How Not-To Onboard Employees
With no formal onboarding process, an organization leaves itself open to some of most common onboarding mistakes. If any of the following describe your organization, it’s time for a new strategy.- Waiting for a new hire’s first day - Onboarding should begin in the downtime before a new employee begins. This applies not only to internal preparation, but also to correspondence. It should never go radio silent after the new hire accepts an offer. Those days or weeks provide an opportunity to inform the candidate of what to expect/bring on the first day, and how to get a headstart on any paperwork or accounts.
- *Paper* forms - There’s no reason to wait for the first day, then hand a new hire a stack of forms and paperwork. Most of this can happen digitally in the lead up to an employee’s first day. This makes record-keeping easier for both sides.
- Failure to set up workspace/tools - This takes a coordinated effort from HR, IT, facilities, and any other relevant departments. What type of equipment does the new hire need in his/her workspace? Does IT and/or finance need to approve and install applications, software, or other business tools? If your organization waits for the new employee to arrive, you’re wasting valuable days just getting the employee into an environment to be productive.
- Failure to set expectations - According to the aforementioned Onboardia survey, 17.5% of employees didn’t understand performance expectations for their position after 90 days of work. Make sure expectations and company processes are very clear from the beginning.
- Failure to follow up on employee experience - This goes hand-in-hand with a common stage of ITIL best practice for service management: Continual Service Improvement (CSI). What works best about your onboarding process? Which areas are inefficient for new hires? The best way to find out is to ask them. Use surveys or post-orientation breakout sessions to collect feedback.
Successful Onboarding Through the Service Catalog
With these common pitfalls in mind, you can construct an organized, and largely automated process to make sure new employees are set up for success the minute they walk into the building. The best way to ensure accountability throughout the process is with the service catalog. With modern ITSM solutions, a licensed service provider (perhaps the Director of HR) can create a catalog item that assigns tasks and organizes workflows from every step of the onboarding process. If you’re unfamiliar with the service catalog, you can find a quick overview here. Basically, a licensed service provider builds out a workflow, creating concurrent (simultaneous) task assignments or conditional (if, then) task assignments based on the answers to sequential data inputs. “Does the new employee need a computer?” (If yes, “Is it a Mac or a PC?”) This data inputs trigger automatic notifications to IT and facilities for equipment setup, HR for paperwork and training setup, and whatever else you’d like to include in the process. A service catalog item can be very long and complex, which it might need to be for a successful onboarding process. Best of all, there’s accountability every step of the way. You’ll know exactly who you’re waiting on for that Microsoft Office license if you’re getting close to the deadline.
