3 Steps to Leverage Digital Employee Onboarding
A digital employee onboarding provides you with a time-saving and more rewarding new hire experience.
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A traditional onboarding process would be exclusively reliant on face to face interactions and rigorous paperwork. By contrast, digital employee onboarding provides you and your employer with the possibility of minimising time and optimising the entire onboarding process, including onboarding documentation. Thus, digital employee onboarding leads to saving time. Moreover, it provides more flexible approach to onboarding.
This article discusses digital employee onboarding. We address its role in making a hassle-free transition in a new workplace. Additionally, we also discuss how digital employee onboarding can aid you to come to speed in fulfilling your job obligations. You will also understand the differences between digital onboarding and a remote onboarding process.
What is a Digital Onboarding for New Employees?
Digital transformation is an important part of any business. The overall goal of any digitisation effort is finding the right tools to make life easier for all parties involved.
When strictly referring to digital employee onboarding, our digital onboarding definition is the following. The process of integrating new employees into a company with the support of digital tools and technology. Thus, it implies the use of employee onboarding solutions.
With the use of digital tools, onboarding can be faster, simpler and more rewarding for you as a new hire. Additionally, a digital onboarding process is a more cost-effective and efficient method of bringing new hires up to speed in a new company.
But digital onboarding does not mean that in-person interactions will be completely foreign to your onboarding experiences. It only means using technology to streamline existing processes, combined to more traditional activities, such as meetings and team-building exercises. Thus, digital employee onboarding does not equate a virtual employee onboarding process.
A virtual onboarding means that no physical interaction will take place for various reasons. Maybe you will work with a hybrid work from home model. In another scenario, maybe you must start working remotely, but will return to the office when it is safe. Many employees had virtual onboarding experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Importance of Digital Onboarding for New Employees
Digital onboarding for new employees leverages digital tools during your onboarding to assist your understanding of workflows and expectations. The following are the advantages of digital onboarding for new employees.
Exciting Digital Onboarding Experiences
Imagine being excited about getting a job in a new workplace and only for you to have first day being bombarded with the manual workflows and cumbersome paperwork. No doubt, you will feel frustrated. As a result, you could even lose your initial excitement and motivation. As a result, you will get uninterested in the employment, causing your productivity level to drop, and you will be on the lookout for another job elsewhere.
Without mincing words, this is the reality that most employees face these days in their new workplace; they are overwhelmed with too much information that they do not know what to do with. Also, they experience an inability to understand their job roles, responsibilities, work ethics, and routine.
The use of digital employee onboarding offers you attractive content and less paperwork. This enhances your capacity to have clarity of job role and attain workflow mastery. A virtual onboarding process with automated and streamlined onboarding mechanisms will simplify how you navigate and engage in your early days at work.
Digital Onboarding for New Hires: Flexibility & Training
When you know that all information is available on your digital onboarding platform, you are able to complete the entire onboarding phase at your pace.
You receive training materials consistent with your job roles and responsibilities in one single place: your digital employee onboarding platform.
This offers a simple way to always access information and find answers to your questions. You can consult your digital platform on a 24/7 basis with all the learning materials that your employer prepared for you. This will ensure that you are provided with a unique learning experience of what you need to succeed in your new role.
With this feature, you avoid the pressure associated with a traditional onboarding process. You will have to take it all in during the first days while sitting through in person presentations.
This can explain why in a survey of 150 L&D professionals from GSDC, 79% learning leaders said online training produced better outcomes than in-person learning. Additionally, 83% of them said that collaborative learning online leads to better team performance.
How we do Digital Onboarding
When a new colleague joins us, we naturally make use of both HR-ON Recruit and HR-ON Staff. First, we manage the recruitment process in Recruit, and as soon as the process is completed, the employee data is automatically transferred to Staff. If any information is missing, we send an Engagement directly from Staff to collect it. After that, the onboarding process begins. In Staff, we assign tasks and connect relevant colleagues so everyone knows what needs to be done. This ensures that the new colleague gets a great start, and that the rest of us are well prepared to welcome them.
Digital Onboarding for New Hires: Coordination
Digital onboarding for new employees ensures you do not miss out on anything because checklists and confirmations are in-built. You can hit the ground running with this because you do not receive any unnecessary information unrelated to your role.
At the same time, you can also rest assured that the information presented is accurate and uniformly presented. Regardless if your organisation has 1000 employees or 50, everyone benefits from the same digital process. Everyone learns about the culture and values in the same way.
Digital Onboarding for New Hires: Productivity & Accountability
Digital onboarding enhances your productivity and accountability. It allows for your progress to be tracked by your employer irrespective of the location of where they are realised.
With a digital employee onboarding in HR-ON Staff, you will experience a better time-to-competency, software proficiency, and engagement because it is more flexible than the traditional onboarding.
Digital Onboarding for New Hires: Socialisation & Relationship-building
Traditional employee onboarding is centred on introduction to coworkers and managers, workplace tours, and others. These are not left out when using a digital employee onboarding. The tools specific for digital onboarding ensure a flawless coordination of all actors involved. The focus falls on effective workflows and optimisation.
A Digital Onboarding System Applies to Remote Workers
During the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2019, many employees were forced to be working remotely. Digital employee onboarding allowed onboarding employees from their remote locations. Thus digital onboarding is easy to adjust to cases of fully remote onboarding.
Though the use of virtual tools, employees benefitting from remote onboarding did not halt their ability to contribute their quota to the overall productivity of their companies. Thus, not living near your company’s location is no longer a disadvantage with digital employee onboarding.
How to Leverage Digital Employee Onboarding
With the following steps, you will get the best out of the digital employee onboarding.
Step 1: Digital Employee Onboarding Requires Clarity
It is essential to understand from the very beginning the goals of your digital employee onboarding. Obviously, fact integration and productivity are the overall goals, but you also need more specific details. What are the steps for achieving decreased time-to-competency? How about the steps towards enhanced productivity?
Your onboarding goals have to translate into easily measurable objectives.In this way, you can assess for yourself the progress of your journey. Your employer will provide the set of metrics and KPIs. New employee onboarding metrics not only measure your performance, but they can even improve your employee experiences.
Step 2: Digital Employee Onboarding Requires a Strategy
After defining your digital onboarding goals, the next line of action is defining how to achieve these goals. For example, you might find that role training is vital in your onboarding strategy. It is a must do in order to attain a mastery of the workflows and expectations.
The amount of training you undertake will set the tone of your competence and productivity. Hence, your employer must pay attention to include all the key activities that will facilitate your integration.
The advantage of digital employee onboarding is that there are pre-made modules and timelines applying to your department. So your employer already has a rough draft of your journey, they will need to further customise it to make it more role and experience specific. But this is a lot easier than having to always start from scratch.
According to the Society for Human Resources management, digital employee onboarding improves employee engagement because it helps build a worker’s experience created to train, engage, and retain you in your new workplace. In addition, with the digital employee onboarding, you are assured of a platform that ensures effective transition into your new role with great job satisfaction.
Step 3: Digital Employee Onboarding Requires Monitoring
Your company has defined the goals, the actions for achieving the goals, and the methods for measuring your progress. But this does not mean that the process is over. Monitoring the digital onboarding programme is essential for a successful implementation.
Continuously monitoring allows for optimisation. Maybe you are a lot faster than expected with some tasks, but maybe you need additional support with others. A dynamic journey is easily implemented though digital onboarding. This is a prerogative for achieving the desired onboarding objectives.
Digital Employee Onboarding: Conclusions
As technology and business develop, digitisation is a natural step forward. It makes sense for business organisations to want to streamline their onboarding process. After all, there is a cost associated with onboarding new employees.
Digitisation is not only a method for reducing costs, but also a method for ensuring improved and uniform employee experiences. Thus, everybody benefits from a digital employee journey. Additionally, as we have shown, a digital employee onboarding does not have to entail a replacement for social connections.
The use of HR-ON as your digital employee onboarding platform will deliver a smooth onboarding for an easier first-day experience on your new job. In addition, you will learn from a structured onboarding process that teaches and enables you to attain full productivity within a short time. This is because it is embedded with multimedia content that will aid the understanding of your workflow properly, thereby enhancing your capacity to perform your core tasks.
FAQ: What is digital employee onboarding?
What is digital employee onboarding?
Digital employee onboarding is the process of integrating and training new employees using digital tools and technology. It streamlines traditional onboardings by reducing paperwork, speeding up workflows, and offering flexible learning so that onboarding new employees becomes more efficient and engaging.
How does digital onboarding improve the onboarding experience?
Digital onboarding makes onboarding new employees faster, more structured, and more rewarding. It provides easy access to training materials, automated checklists, and clear workflows — all in one platform. This ensures that employee onboarding is consistent across the organization and helps new hires become productive quickly.
What is the difference between digital onboarding and remote onboarding?
Digital onboarding uses technology to enhance the employee onboarding experience, whether in-person, hybrid, or remote. Remote onboarding refers specifically to onboarding new employees who work entirely off-site. Digital employee onboarding supports both scenarios by ensuring smooth coordination and communication.
Why should companies choose digital onboarding for new employees?
Companies benefit from digital employee onboarding because it saves time, ensures consistent onboarding for all new employees, and helps track progress and performance. Digital onboarding reduces administrative tasks, improves engagement, and makes the onboarding process more flexible and cost-effective.
