How to make the onboarding experience lean and effective for new employees thanks to an innovative tool: the Digital onboarding.
Digital onboarding: the digital transition begins with HR
In the age of technology and digital, HR is increasingly finding itself guiding the organizations towards a transition the most fluid and smooth as possible, as the leader of a new people-centred innovation model.
Digital onboarding is one of the most innovative HR tools to streamline the entry process for new hires, facilitating the procedures and speeding up the timing compared to traditional onboarding.
To get the full success of recruiting and to guarantee a valuable experience to the new employee, it is essential to clearly identify the key points of the process and make them faster, easier, more accessible and above all, people-oriented: this is the only way to successfully attract the best candidates on the job market.
Why moving from traditional to digital onboarding
Several studies have demonstrated the value of a good onboardingprocess to improve new hires’ experience and allow them to join the company in a quick and effective way. On the contrary, employees who had a negative onboarding experience are more likely to leave the company shortly after hiring, generating a turnover issue.It is therefore important that this process is optimized and designed to facilitate people, minimizingtimewaste and errors, protecting the data confidentiality and ensuring a successful procedure: traditional onboarding, carried out manually and mostly through exchanges of paper or scanned documents sent via e-mail, it can bring to a greater risk of errors and lengthening of times, not even mentioning the amount of work for recruiters to archive and manage employee data.
Digital onboarding transforms all these operations - to be carried out on paper, in person, through long e-mail flows - in a way that allows quick data access on efficient and intuitive platforms, validation of identity with certified techniques, possibility of integrating the digital signature among the official subscription methods, remote accessibility both via PC and smartphone, opportunity to store data in safe and protected clouds.
A well-known research from the Wynhurst Group states that if a hired person receives well-structured onboarding, this person will have a 58% better chance of staying with the company after 3 years from hiring. The effect on retention is undeniable. But a successful digital onboarding can also have a positive effect in terms of Corporate Image, facilitating the attraction of talents on the market and increasing the chances of retaining them within the company.
Digital onboarding: the beginning of a long journey
Thinking about the whole hr onboarding process, it is essential to imagine it as part of an Employee Experience path: this is the first phase, the one where the process started with the selection is completed and the new employee has the opportunity to become independent within the business dynamics, acquiring the knowledge and skills that will help him become an effective member of the organization. It is essential that the new employee feels welcomed, having easy access to information and feeling supported from day one.
We can say that a well-structured onboarding process has to provide for these 4 fundamental employee needs: information, training, integration and involvement. In fact, the new employee, in addition to being able to complete the hiring procedures in a lean and fast way, has to be supported to feel quickly integrated into the company dynamics, knowing where and from whom to find information, having received the necessary training in security, data management, business ethics and organization.
It may be useful to implement a checklist for new employees where to include all the fundamental information: digital tools are perfect to provide quick information, e-learning training usable from any device, sharing material and content that help the employees to develop their sense of belonging to the company in a short time.It is easy to imagine that innovative techniques and cutting-edge tools in digital onboarding can facilitate the attraction and retention of talents on the market, especially among Millennials and GenZ, who have grown up with an innate attitude to the virtual and digital world: a further example is the gamification techniques which, if applied to onboarding, can support the creation of a unique experience not only for new hires but for all the employees as well.
Discover more about Glickon, the People Experience & Analytics platform which helps companies to build a better working experience, for both candidates and employees, thanks to a data-driven approach and simple and engaging experiences.
