Product Story: crafting human-centric digital onboarding on PX
by Shirley Rompis and Mufti Ramadhan
Digital revolution has surely transformed a lot of business practices in the past decade, but the recent pandemic has forced changes in even the slowest-changing industry, including HR.
Despite the limitations and changing policies that come with the digital setup, we haven’t slowed down our hiring spree. Many new talents remotely joined our company from the comfort of their own home across the globe and participated in our virtual onboarding program. However, we realize that digital onboarding activities often sidelines one important factor: the human experience. Service providers limit their services to automating the administrative process, completely ignoring the employee experience.
We aim to challenge this perspective by creating PX (People Xperience), an employee engagement app that puts humans at the center.
What is PX?
PX is a digital platform for people and organisation greatness, which handles a long list of human resource procedures; from onboarding, digital contract signing, to submitting reimbursement forms and leave applications.
Aside from the general administrative features, we build in other attractive functions. Mood Meter, for example, allows users to record and track their emotions, along with the contributing factors. While the Learning Challenge, equipped with a progress tracker, aims to foster self-improvement.
The mixture reflects our belief that HR apps should go beyond automating the administrative process, preserving the sense of humanity in the platform. It also answers the new talent needs, where our majorly Millennial talents prefer flexible work arrangements and continuously seek opportunities for personal development.
The Onboarding Journey on PX
Of course, there would be no relevant solutions for unclear problems. So, during product discovery, we had to map out all the necessary alignments. What were the pain points and problems currently faced by the stakeholders? How were the working environment and business situation?
We conducted extensive interviews and discussions with employees and management which helped us nail down two points:
- Data collection: As a digital company, our recruitment and hiring process should not be hindered by geographical location. However, this could complicate the employee data collection work, as pooling all the scattered talents to Jakarta for paperwork will be costly.
- Work-Life imbalance: Most people spend 70% of their life at work and cram the rest — love, family, hobbies — into the rest 30%. It could happen for decades until they finally retire. This fact is concerning as humans desire growth in all of their life aspects.
We figured that our platform has to break out from the mould of exclusively administrative processing. It should also enable holistic growth in all of the employee’s life aspects.
Along with the engineers and designers, we huddled together to attack the problems and find solutions. Our features had to streamline the employees’ journey from the very beginning to the very end.
The platform would be the employees’ first friend and guide.
We mapped the user journey and flow, created and tested UI/UX designs for the user, ensuring that our platform was easy to use and answered their needs. Since our talents were literally everywhere, we finally came up with this roadmap for the preboarding and onboarding process in PX.
During preboarding, employees didn’t have to travel to the office or send a signed document, for contract signing. They could do it anywhere on the app, whenever they feel ready. After a lengthy discussion with the legal team, we found out that contract signing doesn’t need the actual signature. So, we implemented that into our app. No need for complicated scribbles, new joiners only had to swipe, that easy. The signing process would only take around 5 to 10 minutes.
As for documents like identity cards and family registry, we no longer asked for physical copies. New employees only had to upload document pictures taken by smartphone, or scanned files if they preferred to. Our app would securely scan and process all the data.
After completing the administrative procedures, a countdown card would appear and show how many days were left until their first day.
Then enter the onboarding phase, which is crucial as it’s the time when new employees start familiarizing themselves with a new position, teammates, and culture.
For the first week of the onboarding, there were in-app materials designed to acclimate new joiners to the company’s environment, such as articles about the company, or virtual meet-up schedules.
Users could also start browsing members of their Squad, Tribe, and Chapter using the Circle feature. We would tailor the features to the 30 Days Onboarding Program, currently developed by DK’s People Team, which would also become our guide and success metric.
Done with the discovery stage, we progressed into development. With all the useful insights, our engineers were convinced that they were building a helpful solution for users. We ran a field test for our roadmap and prototype, receiving useful feedback from stakeholders before officially launching the PX app. Most importantly, we added a “Shake Shake” feature for users to send feedback or ideas for improvement.
It has been 16 months since PX began handling DKatalis’ preboarding and onboarding processes for new joiners, along with other HR procedures. All the time-consuming physical works and geographical constraints are eliminated, opening up the opportunity for us to net great talents from any location without a hitch.
What’s next?
Developing an employee onboarding process is a unique journey as each company has different culture and needs. There will always be novel ways to smoothen the process of welcoming new talents and familiarizing them with the working environment. Our work with PX is far from done.
From users feedback, we identify several problems that PX can address:
- Streamlining onboarding kit distribution: It will automate onboarding kit (ID card, insurance, laptop, and welcome kit) distribution management for new joiners, from registration to deployment. We want to make sure everyone receives their work tools before the first day of work.
- Digital buddy: PX will enable us to assign a “Buddy” for each new joiner, helping them acclimate to DKatalis’ office culture and workflow.
- In-app interactions: We are visioning PX to become the digital interaction hub between our team members, where they can chat with each other in the app. You can’t really know other people without mingling with them, can you?
- Hybrid Working environment: Many people enjoy working from home, but sometimes they need to interact with teammates. Through PX, they will be able to book a specific space at the office for important meetings, or catch-ups.
- Work-Life integration: PX could remind employees to take vacation leave if they haven’t gotten any for a long period. Perhaps, giving travel recommendations as well.
With PX, we want to pioneer the mindset of a human-centric HR platform that enables holistic growth. Not only at DKatalis, but other organizations as well.
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If you are a visionary mind with unconventional (but innovative) ideas, then DKatalis is your home! Don’t be shy, come and join us!
