The average millennial stays at a job for 6-12 months, 10-20 times shorter than Baby Boomers and Gen Xers did. Considering that millennials make up some 75% of the workforce, it’s important to understand what millennials want from work and what they expect from their employers. Some 55% of millennials don’t feel fully engaged at work, and perhaps as a result, around 60% say they’re open to a better job opportunity, should one present itself.

While many businesses invest in modern office spaces and offer attractive perks like in-house baristas, free-beer Fridays and unlimited paid time off, they often neglect the internal processes that really shape company culture and impact employee turnover. Onboarding is one of these processes.

For most people, starting a new job is an exciting time. In the course of their research and the interview process, they’ve been won over by the company’s messaging and purpose, and most new hires start out eager to find their feet and prove their worth and integrate into the team as quickly as possible. Instead, they often spend their first days at a new job isolated and mired in paperwork. 

In this digital age, onboarding should be about more than getting a bunch of forms filled out. When done strategically, digital employee onboarding can be a valuable tool to instill loyalty in new employees by making them feel valued and engaged from the word go. By digitizing as much of the traditional employee onboarding process as possible and embracing onboarding prior to their start date, you create the opportunity to focus on human engagement during your new hire’s first days instead.

Onboarding and the Digital Workplace

Much of today’s onboarding is sorely outdated and remains overwhelmingly analog, in spite of the fact that many workplaces are digital-first, distributed or even fully remote. Given the ease with which businesses manage to onboard customers digitally, it’s somewhat surprising that many “modern” organizations still struggle to implement smart, automated onboarding processes that put their employees first. Archaic examples of onboarding processes not only undermine top talent’s expectations but reflect poorly on an organization’s culture.

Current Onboarding Is Broken

Most companies take a fairly passive approach to onboarding, prioritizing tasks like completing the paperwork necessary for compliance and admin tasks such as IT setup.  

The information overload of starting a new job can be overwhelming. Here are just a few of the things new hires need to get up to speed on:

• Names and roles of team members
• Company policies 
• Company benefits information
• Workflows and processes
• Tech stack and work tools
• Their specific role and responsibilities
• Training
• Intra-office power dynamics

New hires are bombarded with so much information in the first week, it’s almost impossible for them to remember all of it. 

Good onboarding familiarizes the new hire with the company’s mission and vision, instilling company values and culture. Perhaps more importantly, but sadly often overlooked, onboarding should help the new hire to fully understand their role and where they fit into the bigger picture, as well as set clear objectives and explain how and when success will be measured. 

All too often, new hires are not given sufficient guidance and are largely left to their own devices. When nobody checks in to see whether they’re doing good work or need assistance, they can feel unsupported and unrecognized. Not only that, it can be difficult for them – and you – to know whether or not they’re meeting your expectations. 

Bad Onboarding = High Turnover

Research has shown that employees are far more likely to leave a company if they had a bad onboarding experience. After you spent so much time and money finding and wooing your new hires, it would be a terrible waste to let them feel like you don’t care about their wellbeing and performance, especially since this situation is so easy to avoid with some basic planning and HR automation.

Onboarding is only the beginning. Employees should always feel that they have the opportunity to learn and grow to advance their careers. If they can’t do it at your company, they’ll leave to do it somewhere else.

Imagine your new hire going home at the end of their first day at your company. What story will they tell their loved ones about how their first day went? Give them a first day worth remembering.

It’s time to give onboarding an upgrade.

Bad Onboarding:  An Example

Imagine that you’re a newly recruited faculty member joining a prestigious higher education institute or college. You’re excited to start teaching and do interesting research. However, on your first day, the receptionist doesn’t seem to know who you are. 

The head of department isn’t on hand to welcome you – it seems there was a scheduling mix up and everyone thought you were starting next week. Your office isn’t ready, so the receptionist parks you in the staff room with a pile of documents to complete and a stack of departmental handbooks to read while she scrambles to get everything organized. 

You start reading and it’s immediately evident that the materials are outdated. You spend most of your first day by yourself, doing paperwork and noting down questions, hoping you’ll have the opportunity to ask someone about them, but you’re unsure who to ask which questions. 

Around 16h00, your reading is interrupted by a staff meeting you weren’t told about, and you awkwardly introduce yourself to your new colleagues. You sit through the meeting and desperately try to follow what’s going on,  but it’s difficult because you don’t know who’s who. 

You wonder whether this is the right moment to ask those questions you have about the curriculum and the recently implemented elearning component, but decide to ask the receptionist who you should approach to set a meeting about that. 

After the meeting, everyone leaves as quickly as possible and you find yourself heading home, hoping that tomorrow will be better. 

Better Onboarding

At 83% of the best-performing companies, onboarding begins before the new hire’s first day. This way, instead of the new employee being met by a pile of paperwork on their first day, they’re sent all the forms they need to complete in advance and they can sign these documents using a digital signature. 

They can even be granted access to an employee portal, where they might find personalized onboarding content waiting, such as their orientation plan, employee handbook, and a note from their manager. 

Other useful content could include information such as an employee directory, an introduction to their mentor, an invitation to a welcoming lunch, and useful tips about the office location (where to park, good places to grab lunch, etc.).

Before you begin, make sure that you have answers to the following questions for each new hire:

• When does onboarding begin?
• How long will it continue?
• Which steps will be present in all employee onboarding, and which steps will be tailored depending on their department and role?
• What does the new hire need to know?
• Who will be responsible for which parts of the onboarding?
• Who can they ask questions about what? 
• What goals do you want to set for/with them?
• How will you measure onboarding success?
• At which points will you check in with the new hire to see how they’re adjusting, review their performance and align their goals?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can start designing a more effective onboarding process that focuses on promoting employee success and fostering company loyalty instead of putting all the emphasis on compliance.

Tips for Effective Onboarding Processes

Hit the Ground Running 

Decrease new hires’ time to productivity through more efficient processes. Early onboarding removes the admin burden and allows the new hire to engage more fully with activities that integrate them into the culture and the actual work. 

Ensure timely completion of forms and facilitate digital signing. You can easily send all the necessary documents prior to a new hire’s starting date and send automated reminders to ensure that their documents are completed before they start. 

Make it Personal

Instead of isolating your new hire with a stack of paperwork in their first days, design engagement activities to help get them up to speed. 

Make It Digital

Digital content such as onboarding videos, quizzes, and other interactive activities can be immensely useful for onboarding and allows your new hire to get started before their first day. You could include a dashboard that tracks all the tasks to be completed, including forms like W-4, I-9, employee information, contract, non-compete form, non-disclosure agreements, payroll, benefits, 90-day goal sheets, etc.

Facilitate Integration

Make it easier for new employees to discover company culture and socialize with coworkers by getting them set up on company communication tools as soon as possible. 

Show Care

Make new hires feel welcome through small thoughtful gestures such as welcoming them with a small gift such as flowers or a company sweatshirt – and don’t forget to celebrate milestones such as work anniversaries. 

Manage Change

Be sure to talk to the rest of the team about your hiring decisions. Keep the existing team informed about the new role, responsibilities, and hierarchies to prevent resentment, particularly with regard to team members with closely related work.

Automate It

When onboarding processes are overly reliant on human intervention, it’s easy for steps to get forgotten. Whether it’s a missing document or a skipped training module, mistakes in the onboarding process can have serious repercussions.

Designing a Digitally-Driven Onboarding Process

In our increasingly digital world, people have come to expect seamless digital experiences that simplify their lives. Onboarding should be no different. With the technology available to allow us to automate entire workflows for greater efficiency, it’s surprising that this is still such an analog process for so many companies.

1. Do Your Research

Audit your existing new hire onboarding practices to identify areas where you can improve the onboarding process. Speak to recent hires about their onboarding experience to find out what worked as well as where the gaps were.

2. Make a Plan

Now that you have a better idea of the current state of your onboarding processes, decide what you would like your onboarding process to achieve, and what needs to happen for it to get there. 

3. Map Your Processes 

Make a list of all of the steps involved in onboarding new hires. First focus on the standard onboarding that all new hires receive (HR and IT setup, furniture and supplies provisioning, company culture, security enrolment, etc.), before making additional lists for each role (role-specific training, meetings, etc.). 

Next, identify which of these steps can be completed prior to the new hire’s first day, and create a schedule for the other steps. Try to stagger training in a manageable flow and plan in activities to break it up a bit. Your new employee will retain much more information if they’re not overwhelmed. 

Next, create a flow diagram using all of these steps, including all of the tasks that need to be completed prior to the employee’s arrival. 

4. Automate Your Onboarding Workflows

Once you have a flow diagram that maps out every step involved, you can automate much of the admin involved in onboarding, to create a standard, consistent onboarding process that runs like clockwork. Set up automated reminders for each step in the process to ensure that no step is left out.

Using intuitive, visual HR workflow software like frevvo’s, you can set up automated notifications to ensure that steps are completed in a timely manner. But most importantly, you design your own forms with its no-code dynamic form builder and automatically route forms and tasks to the next person as the previous task is completed, ensuring a smooth and efficient process. 

You can also set up rules that allow you to make certain steps conditional on the completion of others, or create conditions under which the workflow changes to include different steps (specific documents, training modules, lunch with a specific team member, introductory meetings, etc.) according to the individual’s department or role.

Try frevvo’s employee onboarding software free for 30 days to see how easy it can be to create an onboarding process fit for the digital age.

The post Employee Onboarding in the Digital Workplace appeared first on frevvo Blog.

Drowning in paperwork, files, email threads, and other rote, repetitive, manual tasks has kept HR teams from performing at their best. 

Consider your typical onboarding process: You hire a new recruit. Many forms and days later, you’re finally ready to invite the new recruit to work in-house. That is, once you double- and triple-check your forms for errors, re-route the paperwork back to the new hire to fix the errors, route the form to all stakeholders and wait for signatures, and follow up to keep things moving along. 

Add to this employee vacation requests, expense claims, performance management and more, and keeping HR running smoothly can feel chaotic, if not impossible.

This situation is especially problematic if you’re focusing on business growth. Sustaining growth means improving the productivity of the HR team so they can focus on what’s important – talent.

So what is the solution?

Generic HR software requires an overhaul of your department to fit the demands of the software, and custom programming is, well, just plain expensive and time-consuming. 

Thankfully, there is another solution—and it’s cost-effective and relatively simple to implement. Enter HR automation.

In this post, we’ll cover:

• The Benefits of Automating HR
• Real-World Examples of HR Automation in Action
• How to Automate an HR Process, Step by Step: Employee Onboarding

The Benefits of Automating HR

Today, HR departments must modernize in order to stay competitive. A 2015 survey by Deloitte revealed that 80% of respondents believed their company’s lack of HR skills was a significant issue. As a result, organizations are increasingly redirecting resources to improve their HR department.

They’ve realized that a key aspect of modernization is automation. The HR department has many rote, repetitive, and/or manual administrative processes ripe for automation.

HR automation increases productivity because it reduces the time and resources required to complete typical workflows. Your workflows and forms are automated and live in the cloud, so anyone can search for them, retrieve and edit at any time without needing to go on a company-wide scavenger hunt.

Put Your Focus Back on What Matters—The People

The sad reality is that, on average, HR employees spend 40% of their time on administrative work, either entering data from one system to another or on other tasks. This is time they could otherwise spend attracting and retaining talent. 

HR automation also fosters a fair recruitment process by eliminating unintentional bias. Automation lets companies focus more on candidates’ qualifications instead of other physical traits that may unintentionally lead to human bias.

It’s not uncommon for new hires to lose a little “fire” for their new position as they drown in paper forms and emails. By standardizing and automating your onboarding workflow, new hires won’t get so overwhelmed with the process. When you automate HR, you help your organization empower your new hires by fast-tracking their journey to starting their new positions. 

Complex Tasks Become Easy

Complexity is the enemy to HR, especially if your company operates in more than one location. Standardizing your HR processes reduces complexity and accelerates and streamlines process completion.

For example, when you onboard new employees, automation reduces the steps to complete the process since employees fill out the forms digitally. In addition, repetitive fields (name, address) can be automatically synced across multiple documents, reducing the likelihood of errors.

Software also helps decrease the number of errors made, and standardizes processes such that every employee gets the same experience. Using modern technology draws customers and new employees to your company, and helps employees stay on top of any tasks they need to complete.

Understand the WHY (Analytics and Reporting)

If you operate your business in multiple locations yet one location operates with lower process costs than yours, how can you measure what’s working and what isn’t—and why? With manual processes, this is hardly reliable as it requires making assumptions and relying on guess work, instead of looking at real data.

With a cloud-based HR workflow automation solution, analytics and metrics are easy to track—and they’re reliable. View which processes are working and which ones need improvement—and understand exactly WHY they are performing the way they are. 

For higher ups, they are able to pull up data quickly, making it much easier to read reports and analyses efficiently. 

Improved Communication and Collaboration

Tired of chasing down co-workers to ensure the right information gets to the right people? Say goodbye to multiple email and in-person follow-ups. Cloud-based automated HR solutions end the document-chasing game and allow you to set up automatic reminders and messages with any workflow to notify all parties of pertinent due dates—and ensure they comply. 

Speed Up the Recruitment Process

You may relate to the sinking feeling you get when wading through a pile of 100 resumes from candidates who applied to an open position. How do you streamline this process and whittle down the candidates without the typical stress? 

HR automation can help you with the recruitment process by comparing job application data and providing a shortlist of candidates based on the hiring criteria you set up. Use automation to replace your initial review or eliminate some of the burden of the process.

No Tech Superstars Required

Modern HR automation solutions are not difficult to set up. They don’t require expensive programmers, long setup campaigns or the assistance of your IT department. 

The best automated solutions have pre-built templates and easy drag-and-drop interfaces that cater to the non-techie. Setup is fast and easy (no coding required).  

Automation also enhances security. When onboarding and offboarding employees, you are handling sensitive data. Automated HR solutions keep your data secure in its database and only accessible by the parties you permit to view it. 

6 Real-World HR Automation Examples in Action

Let’s take a look at a few real-world HR automation examples in action.

1. Recruiting

Your recruiting process must be one of the most efficient processes in the company, as talent is the most important determinant of success in the 21st century. Attracting and retaining fresh, world-class talent has become a critical aspect of the company’s future. 

According to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, more than one in three working Americans are millennials; more than any other generation in the labor force. By 2030, an estimated 75% of the workforce will be millennial talent, which means your company needs to start engaging with them now. A streamlined recruitment process attracts millennial talent, and they are inclined to stay at technologically advanced companies. 

You can never have too many talented applicants; the more the better. Digital recruitment software increases your pool of applicants so you can quickly find the absolute best candidate for the position. 

Automated recruitment processes keep relevant materials organized and readily available for the next time they’re needed. Increase your company’s reach and access to even more top-notch talent, standardize the process, and make sure all applicants have the same, high-quality experience. 

2. Employee Onboarding

Once hired, employee onboarding is a very important HR process. The process is far from simple — it requires lots of communication and information passing, and multiple departments must coordinate and crossover. Manual onboarding processes quickly become tedious and error-prone, even just based on the number of employees trying to work on the same thing. Accurate and consistent communication is key.

Instead of relying on slow methods of communication, employee onboarding automation software can improve the onboarding process and help you follow new hire orientation best practices, such that every new hire gets the same welcoming experience.

Software can send important documents to everyone easily, notify employees what tasks need to be completed and when, and set aside space in the office for the new employee if need be. Automation technology helps keep all the pieces organized and easily accessible to all relevant employees.

3. Data Analysis and Risk Management

Digital software makes it very easy to analyze and compare different data. This is an important HR function that is becoming more and more significant as companies switch to automation technology.

Software helps HR representatives with risk management, digital data associated with risk factors is easy to analyze. With this software, employees can compare different courses of action and map out potential outcomes. This makes finding a solution much faster. Employers are also able to analyze employee data — for example, how likely a high-performing employee is to stay or leave the company. 

Especially in larger companies, there is a surprising amount of data that HR processes, creates, and collects, and automation software helps sort through loads of data. This way, employees can focus on tangible data analysis instead of spending time sifting through dozens of documents to find the right information.

4. Employee Offboarding

The offboarding process in any company is usually complex since there are so many moving parts. When off-boarding, the organization must revoke the employee’s account credentials, collect their ID badge, conduct an exit interview, and more. This involves multiple departments within the company that must work together.

Manually offboarding employees often evokes lots of emotion, both from the employee and colleagues. Digitization makes this process much easier for everyone. When emotions run high, people skip steps and rush processes to get things done quickly. Especially when multiple departments are involved in the same process, small miscommunication can cause huge mistakes that are costly and very difficult to fix later.

Instead, your company can avoid these situations before they even happen. Make sure the right information goes to the right people and that everything is organized and clear. Implement automation software for your employee offboarding process and you minimize the risk of error. A stressful process becomes much easier for everyone involved.

5. Employee Training

Over time, as more HR departments switch to automation technology, the use of simulators and electronic instruction will increase.

As of now, some companies still use outdated training processes that aren’t as efficient as they should be. Instead of finding time to “fit training in” when schedules overlap, digital technology like apps, portals, and webinars allow employees to train at their own pace. The employee can complete their in-depth online training and make sure they understand everything before moving on, preventing confusion and future mistakes.

Using automation technology for employee training is also an easy way to get detailed feedback on the process, so that it’s constantly improving.

6. Employee Benefits Management

Benefits, especially setting up retirement plans, are much easier using automation software. It can do a variety of things, but mostly, it helps provide different options and alternatives, helps the employee compare each one and decide which path to take. You can design and use the software such that it takes specific things into account when putting together a retirement plan, customizing it to fit an individual’s needs. 

Using automation software for retirement plans frees up valuable employee time, so they focus on what’s important — customers. Instead of repeatedly offering the same retirement plans and packages, software will help your company realize which plans are the most popular, least popular, and how they measure up to each other. Once this data is available, companies can improve and change their packages to help each employee.  

Other common examples are time off requests, absence records, performance appraisals, timesheets, etc.

How to Automate an HR Process, Step by Step: Employee Onboarding 

We’ll walk through a simple 4-step process to set up general W-4 and I-9 forms for the new hire to fill out and submit to HR for approval.

1. Select a Form Template or Create your Own

frevvo’s many HR process and form templates make it easy to get started, since most of the HR automation tasks outlined in this article can be created by modifying one of our pre-built templates. 

Alternatively, you can easily create new forms from scratch using frevvo’s drag-and-drop form designer.

Since we’re creating onboarding forms, we will start with a template:

Just customize your forms to accommodate your unique business process requirements. There’s no coding required.

You can automate your forms to behave dynamically — showing certain form fields only to certain users, performing custom calculations, or auto-filling fields like the date.

Once you’ve created your templated forms, you can simply send copies electronically to all new hires. 

2. Create Automatic Notification and Approval Workflows

Use workflows when you need to route your forms to several departments for notifications and get approvals (including electronic signatures).

We’ll illustrate a simple onboarding workflow below, but you can quickly customize one with more departments and approvals according to your specific needs.

In our example, the form gets sent to a new employee for completion. 

Once your new hire fills out the form, frevvo will inform them of any potential errors or required fields left blank. (This eliminates a time-consuming back and forth between HR and the new hire.)

Once the employee digitally signs the document in frevvo, the form gets automatically routed to finance and then to the IT department for approval and provisioning of equipment.

You can set follow-up reminders for anyone involved in the process and review the status of a workflow at any time.

Using the visual workflow designer, you can also create custom business logic — without any coding. You’re in full control over which employee documents get routed to which departments. You can create workflows for each department, different hiring managers, or various levels within the company. 

3. Automatically Generate Official PDF Documents

Every onboarding process needs to generate official PDF documents like federal and state W-4s and the federal I-9. With frevvo, it’s easy.

New hires provide each unique piece of information (name, address, SSN, etc.) just once and sign once. frevvo can map the form data–including signatures–to multiple PDFs to quickly generate accurate, official W-4 and I-9 forms.

PDF mapping in frevvo is 100% visual. Simply drag and drop fields from the workflow into the PDF and frevvo does the rest.

If, for instance, your business operates in two states, you add conditional business logic in frevvo to generate the appropriate state W-4 based on the employee’s form inputs.

4. Test and Deploy Your Workflow

Test your forms to review the experience the user will have when filling out the form and double check your business rules.

After creating and testing the form, you’ll be ready to publish the form and use it as part of your onboarding workflow for all new employees. 

Now, each time you hire someone, you’ll be able to focus on the most important parts of onboarding–training, team building, and team integration–rather than spending your time and energy chasing down countless forms and documents.

Before hire additional help for your HR admin tasks, consider automating your HR processes and workflows. With frevvo’s visual, easy-to-use interface, step-by-step instructions, and world-class support, you could be on your way to a leaner, meaner HR department within a few days.

The post 6 Real-World HR Automation Examples in Action appeared first on frevvo Blog.

Yet, too many HR departments are swamped with paperwork, taking away valuable time that could be focused on employees. In fact, on average HR employees spend 40% of their time on administrative work, either entering data from one system to another or on other tasks.

How can we solve this problem and make better use of company time? The answer is automation. Simple automation can save hours of time for every employee, and help your company compete better in the modern business world.

How Do You Know It’s Time to Automate?

If you’re not sure your company needs automation yet, simply talk to your employees — they’ll tell you exactly what you need to know. In addition, listen to how employees talk amongst each other. If you start hearing these 5 things around the office, now is the time to automate.

“I had too much to do!”

Employees that miss deadlines because they were “too busy” try to rectify the situation by cutting corners on projects to catch up. To make matters worse, once they figure out a solution, they still need approval from higher ups before moving forward. Different processes need different authorizations from different departments, and an employee who doesn’t understand the exact steps will get confused.

That’s time wasted on paperwork instead of time spent on customers. Employees will naturally put off things that are confusing to focus on items they can complete easily.

“My manager wasn’t available!”

Employees in technology laggard companies can’t possibly make their deadlines simply because their “manager was away.” What happens when an employee needs manager approval to meet a deadline, but the manager is traveling that week? She has to wait for her to return and only then can she move forward with her project.

Today, we have smartphones that can access the internet from almost anywhere in the world. Why wouldn’t you make it such that the manager can sign and approve from anywhere?

“It must have gotten lost in my inbox!”

Like everyone, HR representatives already have hundreds of emails to look over every day. Obviously, they can’t be checking their email every minute of the day otherwise they wouldn’t be doing anything else. So, if an employee sends an important email at the wrong time, it’ll get buried under dozens of emails by the time that HR representative gets back around to their inbox. When they see that an email needed urgent approval 3 hours ago, there’s not much they can do.

Using email is great for some HR functions, but it’s an inefficient way to communicate more complex processes. Inbox flooding isn’t intuitive and only stresses employees out. In a world of mobile access and notifications, HR departments must implement easy-to-use software that can complete simple tasks, like approval, in minutes.

“I thought I did that already!”

We’ve all been there. How many times have you filled out multiple forms that ask for the same information over and over? When done on paper, employees waste a lot of time when they have to fill out repetitive information on each individual form in order to submit.

For example, in the onboarding process, employees must fill out their name, address, employee ID number, etc. on almost every form. A purchase requisition might require part numbers that are available in a SQL database – there’s no reason for employees to type them in manually.

We interact with software like this daily, but we take this technology for granted in our lives. Your company can avoid repetitive paperwork and save lots of time by using autofill software.

“Where’s my approval?”

Employees who can’t track their own request get nervous about the progress it’s making. “Has my request been authorized yet?” “Where’s my manager?” “What about the VP, are they approving it?” are questions they’ll repeatedly ask until they know their request has been completed and returned to them.

These constant questions increase stress in employees, and cause project delays until that one approval is back in hand.

This is a totally inefficient way to use work time. When employees spend time chasing down managers and paperwork, that’s time wasted. A simple software solution will prevent time wasting and greatly reduce stress in employees, as they’ll be able to track their requests electronically in seconds. 

Why Automate?

In today’s business climate, automation is more necessary than ever. Simple automation can help reduce costs, streamline and ease several business processes, and increase teamwork. In fact, a study by Unit 4 found that worldwide, office workers spend 69 days a year on administrative tasks, costing companies about $5 trillion on the global scale. These numbers can drastically decrease with the use of automation software.

Company CEOs are not immune to this either. They spend almost 20% of their time doing work that could be automated, like reporting on and reviewing data. Automation software can make this job much easier, greatly reducing the amount of time spent on data analysis.

It’s hard to automate 100% of jobs. However, according to analysis done by McKinsey Digital, approximately 60% of all occupations could automate 30% or more of activities and save a huge amount of time.

Clearly, businesses can gain significant advantages through automation in all areas. Let’s take a look at a few HR activities that could benefit.

7 HR Processes to Automate Today

The right software can automate numerous tasks that a typical HR department handles. Take into account your company’s specific needs before choosing an automation platform. Here are 7 of the most time consuming HR processes that can easily be automated:

1. Employee Onboarding

Employee onboarding is one of HR’s most common and important processes. It may seem simple, but it actually requires multiple departments to coordinate and crossover. Paper-based onboarding processes quickly become tedious and error-prone, just based on the sheer number of employees trying to work on the same thing.

Onboarding automation software can standardize and improve the employee onboarding process, such that every new hire gets the same welcoming experience. Software can send important documents to everyone easily, notify employees what tasks need to be completed and when, and set aside space in the office for the new employee if need be. It keeps all the pieces organized and easily accessible to all relevant employees.

2. Employee Off-boarding

Much like employee onboarding, companies can also automate off-boarding to make employees’ lives easier. When off-boarding, the organization must revoke the employee’s email access, collect their ID badge and conduct an exit interview.

Since employee offboarding often comes with an emotional aspect, digitization makes it much easier for everyone. When emotions are involved, people skip steps or rush processes to get everything done quickly. This creates room for error, and offboarding mistakes are costly and difficult to fix later.

3. Personal Information

Keeping employees’ personal information accurate and safe should be a high priority for every company, but doing so manually is tedious and unnecessarily time-consuming. Instead of relying on paper, use automation software to create easy ways for employees to update their information whenever necessary. 

For example, electronic forms create a secure, growing database of employee information. They also curb the repetitive nature of the form-filling process. No one wants to write their name, address, and ID number 7 times on each individual form. When done electronically, software fills this data automatically on every form. This way, the employee only needs to focus on the new and important information on each form.

4. Timesheets

Similar to personal information records, timesheet tracking is an extremely important process for the company. But again, it’s a very tedious process when done manually or on paper. In the time it takes to fill out the timesheet, bring it to the manager, wait for a signature, and receive it back, the employee could have made progress on a different project.

An electronic timesheet process is much faster and less stressful. If you make a mistake in your timesheet, it’s very easy to go back in and correct the error. As before, managers can approve from anywhere on any device.

5. Leave Requests

Automated Leave Management Software helps your HR department by taking care of routine details like:

• who requested vacation,
• how many employees will be out of office on any given day, and
• who approved each vacation request.

Automation also catches any mistakes before you submit the form, so no employee has to chase down their manager to correct a small error. Employees can also track their own vacation balance, and see how their vacation request is progressing in real time. HR representatives can approve and sign electronically on any device.

6. Performance Reviews

Companies don’t conduct performance reviews as frequently as some of the other tasks we’ve mentioned here, but they still consume a lot of HR’s time. To avoid rushing and frustrating employees, try automating this process.

Software can create simple forms and pages where employers can input any comments and reviews they may have, and can easily pull up relevant information on the employee from previous reviews.

7. Employee/Employer Feedback 

Similar to performance reviews, employee feedback is extremely important to the company. This is a great place to start looking for ways to improve the company, and a great way to see what employees think of management.

Feedback forms are very easy to automate; employees can receive, fill out, and submit online forms in a matter of minutes. When the process is manual, employees choose to ignore the feedback survey since it’s time consuming. Employees are more likely to complete a quick, online form. That’s better for the company in the long run.

Email and Excel – How NOT to Automate

If employees are emailing Excel documents around and calling that automation, there are lots of necessary steps to take to increase efficiency. Email and Excel are two important tools, but there are times to use them, and times to stay away. These are great ways to get into the world of process automation, but certainly not the most efficient way to keep up.

As mentioned earlier, HR employees deal with floods of emails on a daily basis. Relying on email to pass information around is a surefire way to make errors. We’ve reached the point in today’s business world where email is simply not an efficient enough workflow tool or document management system. 

Excel is also a great business tool for some projects. It’s a step up from paper forms and invoices, but using Excel for things like leave requests and timesheets is inefficient and outdated.

• If an employee emails the sheet to someone outside the company by accident, there is an immediate issue with security.
• There’s no way to electronically sign and approve anything through Excel directly — it has to get printed and scanned.
• There’s no way for an Excel sheet to catch an error. This can cost a company lots of time and money in the future. In fact, one single Excel error cost JP Morgan billions of dollars. Don’t let your company be next!

Easily Automate HR Processes Using frevvo’s Modern Visual Platform

frevvo’s simple HR workflow software automates your business processes, and the software creates visually appealing forms that are incredibly easy to use. Here are some advantages of using frevvo’s intuitive software:

• No coding — no need to hire programmers and experienced coders to implement the software.
• Drag and drop design — the interface is easy to use, and any employee can create forms without extensive training.
• Automatic validation— mistakes are immediately brought to the user’s attention before the form gets submitted.
• Built-in Mobility — frevvo is supported by any device; you can build, fill-out, and approve from a computer or smartphone from anywhere in the world.
•  Notifications — Software automatically notifies team members when there are new tasks or incomplete tasks that need attention.
• Integration — frevvo can be integrated with your current workflow management system; no need for manual entry of data.
• and more …

Final Thoughts

As world-class talent becomes scarcer and more expensive, HR is rapidly becoming the most important department in your organization. In this business environment, you want HR employees to focus on talent and not on routine paperwork. Yet administrative work consumes 40% of HR professionals’ time at most companies.

Automate your everyday workflows such as on-boarding, time off requests etc. Free HR employees from tedious and repetitive tasks and let them focus on what’s important — talent. There’s no reason to rely on inefficient, outdated technologies like email or Excel to digitize these business processes when affordable, intuitive software is out there.

The post Top 7 HR Processes That Are Perfect for Automation appeared first on frevvo Blog.

1. Think from the new hire’s perspective: Move away from an entirely ad-hoc way approach to systematically documenting the process. The first day is often overwhelming for a new employee; having a documented checklist, a feature-rich resource library and online new hire forms to handle the paperwork is a great way to improve the employee on-boarding process.
2. Communicate what to expect before the start date: New hires go through a lot between accepting your job offer to their first day. Start the process early – communicate the schedule about a week before their first day. Having the necessary paperwork done in advance is a simple yet effective way to improve the overall employee on-boarding process.
3. Reduce paperwork to expedite the process: On-boarding is a multifaceted program; so swamping new hires with paperwork is counterproductive. By using tried and tested automated employee onboarding software like frevvo, you get a dynamic online form builder, can generate dynamic PDF forms and store all documents in the cloud which enhances the security, productivity, efficiency, and flexibility of the on-boarding process.
4. Arrange a Helping Hand: The first day on the new job can be lonely. Try to help new hires get rid of the nervousness and anxiety they might feel about starting at a new organization. Employ specific tactics that will keep new hires engaged during on-boarding. Giving them access to a resource library, assigning a mentor – someone from their team – and answering all their questions personally makes a big difference.
5. Make their day special: Introduce them to the team, ensure that teams take the time to welcome their new colleague , having their desk fully prepared, a personalized AV message from the CEO telling them how important they are to the organization are a few ideas that will make a difference. Giving personalized attention and letting your new hire feel at home is the best way to enhance the on-boarding experience of new hires and motivate them to be productive.

Remember, the on-boarding experience should be smooth, welcoming and productive. Using good employee onboarding solution like frevvo combined with the best practices above is a great way to improve the employee on-boarding process.

With frevvo, your organization can easily digitize new employee forms and processes in a matter of days using simple, visual, drag-and-drop software. Automation dramatically speeds up the process. It gives new employees a great first impression of the organization, improves morale, performance and helps new hires understand their goals right from the start. Check out the short demo video below on automating this process:

Hundreds of customers are benefiting. Sign up now for a free 30-day trial and give it a try for yourself.

The post Best Practices to Improve Employee on-Boarding and New Hire Orientation appeared first on frevvo Blog.