A new employee roadmap can be an effective way to get your HR onboarding processes “on paper,” so that you can then review both their effectiveness and their fit to the current needs of various stakeholders within your organization.

Let’s explore how and why such a roadmap is good policy, as well as the many ways to optimize the process using thoughtful planning and cost-saving HR automations.

The importance of the employee experience

As has been greatly underscored by the current, hot job market, the success of your organization in pursuing its financial and business goals depends in large measure on how your employees view their experience(s) working for and with you.

Employees who benefit from a clear, thoughtful, and efficient new employee roadmap will contribute towards greater retention in your organization. This reduced turnover will have a net positive impact on recruiting costs.

Additionally, employees who are happier, more informed, and feel valued  – all byproducts of smart and thorough onboarding, in addition to general company policy and culture – generate increased productivity.

Taken together, these two benefits of smooth onboarding (decreased turnover and increased productivity) help improve workplace culture.

So, let’s explore how to ensure that you’re doing everything you can with your new employee roadmap to optimize for such benefits and improvements.

How to improve your new employee roadmap

Remember that metaphorical “piece of paper” we start with, that outlines your current onboarding process?

Hopefully, it’s digital by now. But a more important question is whether you’re taking full advantage of all the opportunities to develop the best roadmap for your new employees.

1. Sync related processes

In a word, we recommend client’s “sync” related and overlapping HR processes with smart automations. This commonly manifests as a streamlined system that identifies and removes redundancies – or introduces new efficiencies – into your recruiting, preboarding, and onboarding cycle.

The main benefit of this approach becomes immediately apparent once implemented: a seamless experience, visible end-to-end, of the entire initial employee experience. In addition to cost-savings and the good impression it makes on new hires, HR leadership is able in this way to identify areas of future improvement within your evolving new employee roadmap.

2. Develop a standardized provisioning checklist

Imagine you’re a new employee. It’s your first day. You have everything you need to hit the ground running. Sounds perfect, right?

Except this is still a rare scenario, in too many organizations.

With the right groundwork, and smart automations, your HR department can stand out in this key area to new employee onboarding.

Here are some examples of what can be included in a standardized provisioning checklist:

• Computer
• Office supplies
• IT accounts
• VPN access
• Other equipment
• Facility access
• Parking pass
• Welcome package

Standardization doesn’t mean inflexible. With solutions like those offered by BP Logix, provisioning can be customized to your organizational needs, no matter the industry or administrative structure.

With everything listed in one place, HR leadership can enable management and departmental leadership to automate as much provisioning fulfillment as possible, leaving more time for important tasks like job fulfilment and company growth.

3. Engage with new hires before their first day

While a relatively simple and straightforward recommendation, pre-engagement merits a special mention when it comes to your new employee roadmap.

After the offer and acceptance, and before the official start date of your new hire, consider systematically equipping your new colleagues with the option of getting a head start. It helps both parties to clear some paperwork before engaging in the exciting but potentially overwhelming task of getting started in a new role.

Engaging with new hires before their official start can help smooth out the earliest days of a new business relationship, to the benefit of everyone.

4. Digitize new hire paperwork

Not every organization has digitized their new hire paperwork yet. Often, this is just something that’s gotten kicked down the road. That’s okay. But revisiting or rebooting your new employee roadmap should start with digitization.

As in – everything. There’s no need to fill in any gaps with paper forms, anymore.

Digitization makes everyone happier. Critical for remote-first and/or hybrid workplaces, but arguably just as or more important for physical office spaces, digitization reduces clutter (and your carbon footprint), speeds up form-filling, and enables data sharing across departments.

5. Assemble a welcome package

Perhaps you’ve seen them in snapshots posted to LinkedIn. A welcome package can be an opportunity for more than simple data collection, for forms and regulatory requirements.

Welcome packages impress employees, help them to feel connected at the onset of their work with your company, and they contribute to retention increases of up to 82%.

Some items you might include in a welcome package:

• Welcome letter
• “Getting to know you” survey
• Welcome gift
• Business cards
• Company swag (mug, notepad, koozie, etc.)
• Employee handbook
• Org chart/directory
• Info on company tools, office amenities and perks, nearby eateries and cafes

It takes just a little bit of upfront effort to plan and fulfill welcome packages, with high dividends paid back to you in the form of boosted retention and productivity.

6. Assign an onboarding buddy

Before remote and hybrid work became more common, many organizations large and small would often consolidate new employee onboarding processes into an orientation day. While this can still work, in today’s workplace this same motivation to build culture and speed up onboarding can be achieved by assigning onboarding buddies or cohorts digitally (and/or IRL).

An exhaustive new employee roadmap will focus on softer benefits like this along with other more tactile solutions. Help new hires acclimate by pairing them with others who might know more directly how they are feeling in their first days.

7. Home Run swing – knock your "day one" agenda out of the park

If we’re mentioning retention goals again, it’s because we’ve seen firsthand how valuable it is to our clients. On top of streamlining as much as possible, and as a supplement to other efforts to provide your new hires with a warm welcome, knocking your employee’s day one agenda out of the park is a great way to impress them and make onboarding more comfortable.

A strong first day agenda might involve:

• An office tour (bonus points for creativity)
• Meet-and-greet with team/leadership
• 1:1 with direct manager
• 1:1 with onboarding buddy
• Welcome lunch or other social event

Much of what we’re discussing around your optimized new employee roadmap is about clear, direct, thoughtful communications with new hires – and a winning day one schedule sets the tone in this regard.

8. Develop a 30/60/90 plan

Make it clear, document goals and milestones, establish expectations at the onset.

With things like automated onboarding helping to clear the busywork at the start, a firm and clearly communicated 30/60/90 onboarding plan will see so many positive returns for both your organization and its new hires.

Productivity will benefit from such a structured plan, as will morale.

9. Streamline training and orientation with online learning

Especially when paired with many of the above strategies and tools, employing online learning for new hire training and orientation can provide additional onboarding efficiencies. It also documents regulatory compliance efforts and makes them easily reportable.

Finally, especially for trainings that are important but don’t require you or other leaders to necessarily be “in the room”, online learning provides a speedier process for employees eager to go at their own pace – and then get to work on their day-to-day responsibilities.

10. Get feedback from new hires

Last but not least, a comprehensive new employee roadmap will create space for many feedback touchpoints. Automation can help again here, but whether you use it or choose to check in manually, it’s worth engaging new hires at regular intervals to see how things are going for them. Take advantage of their perspective to identity improvements or new additions to your roadmap.

Process automation: The core of your roadmap

As has hopefully been made clear, process automation for your employee onboarding can introduce many efficiencies and benefits into your new hire roadmap.

At BP Logix, we’ve designed products that maximize these efficiencies, while also leaving room for custom solutions built to the unique needs of your organization.

To more closely explore how process automation can take your new employee roadmap to the next level, set up some time with BP Logix to demo our software.

Better retention, higher productivity, a happier workplace culture – all these and more can be won by smarter, faster, error-resistant new hire data collection and processing.

Automating your employee onboarding consolidates and reduces redundancies in HR processes, saves you time, and improves the accuracy and security of organizational data. In even better news, it also contributes to greater productivity and retention among new employees.

In this guide, we’ll dive deep into how and why implementing an HR automation solution for onboarding proves so powerful for future-forward organizations.

Why should I automate in the first place?

Manual onboarding or partially automated onboarding processes can leave a lot to be desired for both HR leaders and employees. 

With all respect for the challenges of managing employee data in a complex and/or growing organization, legacy processes often suffer from a number of inefficiencies:

• Siloed data, both within HR departments and between shared departmental resources
• Disconnected recruiting, hiring, and onboarding processes
• Human error

Automated onboarding enables greater leveraging of the same data points across departments and functions in your organization. By identifying areas of overlap, or revealing new opportunities for data sharing – all while proving more secure than manual processes – automated onboarding introduces a greater fluidity to existing processes.

With AI-enabled technology leading the way, errors are reduced, compliance is made simpler, and employees are left impressed by your organization. This not only fosters greater satisfaction in their first days at the job, it also improves retention in the long term and ensures more productivity at the onset. 

In this way, employees can jump into their new job functions with confidence, while you report to management that the help they needed is on the way, faster than ever before.

How to automate your employee onboarding process

At BP Logix, we do not advocate for a one-size-fits-all approach to automated employee onboarding. Every organization has unique needs, and your automated onboarding process should meet those needs better than your current manual or partially-automated processes.

In most cases, you and your team will know best which processes could benefit from automation. You probably have a list of headaches and bottlenecks from processes that either need a complete update, or could stand to be made more efficient.

When identifying how to automate more holistically, you’ll want to audit current processes to discover which (and how many) need to be retired or integrated with other solutions.

Examples of onboarding processes and HR tasks that are frequently improved through automation can include:

• Recruiting and hiring
• Employee referrals
• New employee forms
• Benefits enrollment
• Equipment provisioning and/or reimbursements or expenses
• Facilities access
• IT setup
• Vaccination attestation
• Training and compliance

Many of the data inputs and outputs inherent to these processes can be shared, and organized in such a way that they both align with your unique organizational structures and meet the essential needs for internal reporting, regulatory compliance, and employee engagement.

What to look for in your automated employee onboarding solution

While there are many onboarding solutions on the market, several options seek to force the disparate needs of various organizations into one, broad approach. 

This can help to marginally improve things, but such an approach often shortchanges HR departments on some of the very promises that automation offers in the first place.

Instead, look for software that promises a robust set of capabilities that matches your organization’s unique needs.

• End-to-end visibility: Track progress and identify bottlenecks with a high-level view of the entire employee onboarding cycle, from recruitment, to day one, through to 30/60/90 day analyses.
• Customizable workflows: Automated onboarding systems should fit your company’s particular HR needs – not the other way around.
• Pre-built workflow components: Customization doesn’t mean you can’t hit the ground running, or that you can’t implement a new automated system quickly. Smart onboarding automations provide templates and pre-built modules for common tasks like requests/approvals, document submission and filing, and provisioning checklists. This allows HR managers to swiftly improve core processes even as bespoke integrations are being implemented (these can also be built quickly, with the right software).
• Intelligent routing and approvals: Ensure the correct review/approval tasks are delivered to the right hands, at the right times, with automations that account for the busyness and imperfection of humans in the loop. Automations are meant to make lives easier. They aren’t just a means of simply duplicating manual processes in digital form.
• Predictive analytics: Be warned when a task is going to be late, or if there’s another similar challenge looming. Analyze organizational trends to target new efficiencies.
• Seamless integrations: Plugging into existing IT systems should be as easy as possible. Low-code, AI-enabled technology will reduce friction in matching new automated solutions to existing data architectures.
• User-friendly dashboards: HR managers want automations that help them do their jobs, which should include reports and interfaces that are as easy-to-use as the underlying automation technologies they are built upon. Extended to users and onboarding employees, this easiness should reap many more positive benefits within the organization, once rolled-out.

A great way to see just how crucial features like these can optimize your employee onboarding processes is with a tour of BP Logix's solution:

Spotlight: Automated employee onboarding success in action

University of Wisconsin Eau Claire

When the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire was looking to replace a legacy onboarding system that was no longer meeting their evolving needs, and costing too much money for a fixed cohort of licensed users, they did a lot of homework. 

After looking at over 100 products, a few key factors in particular led to them to shortlist Process Director, from BP Logix.

UW-Eau Claire needed an onboarding solution that:

• Favored cross-compatibility
• Didn’t cost more than made reasonable sense
• Was easy to develop to internal needs
• Was easy to use
• Did not charge per-seat for licensing
• Did not have any barriers to development
• Featured better responsiveness and support

According to UW-Eau Claire, they ultimately selected BP Logix as their partner for automating employee onboarding based on the strength of their demo of Process Director. 

In line with the professed advantages in speed, simplicity, customization, compatibility and cost-reduction, UW-Eau Claire found that Process Director  for BP Logix delivered on the promise of automation to make their HR processes better and more modern.

The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)

Human resources leaders at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) wanted to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the organization’s decision to go green, to also streamline employee onboarding and other processes through more advanced automation.

Ultimately, they chose BP Logix as their partner in this, with the end result being the elimination of 200 paper forms and counting. 

On top of this, UTEP cited the following benefits to automating their documentation:

• Easy to install, use and customize BP Logix software
• Time saved – the UTEP IT team saved countless hours with low-code implementation
• Less frustration, no more missed deadlines, thanks to greater visibility and smart notifications from the BP Logix dashboard

UTEP ultimately felt they found a perfect match in BP Logix, considering that they also needed more advanced functionality with their new automated employee onboarding solution, such as user authentication and dynamic documentation routing.

With this blend of streamlining and custom modification, UTEP was able to leverage automated onboarding to make user experiences more pleasant for employees and students alike.

Smart automation makes for happier humans, too

While perhaps less easy to quantify in the past, in recent years researchers have begun to see how the right automations can lead to happier, more productive employees. 

We’ve already touched on such benefits a bit, but let’s dig in more fully, considering the importance of employee engagement to organizational success.

The employee advantages to implementing an automated onboarding system are numerous, and often include:

• Removing tediousness from the process
• Bridging the gap, and speeding up the handoff, between recruiting and onboarding
• Empowering and impressing new hires from the onset
• Positive impacts on workplace culture

Automated onboarding represents the sort of technology organizations will want to adopt, as they continue to focus more on the human in human resources – towards results that will also impress leadership, when costs are reduced and productivity grows.

Take employee onboarding into the future with BP Logix

Examples like the above highlight just some of the ways by which BP Logix seeks to deliver automated onboarding solutions that strike the appropriate balance of efficiency and customization for an organization like yours.

If you’re reading this and wondering if a new automated employee onboarding solution could make your life easier, and your organization more productive and happy, let’s get you a demo and dig in on what particularly BP Logix can do for your HR team.

Happy onboarding!

HR automation software can streamline recruitment workflows and enhance the employee onboarding and offboarding experience. Here's our guide for businesses looking to streamline their HR processes with technology.

What is human resources (HR) automation?

Human resources (HR) automation is a process of streamlining repetitive human resource functions, including employee onboarding and offboarding, payroll, benefits administration, and more. HR automation uses technology to digitalize and automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks that fall under the scope of the HR department.

Statistics from Gartner’s Artificial Intelligence Survey showcase that the businesses who are implementing automation tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline repetitive HR tasks improve employee experience and make informed decisions. In fact:

• 51% of businesses implement HR automation tools to capture cost savings.
• Over 56% of those deployed AI-powered HR automation tools are looking to improve customer experience and automate repetitive, time-consuming, or manual tasks.
• 62% of those deployed AI-powered HR automation tools are looking to improve the accuracy of decision-making.

Automating HR processes is a paramount for organizations of all sizes as it helps in reducing employee turnover rates and increasing organizational productivity. We put together this guide to help businesses understand the benefits of HR automation and identify the common HR workflows to automate.

Common HR processes and workflows to automate

A few common HR functions and workflows to automate are recruitment, development, payroll, employee relations, employee retention, tax compliance, health and safety, performance management, and offboarding. Let’s take an in-depth look at a few of these below.

Recruiting efforts

The recruitment process comprises several steps, including recruitment planning, strategy development, searching for ideal candidates, screening of candidates, and evaluation.

An HR automation software can reduce the cost-per-hire and improve recruiter productivity by eliminating the need for human interference in the following recruitment tasks:

• Candidate sourcing and engagement.
• Screening resumes based on various predetermined parameters such as experience, qualifications, salary expectations, and skill sets.
• Applicant’s status updates throughout the recruitment journey.
• Scheduling interviews.

Employee onboarding

Over 36% of HR leaders in a recent survey blamed insufficient technology for their inability to streamline employee onboarding programs. An HR automation software can enhance the onboarding experience for new hires by eliminating the need for manual interference in activities such as:

• Pre-boarding workflows, including sending welcome emails and creating user accounts.
• Scheduling orientation meetings.
• Employee onboarding documentation.
• Collecting feedback on recruitment and onboarding process.

Not sure where to start? Don't miss our guide for how to automate the employee onboarding process.

Employee offboarding

Employee offboarding is a process that involves several activities leading to a formal separation between the employer and the employee. Organizations need to streamline the employee offboarding process to meet compliance standards, minimize legal risks, and provide the best possible experience for the departing employee. An HR automation software can automate offboarding activities such as:

• Resetting shared passwords.
• Creating backups of data or documentation.
• Revoking access controls.
• Getting non-disclosure agreements signed.
• Conducting exit surveys.

Payroll and employee benefits

Manually managing payroll is time-consuming, error-prone, and labor-intensive. The lack of automation often results in employees receiving salaries and benefits at a later date than expected, or identifying mistakes that take great lengths of time to resolve.

A few payroll and employee benefits tasks that can be automated are:

• Timekeeping and time tracking.
• Calculating wages based on working hours, overtime, and holidays.
• Processing direct deposits and sending notifications to employees about their salary deposits.
• Managing deductions for employee benefits.
• Completing and filing relevant paperwork.

Expense claims

Expense claims are reimbursement requests submitted by employees to claim back the costs they paid on behalf of their employer. Every month, HR team members receive expense claims in the form of mileage, food, and travel expenses. However, a recent survey found that 43% of businesses are still managing expense reports manually. Of those who implemented automation software, 82% have said they aimed to simplify the expense reporting process for employees and managers.

An HR automation software can simplify the expense claims process by:

• Eliminating the need for physical reports/paper documents.
• Enabling employees to scan and upload claim reports.
• Getting the approvals from managers through e-signatures.
• Automatic and timely pay-outs.

Routine data entry

Did you know that HR professionals lose over 14 hours a week on manual and repetitive data entry tasks that could be automated? In most organizations, HR teams are forced to do routine data entry tasks with regards to HR processes such as attendance, payroll, employee data recording (personal and medical), and taxes. An HR automation software can eliminate human interference in routine data entry processes such as:

• Entering employee data.
• Identifying the incorrect, irrelevant, incomplete, and duplicate data.
• Verifying and validating data.
• Updating the database.

Tax filing

Staying compliant with employment tax requirements is one of the biggest concerns for businesses. With manual HR processes, it is very difficult for HR teams to keep up with tax laws and deadlines.

According to Deloitte, organizations have a 15-90 percent cost reduction opportunity depending on the taxation activities they select for automation.

HR automation software can help businesses streamline the following activities within the scope of filing taxes and help them stay compliant with tax laws:

• Gathering and validating data from employees.
• Running reports and calculating adjustments.
• Filing income tax returns.
• Keeping tax reports to meet the compliance standards.

Performance reviews

91% of companies that adopted continuous performance management are making informed-people-decisions and removing biases in promotion and advancement. With automation software, HR teams can streamline the feedback collection process and spend less time on administrative tasks related to performance appraisal such as:

• Gathering self-feedback from employees.
• Gathering feedback from peers and managers.
• Sending reminders to employees/managers.
• Implementing Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework (OKR is a tool used by organizations to determine SMART goals and track their outcomes.)

Benefits of automated HR systems

There are a myriad of benefits to implementing automation in your HR systems and processes, including:

Improved efficiency that positively impacts operations

HR teams often waste time on unproductive and repetitive tasks such as screening candidates, scheduling orientation meetings, and manually entering employee data into spreadsheets and timesheets.

Software that automated processes in HR systems can improve the efficiency of HR teams by letting them focus more on strategic tasks such as recruitment planning and succession planning than unproductive and repetitive tasks. This level of efficiency can trickle down to other parts of the business, positively impacting revenue-generating departments of an organization.

Less dependence on paper documents

HR is a document-driven department. However, paper-based processing is highly time-consuming and costly. In fact, U.S businesses waste over $8 billion managing papers every year. Additionally, they spend an average of $120 to find a misplaced document and $220 to recreate a lost document. An HR automation software reduces the dependence on paper documents and increases the productivity of HR teams by digitalizing activities such as onboarding, offboarding, tax filing, and feedback collection.

Reduced clerical errors that cause financial loss

An overwhelming 97% of the workforce, in a recent survey, stated that automation can help their organization in reducing human errors and improving productivity. An HR management software may help organizations reduce clerical errors that cause financial losses.

Improved experience for job candidates

Job candidates often feel anxious about the company when they don’t receive updates on the status of their recruitment journey from the HR department. When manual processes are in place, HR staff struggles to provide updates to job candidates on a regular basis, risking the loss of potential new employees. This often results in dismal recruitment experience for job candidates and reflects poorly on the organization as a whole.

An HR automation tool can improve the experience of job candidates through following ways:

• Providing regular updates on the status recruitment journey.
• Answering repetitive questions about the job through chatbots.
• Streamlining the employee evaluation through push notifications.
• Streamlining pre-boarding workflows.

Put your people first! Better experience for existing employees

An HR automation software enables you to put your people first and provide them with a better working experience. This often results in higher employee retention rates and better organizational performance. To add, organizations in which HR departments facilitate a positive employee experience report 1.3 times higher organizational performance.

Effective HR and business process automation with BP Logix

Automation can help HR managers eliminate redundant, time-consuming, and labor-intensive tasks in areas such as recruitment, onboarding, payroll, offboarding employee benefits, expense claims, tax compliance, performance management, and more.

A human resources automation software can improve the efficiency of HR teams and make them less dependent on papers.

Ready to accomplish the same?

Streamline your human resource management processes with the help of BP Logix HR Automation Software. Request a demo to see how it can assist your organization today.

Employee offboarding is a process that leads to a formal separation between employee and employer. The offboarding process involves several activities, including deactivating access rights, returning equipment, collecting feedback through exit surveys, and transferring job responsibilities. Let's walk through how employee offboarding works and how HR automation can streamline the process.

When to start offboarding an employee

The offboarding process begins immediately after the employee tenders the letter of resignation for the job. A few common reasons for kickstarting the employee offboarding process are:  

Voluntary resignation

Voluntary resignation takes place when an employee chooses to leave the organization voluntarily. Employees opt for voluntary resignation for various reasons, including a better offer from another organization, personal conflict with managers, health issues, and relocation.

Retirement

Retirement takes place when an employee permanently leaves the job as he/she attains the full retirement age. For instance, the full retirement age in the United States ranges between 66 years and two months and 67 years.

Furloughs and layoffs

A furlough is a temporary mandatory leave given to human resources in special situations such as an economic recession or a pandemic like COVID-19. A furloughed employee may be called back to work when the situation returns to normalcy. 

Layoffs are a temporary or permanent termination of employment of a worker or a group of workers.

Involuntary termination

Involuntary termination refers to the dismissal of an employee from employment by the employer. A few reasons for involuntary termination may include poor performance, willful insubordination, fraud, and dishonesty.

Onboarding vs. offboarding

Onboarding and offboarding aren’t the same. Here is a table that identifies the differences between employee onboarding and offboarding:

Most employers don’t give as much priority to offboarding as they give to the onboarding of employees. The below statistics showcase the importance of the formal offboarding process for organizations:

1. According to Intermedia SMB Rogue Access Study, 89% of employees were able to access sensitive corporate applications after they completed offboarding formalities.
2. 72% of CEOs, in a recent survey, admitted that they have taken important intellectual property (IP) details, ideas, and sensitive data with them from their former employer.

Moving forward into this article, we’ll explain more about why proper employee offboarding is important for the organization and provide a checklist that helps HR teams to improve the effectiveness of the offboarding process.

Why is proper employee offboarding important?

Organizations may need to implement a proper employee offboarding process to:

1. Meet compliance standards and regulation

Data leakages by former employees may result in compliance violations and attract huge penalties from regulatory bodies. For instance, the penalties imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) for data breaches can go up to $1.5 million per violation.

Automation helps the organization avoid costly data breaches and meet compliance standards by preventing email forwards and resetting passwords without any manual intervention.

2. Minimize legal and security risks

Around 50% of IT leaders, in a survey conducted by TechRepublic, said that the outgoing employee’s accounts remain active for longer than a day after they left the organization. This poses a huge security risk to the organization.

By automating the employee offboarding process with the help of HR Workflow Software, the HR team can deactivate the access rights to sensitive information immediately after the employee’s resignation is accepted.

3. Collect critical feedback for the department/organization

Employees are the best source of information for the organization. Since employees interact with various stakeholders, including co-workers, suppliers, customers, and creditors daily, they will be in a better position to provide honest feedback about both department and organization-wide operational practices.

An employee offboarding process, powered by automation software with a user-friendly interface, can collect and interpret the critical data from employees through:

1. Detailed and well-thought-out template questions.
2. Best-in-class analytics.

4. Part ways on the best terms

Former employees can make or break the employer brand. A poor offboarding process may spread negative word of mouth about the employment practices of an organization in the market. This negative word of mouth makes it difficult for the organization to attract qualified employees. Therefore, the organization should always try to part ways with employees on good terms.

By automating the offboarding process, the HR teams can streamline the activities such as getting the documentation signed and issuing the final paycheck on time.

The two major benefits of automation here are:

1. Hassle-free offboarding experience to employees.
2. On-time relieving of the employee.

5. Helps with future onboarding processes

Offboarding and onboarding go hand-in-hand. An ineffective offboarding may negatively impact the onboarding processes of the organization.

For example, if the knowledge transfer is not properly done during an employee offboarding, the organization may need to train the new employee separately by spending additional resources. Therefore, HR teams should focus on streamlining the offboarding if they want to improve the effectiveness of the onboarding processes.

A quick employee offboarding checklist for HR teams 

Here is a nine-point checklist that helps HR teams to complete the employee offboarding process successfully:

• Notify all key stakeholders of the employee leaving
• Get all relevant paperwork and documentation signed and filed
• Plan an official knowledge transfer
• Issue final paycheck and update payroll
• Update your organization charts
• Recover all company assets and hardware
• Revoke or cancel systems access
• Conduct an exit interview 
• Stay in touch!

1. Notify all key stakeholders of the employee leaving

Employees regularly interact with various stakeholders including co-workers, suppliers, and customers. When an employee leaves the job, the first thing the HR team should do is to notify all key stakeholders about this development through email, phone, or any other relevant means of communication.  

This communication may include the following details:

• The last working day of the employee.
• Details of the person, who handles the work until a replacement is found.
• Details of the successor, if already a replacement has already been hired.

2. Get all relevant paperwork and documentation signed and filed

Documentation is a vital step in employee offboarding. The employee needs to sign a few documents and receive several forms from the HR team while leaving the organization.

1. Get the non-disclosure agreement signed, if applicable. This agreement ensures the employee does not use the company’s sensitive information for his personal use or third-party’s benefit.
2. Get the Change of Address form filled, if the employee is relocating. This ensures the employee receives his/her Form-W2 without any delay.
3. Gain the employee’s written permission to release the employment records for future reference checks.
4. Give out the letters related to the status of health insurance, retirement benefit, and other benefits the employee might have received from the company.
5. Provide details about Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA).

3. Plan an official knowledge transfer

Knowledge transfer is a process of transferring the skillsets, job knowledge, and behaviors from the relieving employee to the one who replaces him/her. An effective knowledge transfer, at the time of employee offboarding, may involve several steps, including, but not limited to:

1. Explain the job responsibilities.
2. Identify the outstanding tasks and give knowledge on how to address them.
3. If possible, facilitate the work shadowing for a week (work shadowing is an on-job training wherein a new employee observes an expert performing the job).
4. Use knowledge measurement tools to assess the success of knowledge transfer.

4. Issue final paycheck and update payroll

HR teams may follow the organizational policies while issuing the final paycheck to employees. If the organizational policy states that the employees receive their final paycheck on the last day, HR teams should stick to the same and make appropriate arrangements.

HR teams should consider the following aspects while issuing the final paycheck:

1. Deduct the salary advance from the final paycheck.
2. Add bonus, commissions, and reimbursements, if any, to the final paycheck.
3. Add the money the employee had accrued through paid time off (PTO) to the final paycheck.

Once the final paycheck is issued, HR teams should remove the employee's name from the payroll. According to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the organization may need to maintain the payroll records of employees for at least three years. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) asks employers to maintain the records of employment taxes for at least four years.

5. Update your organization charts

An organizational chart represents the hierarchical structure of roles, responsibilities, and relationships within the entity. The organizational chart plays a vital role in seamless communication flow and internal reporting at the workplace.

Employee termination or resignation creates a void in the organizational chart and obstructs the information flow within the organization. Immediately after an employee departs from the organization, the HR team should update the organizational chart and ensure there is no disruption in the information flows and internal reporting.

In large-scale companies, HR teams may need to update the organizational charts both department and organization-wide.

6. Recover all company assets and hardware

HR departments need to recover all the company’s assets and hardware from the employees when offboarding them. The following are the assets the HR team may need to recover from employees:

1. ID badges
2. Computers, laptops, and chargers
3. Hard drives and pen drives
4. Drawing pads
5. Phones
6. Car or other vehicles
7. Credit cards

Though it is a bit rude, the HR teams are advised not to give final clearance until the employee returns the company property that they may have in their possession.

7. Revoke or cancel systems access

Considering the increasing number of data breaches, revoking system access is a vital step in the offboarding process. While revoking the systems access, the HR team should focus on four aspects:

1. Reset shared passwords
2. Prevent email forwarding or sharing files.
3. Revoke access to corporate applications.
4. Create reliable backups.

8. Conduct an exit interview 

An exit interview is the best way to collect honest feedback from the departing employee. It helps the HR team to identify areas of improvement in employment practices.

A few exit interview questions that can be asked to a departing employee are:

1. Why do you choose to leave the job?
2. Which aspects of our organizational culture you did not like?
3. What could we have done to retain you?
4. What did you like the best and least of the job?
5. Were your accomplishments recognized throughout your employment?

The “check the box” type of feedback collection is ineffective. The HR manager should engage in face-to-face interaction with the exiting employee to gather feedback.

9. Stay in touch! 

Never get disconnected from your former employees. Stay in touch with former employees, learn about their career progression, and offer compliments for their professional achievements even after they exit from the organization. HR teams can make use of social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter to maintain a relationship with ex-employees.

Simplify and automate the employee offboarding process with BP Logix

There is no better way to simplify the employee offboarding process than by automating it. A proper offboarding process is important for the organization because it helps to meet compliance standards, minimize legal and security risks, collect critical feedback for the department/organization, and part ways with employees on the best terms.

HR team members may need to create a checklist for the employee offboarding and make sure each point in the checklist is marked before giving a formal send-off to the employee. An HR workflow software enables the organization to streamline the activities involved in the employee offboarding process and ensure employees are relieved on time.

Automate the employee offboarding process with the help of BP Logix HR Workflow Software. Request a demo to see how it can assist your organization.

Streamlining the employee onboarding process with HR automation can increase the new hire retention rate. Here is an HR guide to best practices for new employee onboarding.

What is employee onboarding?

Employee onboarding is a systematic process of introducing new hires to the organization and integrating them into the organizational culture. The process of onboarding a new hire starts from the day the organization releases the offer letter.

A proper onboarding process creates a positive first impression about the organization and its culture. It helps the HR team establish the company culture and set up the stage for a collaborative workspace.

The following statistics showcase many organizations haven’t yet adopted the best practices for employee onboarding:

1. In a survey conducted by Gallup, 88% of employees said that their employers did a poor job onboarding them.
2. As little as 37% of companies are extending the employee onboarding process beyond a month.

The absence of the best practices for employee onboarding is a cause for concern because it increases employee turnover rates and lowers organizational productivity. We put together this guide to help HR teams of manufacturing companies adopt best practices for the employee onboarding process and develop a checklist for day one of the employee onboarding.

Benefits of the onboarding process for new hires

The major benefits of the onboarding process for new hires to the organization may include a higher employee retention rate, better workplace productivity, increased employee confidence, and improved employee performance.

Read more about how a streamlined onboarding process can benefit organizations:

1. New hires that undergo a streamlined onboarding process are 58% more likely to stay with the organization for more than three years.
2. A streamlined onboarding process can increase the retention of new hires by 82%.
3. A standard onboarding experience can increase the productivity of new hires by 50%.
4. Organizations that use the pre-boarding process retain 81% of their new hires.

The ideal employee onboarding process - best practices for HR

Organizations need to adopt several best practices to create an ideal employee onboarding process. Here is a list of the seven best practices every HR team should follow to improve the employee experience:

1. Refine your hiring process

The hiring process creates a path for onboarding. Rather than using traditional job portals, HR teams should use platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to attract suitable candidates and assess their competencies.

HR teams should focus on creating a job description that communicates about the job position, major duties, the scope of the work, working conditions, compensation, and qualifications. Organizations should also engage a hiring manager who works in coordination with the HR department and supervises hiring processes.

2. Make good first impressions

A first impression is the best impression one could make. Since office visits aren’t very commonplace anymore due to hybrid work settings, organizations can create a great first impression by automating the entire onboarding process.

An automated onboarding process can get all the documentation done, schedule an introduction call with new team members, set up user accounts, and create an email flow that communicates the organization’s policies, vision, and objectives. Organizations can make the onboarding process transparent and inviting with the help of automation.

3. Send the offer letter

The process of employee orientation should start from the time of sending an offer letter to the new hire. The offer letter is a formal document sent to a candidate offering a job. The offer letter should comprise several details on the job offer including the start date of employment, job title, compensation, benefits, and company policies.

4. Check in with the new hire before day one

Hiring managers need to check in with the new hire before day one to start the onboarding process. Automation helps to streamline all activities involved in pre-boarding. For instance, the HR automation software would help the organization automate the pre-boarding workflow, which comprises the following activities:

• Sending a welcome email to the new hire.
• Upon receiving an acknowledgment from the new hire, the software may trigger a notification to the IT team to set up a user account to start the onboarding process.
• Once the user account is created, the software sends the username and password for the new hire to log in to the onboarding platform.
• Once new hire logs in to the platform and fills out their forms and gives their e-signatures, the software uploads them.
• The new hire would provide bank account details to the software in order to set up their direct deposit.

5. Provide a welcoming first day

The HR team should provide a welcoming first day to the new hire. The first day is where the actual onboarding experience for the employee starts.

HR teams should give warm welcome to new hires and take them for an office tour. The paperwork, if pending, should be completed on the employee’s first day itself. Introduce the new hire to team members and provide them with the employee handbook that highlights the company’s culture, reporting structure, vision, and mission.

6. Encourage employee engagement during their first month

Employee engagement is the key to workplace productivity. If the organization wants to achieve higher productivity, it should engage new hires in the work during their first month itself. An effective onboarding program that establishes the expected workflow encourages new hires to engage in the work during their first month.

The workflow may include activities such as:

1. Communicating expectations in the first week.
2. Assigning key responsibility areas (KRAs).
3. Developing clear reporting structures.
4. Providing the training schedule.

7. Turn their first month into their first year

Successful onboarding ends when the employee becomes a part of the company culture. An effective onboarding process enables the new hire to learn about the company and become a part of its culture within a month or two.

With a poor onboarding process, this may take six months to a year. Employee retention rate increases if the employees align their goals with the organization and start to share the organization’s culture.

Benefits of automating the onboarding process

Automation is the best way to streamline your employee onboarding process. McKinsey reported that 56% of hire-to-retire (human resource management) tasks can be automated with the help of existing automation technologies.

Here are the five major benefits of automating the employee onboarding process.

1. Automation simplifies the pre-boarding workflows which include sending welcoming emails, creating user accounts, adding the new hire to the onboarding channel, and scheduling orientation meetups.
2. Quick turn-around as the automation streamlines activities such as reviews, approvals, and sign-offs (hours vs. days and days vs. weeks).
3. The authorized people have visibility into all aspects of the employee onboarding process.
4. Automation digitalizes the entire onboarding process through electronic forms, e-signs, and online change requests. It eliminates redundant documentation and reduces paperwork. Therefore, HR teams can allocate more time to answer queries from new hires and coordinate with them to create a streamlined onboarding experience.
5. Automation helps the organization meet the compliance guidelines by creating an online platform that gathers employee vital data accurately and stores it on a secure cloud.

Day-one employee onboarding checklist

Day-one of the employee onboarding is the right time for HR professionals to create a strong positive impression about the organization’s policies, culture, operational procedures. The onboarding process should make employees feel they are at the right place on their starting day.

An onboarding program may be termed successful when employees get acquainted with their roles, new co-workers, and the organization’s culture. Here is a checklist for successful day-one employee onboarding:

• Finish the paperwork or documentation
• Introduce to team leader and team members
• Tour of workspace.
• Assign employee training
• Give brief about the organization’s vision, mission, and objectives
• Establish expected workflow
• Introduce to company culture
• Introduce to team members
• Set up communication channels
• Set up the employee’s desk
• Communicate policies, code of conduct, and procedures

Streamline your employee onboarding process with BP Logix

The traditional onboarding process takes time and involves a lot of paperwork. Automation is the best way to streamline the employee onboarding process. An employee onboarding software, which eliminates the new hire paperwork and increases the speed of the onboarding process, may help the organization improve the new hire onboarding experience. Not sure how to get the ball rolling? Don't miss our how-to guide for automating the employee onboarding process.

A streamlined onboarding helps the organization to improve employee retention and workplace productivity. The first day and the first month are critical in the employee onboarding process. Ideally, the HR teams should create a first positive impression on the first day and make the employee become a part of the company’s culture by the first month of the employment.

Automate the employee onboarding process with the help of BP Logix HR Workflow Software. Request a demo to see how it can assist your organization.

The process of onboarding new hires is critical both to the organization and to the success of new employees. A well-designed onboarding process improves employee retention in the first three critical months of work, sets the pace for engagement, and can either make or break initial productivity.

And yet, according to a Gallup report, only 12% of employees reported that their companies did a good job of onboarding. With that in mind, it should be no surprise that 51% of organizations reported losing new hires within the first 6 months.

Clearly, employee onboarding is in a bleak state. The situation has only deteriorated since the pandemic began and work-from-home policies were implemented. 

But with HR automation, employee onboarding does not have to be a task for HR teams to dread and avoid. The right workflow automation software takes away most of the onboarding work from your hands and makes it much more fulfilling, engaging, and effective for everyone involved.

The Role of Low-Code Process Automation In Onboarding and HR

While workflow automation is normally a strategy employed by IT teams, and might not seem rife for use cases within HR, Onboarding has increasingly become a set of processes that take well to automation. Even more so when paired with a low-code platform that can be utilized by those without a developer skillset.

Specifically, onboarding involves new hire paperwork, orientation, training, performance tracking, and project management. These are repetitive tasks, and intelligent automation systems handle them effectively. 

 For new hires, onboarding is full of uncertainty, pressure, expectations, and a general feeling of being overwhelmed and oftentimes, lost.

One study showed exactly what employees want from onboarding:

• 76% wanted on-the-job training
• 73% wanted a review of company policies
• 56% wanted to be assigned a mentor or buddy

With this data in mind, it becomes easier to understand just how powerful workflow automation in employee onboarding can become to make the process easier for all parties involved.

1. Simplify Onboarding and Training of Remote Employees

Remote working threw a wrench in an already difficult onboarding process. Without physical contact, tasks like training and document generation have become more of a challenge. However, virtual onboarding using automated workflows can make sure the proper training, resource provisioning, and other critical processes are always consistently counted for.

 What makes automated training so effective is that employees are taken through every process step-by-step without room for manual error. Unlike an employee handbook, automated workflows are dynamic and can pivot quickly to handle new policies.

2. Digital Tracking and Document Management Eliminates Manual Bottlenecks

 Automated HR workflows carry you through pre-processing, onboarding, and ongoing employee management. At each of these stages, an automation solution like BP Logix’ Process Director generates dynamic forms for applicants to fill along the way and automatically stores, shares, and updates records as needed. Audit trails are always there for compliance purposes.

 You can even automate the setting up of new accounts in payroll systems, trigger notifications to the people concerned, and requisition any resources needed such as software licenses or access credentials. This eliminates the headache of manual document pivoting from system to system, or worse: scanning and filing. 

3. Track the Progress of New Employees Automatically

An automated workflow system also allows HR teams to track the progress of all new applicants as they go through the virtual onboarding process. Processes can be designed to automatically capture important metrics and run reports as needed to keep track of applicants as they advance through the system.

 The detailed data and analytics availed by automated HR workflows provide precious insights that can help you figure out how to improve your onboarding processes for the future, including finding the critical path to make processes more efficient.

4. Standardize the Onboarding Process Across All Applicants

In organizations without automated onboarding processes, some new hires come in and receive a full concierge onboarding program, while others come at a bad time and are left to their own devices. Leaving onboarding processes to individual leaders allows for markedly different new hire experiences.

 Automated onboarding processes streamline and standardize this experience so that everyone receives the same treatment. 

 The system also ensures that employees are trained in the same way, creating a consistent brand experience for every client. When new hires are left to figure things out, variance exists between the way each employee carries out supposedly similar tasks.

5. Improved Policy and Regulatory Compliance

The right onboarding platform can be programmed to ensure compliance at every stage. Whether that's overtime compliance, fair labor standards, FMLA, federal civil rights, accountability, or labor laws, automated workflows can be built to take care of the complex compliance regulations for you.

 It is common knowledge that HR compliance has become a minefield. However, unlike manual onboarding processes, automated onboarding also provides visibility into the whole process and makes compliance audits much easier.

6. Integrate with Legacy Applications

Integration with finance applications, active directory and legacy ERP systems like Peoplesoft make sure data easily gets from one system to another, without manual error. Low-code automation platforms equipped with robust integration capabilities, like BP Logix, make sure documents and data can be easily actioned and never fall through the cracks.

7. Collaborate with Other Team Members for Successful Onboarding

Using automated workflows for onboarding new employees sets up channels for communication and collaboration not only with HR teams, but with other team members as well. The right onboarding platform can integrate with email and UCC platforms to ensure that even new team members stay involved and engaged with their team.

Automate HR Workflows to Ease Administrative Workload: How BP Logix Can Help

Onboarding is a challenging and complex process that demands a high level of commitment from HR teams to conduct successfully. However, thanks to the power of a Low Code onboarding platform like BP Logix, you get to take much of this workload off your plate and create an effective onboarding process for your new hires. 

 BP Logix specializes in intelligent BPM software with a low-code platform that excels in automation of critical business functions in HR and across the business.

Contact us to learn more about how our intuitive AI-powered engine can help transform your HR onboarding to a smooth, effective process for you and your prospective hires.

A survey of 350 HR leaders in the U.S. found that 76 percent of respondents’ workplaces1 are not effectively onboarding their new hires. A delayed or uncoordinated onboarding can result in lost productivity, low employee morale and, in extreme cases, unplanned attrition. Similarly, missing key steps in offboarding can increase your compliance, litigation and reputation risk.

Several studies have been conducted that point to the need to paying closer attention to employee onboarding and offboarding and investing in HR automation. For example: 

• More than 50 percent of job seekers checked a company’s job reviews on Glassdoor before applying for a job.
• Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.
• Employees who have negative new hire onboarding experiences are twice as likely to look for new opportunities in the near future
• 88% of employees think their employer did a poor job with the onboarding process

The challenges of onboarding and offboarding

The average new hire has 54 activities to complete during their onboarding experience which makes it one of the most complex HR processes. Therefore, it is not surprising that the main reason for neglecting onboarding includes managers not having the time to undertake it (57 percent), the absence of tools to measure its effectiveness (55 percent) and the lack of digital onboarding technology to automate the process (39 percent).

Today's workforce is made up of digital consumers, and they expect the same conveniences of on-demand, flexible, and simple processes and innovation at work that they experience in their personal lives. More recently, the COVID 19 pandemic has forced several organizations to maintain a high level of flexibility with their staffing plans, resulting in higher-than-normal level of termination, hiring, and rehiring. This has increased the HR onboarding and offboarding workload on an already lean HR organization. 

At most organizations, onboarding and offboarding of employees touches multiple departments and sometimes, external entities. The end result is typically an onboarding and offboarding process that is both complex and unique.  As a result, a cookie cutter approach and off the shelf software tools rarely gets the job done.  What is more is that HR policies can change as can the needs of the hiring manager.  Not only is it important for these critical HR processes to be tailored but they also need to be agile and responsive to the changing needs.

How to improve the employee onboarding and offboarding process

Given the complex nature of the onboarding and offboarding processes, HR organizations need a way to build tailored processes quickly and easily adjust them as their requirements change to create a positive onboarding journey for new employees.  Similarly, because the HR teams are burdened with an overflowing to do list, they need access to intuitive dashboards and reports that inform them and alert them about deadlines, processes and resources.

A low code onboarding and offboarding platform is a better technology to build and automate your process compared to either building such a workflow as a custom application from scratch or a rigid off the shelf application.  A low code onboarding and offboarding platform is like a set of Lego blocks that can be quickly assembled to create a tailored workflow.  In addition, the right onboarding and offboarding platform should have the following key capabilities:

• Easy to install and upgrade.
• Low code – no coding knowledge required.
• Rich integration capabilities that make it easy to coordinate the HR onboarding and offboarding process across multiple departments.
• Strong in audit tracking of the activities which can be critical for certain industries.
• Powerful process modeling capabilities allow clients to model complex processes with ease
• Ability to proactively identify potential delays and recommend corrective action to ensure timely onboarding. 

• Gain 70% in cost savings
• Improve internal team productivity by 40%+
• Reduce in process time (5 to 10 times faster)

Take decisive action now

Click here to learn more about how some of your colleagues are using a low-code platform to address the unique challenges posed by onboarding and offboarding. In particular, how they are quickly assembling tailored onboarding and offboarding processes to improve their employee retention and relieve the HR team from administrative tasks at an affordable cost and in a short timeframe.