Your employee onboarding is broken

There are a couple of truths about why employee onboarding in the enterprise is broken and why HR Tech is the only solution

1. There are multiple Systems of Records that a new hire has to deal with — Recruitment software, HRMS, payroll, LMS etc.
2. Too many processes are manually driven that do not scale well — as result of point #1.

Employee Experience & Culture has been receiving a lot of interest lately. The fact that we are talking about the employee “experience” means that there is some thing fundamentally lacking in it currently. Let’s take a closer look at new hire experience and the two reasons stated above.

REASON 1: Multiple Systems of Records (SoR) & Processes

If you were to do a simple study of systems within an enterprise — you would find a ton of different logins to get work done… At least that’s the premise — to get work done. The whole architecture is built to empower various parts of the organization.

Year 1 — Bought ERP & Payroll software

Year 2 — Bought HRMS software

Year 3 — Bought Sales Software

Year 4 — Bought Learning Software

Year 5 — Bought Code Management Software

Year 6 — Bought Recruitment Software

However, it very quickly becomes quite a smorgasbord of applications. And it goes on and on…

However, that’s not the worst part — the salt on the wound is that, more often than not, these are all disparate systems that find it hard to talk to each other. The products were never built to seamlessly talk to each other. There are no sophisticated APIs and easy data sync possibilities.

It requires a very skilled team to manage all these different, disparate, anti-social systems to work together. Much like an orchestra filled with various instruments that each have their own parts to play.

Now, when you think of a new hire joining the organization — the situation is more dire. As it is — these new hires are stressed with having to learn about a new work environment, fit in, work with their new boss, figure out who they can hang out with at lunch and on top of that — quickly learn 17 different systems that apparently should make their lives easier.

New hires are expected to complete some of their details in the recruitment software, then, once offered a job — complete data capture in another system or on paper, get content as PDFs and notifications on email, receive phone calls from the HR team and try and self-assimilate all of this together to form a perspective of the company.

REASON 2: Manual processes

Processes that depend on humans are always more susceptible to failure. In most organizations, employee onboarding relies a great deal on human intervention. However, due to the disparities in delivery of the same function over and over again, every new hire receives a different experience.

For a very few number, everything works perfectly as they are welcomed to the organization. For most, manual HR & manager coordination results in delays, incomplete information or complete failures in processes.

And it does not take much — Imagine how happy a new hire would be when her manager talks to her about her interest in horse-riding and how he too learnt how to ride horses as a child! More compelling than saying “Welcome to the organization, faceless person.”

So, what’s next?

Technology can help in two ways — make the onboarding process easier with a single interface and help the employee truly“experience” onboarding. From my experience, here are a few things you could consider when looking to add more technology to help with the Systems Overload problem.

1. First and foremost, adopt HR Tech that can automate & improve the employee onboarding experience
2. Make sure the technology chosen to automate can also orchestrate processes across the other existing systems in your enterprise
3. And most importantly, always buy tech solutions that really impact the employee experience. Always look at it from the employee’s view and not the organization’s view.

As an aside, the advantage of having a completely integrated infrastructure gives you much better insights. Data is the most valuable asset you have. A single view of the employee data can lead to insights that help in making leadership, training and investment decisions.

I would love to know what your thoughts are on the multiple systems that drive the HR process today and the lack of a single view point on the entire employee onboarding process? How do you manage it at your organization?