Onboarding can be complicated at the best of times. Yet, despite this, it’s crucial that you get it right, as onboarding helps new hires settle into their roles quicker and be productive as soon as possible. It also keeps new employees engaged, which ensures they stay at your business for longer.
Conversely, failing to onboard employees properly can be disastrous because it reduces productivity and, even worse, can increase employee turnover. In fact, about half of employees who quit in the first month of their jobs do it because of poor onboarding.
It’s imperative to make your onboarding as effective as possible. And in this post, we’ll show you how to automate employee onboarding to provide a fantastic experience!
Why You Should Automate Employee Onboarding
When you automate your employee onboarding, you’ll eliminate many manual tasks that either your HR team or the employee needs to perform. This means you’ll not only save time but you’ll also make your HR team more productive.
Automate Employee Onboarding to Simplify Paperwork
When onboarding a new employee, there is a lot of paperwork. The employee needs to provide their details on forms and complete and sign a lot of documents to provide you with all their information.
You’ll probably also provide them with all the documentation and information they need to do their jobs, like company policies, mission statements, compliance documents, SOPs for maintaining their devices, and more.
If you automate employee onboarding, you can simplify this process by gathering the employee’s data with online forms and providing them with links where they can download all the necessary information and documents.
Automated Employee Onboarding Improves Efficiency
Once the paperwork is done, you’ll need to ensure that the new employees have access to your organization’s tools through their devices, log-in details, and other authentication protocols.
While you can perform all these tasks manually, it takes time and effort.
However, when automating your onboarding processes, you can develop automated workflows that simplify the process and take your new hire through every step.
HR Automation Eliminates Human Error
Reduce the possibility of missing something. With automated employee onboarding, you’ll always record vital data, get and store the correct information from your employee through online forms, and provide them with the right documents.
This is especially important when considering compliance is a critical component of employee onboarding. You won’t fall foul of compliance laws and regulations by keeping your process error-free.
HR Automation Reduces Costs
You’ll reduce your operational costs when your onboarding process is efficient.
For one, you’ll reduce the hours your HR team needs to spend onboarding new employees. This frees up their time to focus on other, more critical aspects of supporting your team.
Apart from this, you’ll also save on the amount of paper, printing, and other office supplies your HR team typically uses when onboarding an employee. While these costs might not amount to much for a single employee, it all adds up over time, and automating your employee onboarding can bring about significant savings.
Automate Employee Onboarding to Enhance Talent Engagement
A significant problem with employee onboarding is that your HR team often takes too long to get back to the new hire. (They’re just too busy juggling the paperwork and scattered tasks.)
When you automate your onboarding, this won’t be a problem. Your HR team and managers will be able to focus on human interaction with your new employee.
As such, they’ll be able to answer their questions, give advice, and build meaningful relationships with them. Ultimately, this makes the onboarding process more engaging, which, as mentioned earlier, increases employee retention.
Get More Insights with Automation
When you automate your employee onboarding, you’ll be able to gather valuable automated feedback from your employees once they’ve completed the onboarding process.
From this feedback, you’ll understand what you’re doing well, where you should improve, and what you can do better – without your HR team needing to reach out and solicit feedback.
Since talent requires a different approach these days, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the competition and strengthen your employer brand. And all it takes is automating employee onboarding!
How to Automate Your Employee Onboarding Without Code [3+ Ideas]
Fortunately, you don’t need expensive tools to automate employee onboarding. You can do it without code.
Our onboarding automation recipe requires the following:
Google Sheets will be your central HQ and sheet.best will turn your spreadsheet into a REST API you can plug into your tech ecosystem. Once you turn your Google Sheets spreadsheet into an API (it takes 30 seconds), you can use it anywhere!
So, when automating your employee onboarding without code, you can use a no-code app builder to create an application that guides your new employee through the onboarding process while pushing and pulling data to and from the spreadsheet with sheet.best.
Create Your New Employee’s Profile
As mentioned earlier, when onboarding starts, your new hire will typically need to complete a lot of forms to provide you with all their information. Set up your app with a form that captures all this information and writes it to your spreadsheet.
You can then turn this spreadsheet into an API with sheet.best, and connect it to your HR software so that the employee’s information is entered into the system automatically.
Source: WP ERP
Deliver Onboarding Information
When you need to provide documents like company policies, operating manuals, and more, you can also do this using your spreadsheet.
Source: 360 Learning
Upload the documents to, for example, Google Drive and place the link to them in your spreadsheet. Connect it to your HR software via sheet.best and your new hire will have access to these documents through the app mentioned earlier.
Share Apps and Credentials
Like the documents mentioned above, you can also provide all your new employee’s app credentials in a spreadsheet and deliver them seamlessly to the employee through your app. Another benefit is that your employee will always have their credentials available.
However, be mindful of the potential security drawbacks. Sometimes, it’s best to use your spreadsheet to share a link to a safe password tool like 1Password.
Get and Process Feedback
Like you would gather your new hire’s information at the start of the onboarding process, you can also use a form in your application to gather feedback once the onboarding process is completed.
Once this feedback is captured in a spreadsheet, you can then turn it into an API and use it to analyze the feedback and gather insights from it.
Of course, these are just a few ideas sheet.best clients shared with us.
However, you can do anything with a versatile no-code automation tool; build a knowledge base, a CRM, or streamline your operations in general.
The world is your oyster! All you need is a spreadsheet.
And if you’re ready to try sheet.best, give it a test ride – it’s free!