Ready, set, go!
Imagine that on your first day on the new job you already have your telephone, laptop, employee username/login, phone line and voice mailbox, employee email account, company iPhone, business cards, and name badge. In addition, you already have access to the appropriate databases and user groups. And to top it off—multiple departments across the organization have already been notified of your arrival. This is the ideal scenario for most organizations. As an employer, you want every new hire’s first day to be as reassuring and productive as possible.
Employee onboarding
Employee onboarding is best defined as a systematic and comprehensive approach to orienting a new employee process workflow to help them get on board. All of this requires coordination between HR, hiring managers, IT, facilities, and other parts of the organization.
Onboarding & provisioning the new hire
There are two parts to the employee onboarding process. The first part is known as employee onboarding, Wikipedia refers to it as “the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organizational contributors.” This part of the process includes HR’s protocol — company and departmental overviews, job expectations, policies and procedures, etc..
The second part of the onboarding process includes provisioning the new hire with the tangible and intangible items they will need to be productive. New hires need to have their workspaces fully provisioned with phones, computers, email accounts, and the appropriate database and application access as soon as possible.
Onboarding in large organizations
Large organizations must onboard and provision new employees quickly and efficiently in order to speed employee time-to-productivity. They need to be able to respond to onboarding and IT provisioning requests promptly in order to maintain an acceptable productivity level — especially imperative to organizations with many new hires and high employee turnover. If the employee onboarding and provisioning process is not fully automated, it can be tedious and time-consuming.
Benefits of automation
The benefits of automating onboarding and provisioning include less paperwork, reduced costs and increased efficiency. Automation also ensures accuracy — especially beneficial for compliance purposes — and provides a full audit trail if needed. Perhaps most importantly, new employees feel welcome and prepared in their new positions and are more confident they have the resources to quickly make an impact within the organization.
Automating Onboarding with Request Management
There are several ways to automate employee onboarding and provisioning, including purpose-built applications, but using a request management application is perhaps the simplest and most efficient way to do it.
Request management is the process of managing a request, from submission to follow up, in order to standardize and automate service delivery.
Request management is a key component of an actionable service catalog or service portal; it is the underlying workflow and processes that enable a service request to be reliably submitted, routed, approved, monitored, and fulfilled.
The benefits of using a request management application for employee onboarding include:
- Accelerate the time to employee productivity.
- Leverage a single configurable interface to orchestrate all employee onboarding and provisioning requests across multiple departments: HR, Payroll, IT, Telecom, Facilities, Security.
- Reduce costs due to inefficiency.
- Increase reliability and accuracy, and consistently assure legal compliance.
- Get visibility to audit trails for compliance and reporting purposes.
- Reduce human intervention to a minimum with user self-service.
The Kinetic Platform has the capability to do these things and more for your organization. With the power of enterprise-wide flexibility and task management simplification, these products are a valuable asset for organizations looking to increase overall efficiency.
In summary
Employee onboarding and provisioning activities that are coordinated and orchestrated with a request management application are improved in a number of ways. The automation of these processes has proved time and again it is worth the investment. Companies who make the decision to streamline their procedures are rewarded with consistent cost reduction, accuracy, reliability, and cross-departmental capabilities as well as increased employee productivity and satisfaction.
If you're ready to close holes in your existing onboarding and provisioning processes, it's time to call the experts at Kinetic Data. From ensuring tasks are routed to the right place at the right time to tracking system access for users and everything in between, our platform ensures your people are efficiently provisioned to get the job done. Contact us today!
NOTE: This is an updated version of a post previously published on the Kinetic Vision blog.
Cassy Lueneburg