Tips and examples
The onboarding of new employees is a task that is relevant and of immense importance for every company: From the day of acceptance to the end of the probationary period and beyond, successful employee onboarding should create satisfaction, ensure the professional familiarisation, but of course also welcome and socially integrate the new team member. The influence of successful employee onboarding should not be underestimated: After all, once a qualified person has been successfully hired, it is very painful to receive a dismissal within the probationary period or the first year.
Employee onboarding should fulfil a whole range of functions: From a matter-of-fact point of view, all relevant documents, such as the contract, master data, supplementary agreements or certificates, including signatures, must be exchanged. But in this phase there is also the opportunity to welcome the new team member. Regular contact before the first day of work can help to ease nervousness. However, many companies do not have a truly standardised process for employee onboarding until the first day of work. But it doesn't have to be that way!
Because especially but not only the administrative part of onboarding new employees can benefit from automation. That's right, automation. In this blog post, we will show you exactly how using a fictitious employee journey. But first we explain what we mean when we talk about automating employee onboarding.
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The ideal case is that newly recruited employees get a positive image of your company and the team right from the start. But this is no coincidence or purely a matter of sympathy. Most of the time, the phase before the working day is marked by administration: Obtaining information, maintaining data, preparing contracts, exchanging certificates, and so on. But what is absolutely necessary is actually just that: a necessary evil. A great contract alone is not necessarily enough to get the new team member in the mood for the company.
Nevertheless, it is precisely this administrative part that can be automated, as it is highly standardised and recurring. If this succeeds, you can focus less on creating the necessary documents and more on welcoming the new team member in a friendly manner. In addition, you can...
save administration
Retain employees
Communicate corporate values
Have important documents at hand
Realise an optimal induction
Shaping employee satisfaction from the start
Relieve your personnel department
If you automate your employee onboarding, you reduce the amount of paperwork and formalities to a minimum and can focus on professional and social induction from the very beginning. (Speaking of which: what is the difference between digitalisation and automation?)
The line of automation of your employee onboarding is closely linked to the goals of employee onboarding itself:
Inform new employees
Provide all important documents digitally and signed in a timely manner, without forgetting anything.
Create consistently high quality
Through a standardized and automated onboarding process, the familiarization succeeds every time anew.
Voice employees to the company
Onboarding is the first process new team members go through after applying. Make sure they are convinced.
But enough preliminaries, how could the whole thing look realistically? We have sketched out an automated employee journey that can be easily implemented in this or a similar way.
From recruitment to the first day of work:
Setting
Congratulations! The new team member has been successfully hired and accepted for the position. Time to start your automated employee onboarding. With one click in your database, you start the process and the team member receives an email asking them to fill out the HR questionnaire.
obtain information
The team member fills out the personnel questionnaire via a form. All information is securely transferred to the database and your HR tool. The responsible person receives a notification and selects which documents are sent via a checkbox.
Send documents
The contract template is automatically and correctly created from a number of templates. Other documents, such as supplementary agreements or exemption requests, can also be selected. These are sent to the team member with an accompanying email.
Obtain signatures
At the same time, the documents can be digitally signed by you and the new team member. Or changes can be made again, completely individually.
Provision
The signed papers are made available to all relevant stakeholders: HR, payroll, external tax advisors and of course the team member himself. In addition, the documents are filed in the storage location where they belong. All automatically.
Familiarisation
The perfect induction starts even before the first day of work: you keep the new team member in the loop via automated emails and e-learning: What are the next steps, what will the first working day look like, what can the person expect. In this way, new staff start their new job directly with satisfaction.
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The example shows that automating employee onboarding means connecting processes. With just a few clicks, important documents are created, information is requested and signatures are obtained. So connect your onboarding with all relevant channels, such as website and emails, keep new employees in the loop, inform them about further steps, collect all information and then make it available to the relevant people, such as HR, tax advisor and employee.
By automating onboarding, you not only ensure that no important documents are forgotten or lost, but also save time for administration that you can use much better elsewhere: successful professional and social induction. In this way, automated onboarding supports you in gaining satisfied employees.
Whether Wordpress, Webflow or another CMS: Your website is probably the first touchpoint for many applicants. That's why it's important to integrate it into the entire onboarding process via forms.
Emails via Outlook or Gmail are the primary communication channel for documents and information. Your new team member not only automatically receives all documents by email, but also regular updates until the first day of work. Almost any email software can be used for this purpose.
Of course, the information must also be stored somewhere. That's why a database, such as Airtable, is essential. This way you ensure that all data is available in a secure and flexible way.
Alternatively or in addition, you may already be using software that supports your HR in many administrative processes, such as Personio. Of course, this application can also be integrated into the automation so that all data is available without errors and in the right place.
Contract creation is probably the most individual step in the course of onboarding. But automation can also help here: Using templates and text passages, you can automatically create digital and signature-ready contracts according to your requirements. All you have to do is tick a few boxes and the employment contract is automatically created according to your wishes. In addition, new employees only receive the documents they need via further individual queries.
Signing the contract - the moment of truth. Using tools for digital signatures, the contract and other relevant documents can be made available to employees and HR managers quickly and in a legally secure manner. In this way, contracts can be concluded regardless of time and place.
In addition to all the paperwork, the training and induction of your new employees is also of great importance. In order to impart important knowledge right from the start, an e-learning platform such as Learndash can be integrated. This way, professional onboarding is also taken into account.
The above examples show that many documents are important, but secondary to the actual goal of onboarding: Engage the new employees from the beginning. Gain more time for onboarding instead of chasing documents by automating the onboarding of new employees.
In this way, you create an optimised and reliable employee journey, the aim of which is to bind your long-sought personnel to the company right from the start. We are happy to support you in uncovering potential, highlighting opportunities and implementing automation.
Cloud Integration, iPaaS, SaaS, BPA… Ough, hard to keep track of all these terms. They are currently used frequently (and increasingly) in the context of automation, and it is sometimes difficult to make a clear distinction and distinction. We have already written blog posts on the terms iPaaS, SaaS and BPA, but we’ll take them up again here to make the difference.
But let’s start with cloud integration, because that’s the central umbrella term in which we embed all the other technologies in this blog post.
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Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
To illustrate these advantages, an example is suitable that we know well from our everyday work as an automation agency:
The central data to be used here is the data of a major customer. This can be the simplest information, such as the address. This address is required in numerous but completely different processes in the company: on the one hand, for correct invoicing in accounting. On the other hand, in the CRM system, where all the data of the large customer is also stored. But the address is also important in sales, for example, when employees go to the sales meeting on site.
Now the customer announces that the address of the company has changed after a move. This information will reach you by e-mail. There are now two options:
01. The e-mail is forwarded to all affected departments, accounting, sales, customer service, marketing… All persons open their corresponding program, CRM, accounting software, marketing tools (such as newsletter marketing) and change the data already stored there of the customer. This means that in multiple applications, different people do exactly the same thing: change one address.
02. But there is also an alternative: By connecting your applications, thus by integrizing them, the customer’s e-mail, or rather the information it contains about the address change, is automatically passed on to all affected applications: CRM, accounting, marketing, ERP. This does not require any clicks, because the cloud integration detects a trigger, i.e. address change, and thus automatically starts the process.
What sounds unimpressive in a single process becomes more effective when such a process occurs several times a day or weekly. Because there is a lot of data that is available in different applications and should always be correct. If these applications are cloud applications they are suitable for cloud integration.
But cloud integration doesn’t just happen. There are now a variety of applications that enable and implement this. Such tools usually allow us to link the relevant cloud applications on a central platform and define clear rules on when, how, where, how much data should be passed on and what happens to them.
To realize cloud integration, there are various applications and technologies that are sometimes used interchangeably.
We have made a first distinction between iPaaS and BPA here.
We explain the term SaaS in more detail here.
Cloud integration is rather an umbrella term that includes numerous technologies, such as SaaS, iPaaS and BPA, and this is also absolutely necessary. Cloud integration is a concept that is made possible by appropriate technologies.
However, all terms share the commonality that they are cloud-based and thus offer enormous potential for growth and scaling. In addition, they are often cheaper to implement and maintain because changed requirements are easy to implement.
As an independent automation agency, we implement cloud integration according to your requirements. We use a variety of SaaS tools and iPaas (strictly speaking BPA) software. Together we find individual solutions that are flexible and scalable.
