involved and the points of contact where the HR department generally steps in.
Write down each of the required tasks and create a checklist. This will provide the backbone of your automated onboarding system.
Different onboarding systems will work in different ways. Running this checklist through software might vary depending on what kind of program you decide to use. But, it should be as simple as translating these needs into an easy-to-follow digital checklist.
This checklist should provide proper communication resources and documentation along the way.
Many onboarding programs are user-friendly and can walk you, through the process of creating your own workflow each step of the way.
It’s best to run through your new workflow on your own once before starting to utilize it for new hires.
Practicing the Best Business Management
If you want to be a successful business owner, you need to be on top of bettering efficiency across all of your business practices. Looking into employee onboarding automation will be an essential task if you really want to do what is best for your business.
It can lead to better work practices at your company, free up time and money, and benefit overall employee happiness. It’s well worth looking into.
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