If you are many other l&d professionals who work at organizations that are focusing on improving their employee onboarding programs s this year, you are probably looking for ways you can streamline the entire process. This makes sense if you consider the impact a high quality onboarding program can have on your companies brand reputation, employee retention rates and even its revenue.
However, modern onboarding programs begin before a new employees start date and they consist of many different parts. The best in class onboarding programs begin the process of employee engagement as soon as a new hire accepts their offer letter. The most effective onboarding programs continue past the standard 90 days. This can heavily increase the workload of your HR department. Fortunately there are several different kinds of tools your organization can use to improve the new hire experience for both employees and for management.
To help you better understand what kinds of tools are available and how to best use them we have included some must know details in this article. There are three major categories of tools you should know about.
HR Chatbots
These chatbots are automated systems that employees can communicate with by typing text into the provided chat format. The format is familiar to most and is a lot like using any other messenger application. HR chatbots tend to be an incredibly useful tool when it comes to onboarding new hires.New team members have a lot of information to process and often have a lot of questions to ask. HR chatbots can answer questions almost instantly making the process both faster and more efficient. This also takes the pressure off of new hires who may not know who to ask or where else to get information.
Chatbots can be accessed anytime and they do not take sick days which is another useful team. This is feature is quickly becoming important as the global workforce grows and distributed teams become more popular as chatbots make time zones almost irrelevant. If the chatbot is unable to answer an employees questions it has the ability to point them in the right direction.
Specialized Tools
There is a wide range of specialized tools that have been designed specifically to help streamline the process of onboarding new employees.These tools are the all-in-one types of tools that you will find. The goal of these programs are to offer a set of tools in a single system. Each tool in the onboarding software is meant to streamline the employee onboarding process. They often include features like the following:
- Digitization of paperwork
- Customizable onboarding checklist templates
- Chat tools
- Quiz builders
- Tool to upload and or create learning content
- User onboarding tools and features
- Tracking and reporting of newly hired employees onboarding process Having all software, features related to your onboarding program in a single location makes the entire process easier for your l&d teams to manage.
Integrated Tools
Integrated tools are different than specialized tools in the the way that they offer a range of tools for all HR related tasks including, but not specific to onboarding. They offer many of the same features you will find in specialized tools like digitization, tracking or quiz builders. However, they typically come with additional built in features for payroll, attendance and email automation. These tools aim to be your go-to for all things HR related. This can be incredibly useful for HR teams because many of the tasks related to onboarding new employees are often related to othe HR responsibilities.
Wrap Up
As technology continues to change the way we work and interact with each other the role of HR professionals also continues to change. Your organizations human resources team are now essential to an organizations ability to develop business strategies and plans for the future. Employee learning and development also also become an important area of focus for competitive industry leaders.
These changes have increased the workload of the modern HR team. Fortunately, there are a few different tools organizations can leverage to streamline the employee onboarding process making the new hire process more pleasant experience for everyone involved.
To learn all you need to know about onboarding read the eBook The Definitive Guide To Onboarding Programs.
