You might think hiring employees is tough, but onboarding them is the next hurdle you need to overcome when expanding your business. Welcoming employees to the organization, helping them learn the culture, completing the right documents, and undergoing the appropriate training takes hard work and effort.
Not only are employees being onboarded inside some offices, but other remote and hybrid work environments mean having robust software is essential for this process. You need a solution that can tick all the boxes so new employees feel they are having a great experience in their new roles.
When your business is rapidly expanding and you’re onboarding new hires daily, the employee onboarding software can help you automate essential processes and ensure that nothing gets missed. You are compliant, and the experience is consistent every time. Unfortunately, more than a third of HR professionals believe that inadequate technology leaves them unable to optimize their onboarding processes.
Benefits of Employee Onboarding
First of all, we’ll consider the benefit of effective employee onboarding for your business.
Increased Productivity
New hires are more productive more quickly when they are onboarded in the best way. They spend less time searching around for information and making guesses about how they are supposed to work and more time producing revenue-generating tasks, which is likely why you hired them in the first place.
Compliance Fulfillment
In many cases it will be legally required to onboard your new employees effectively, making sure they understand all of the relevant rules and regulations needed for them to perform their jobs safely and remain in compliance. Skipping comprehensive onboarding is not an option.
Elevated Employee Engagement
When onboarded correctly, employees are more engaged. A robust onboarding process means employees learn the important elements of your company such as how they are expected to work, the primary tools used for project management and communication, and the hierarchy of their team.
Enhanced Retention
69% of employees say they would have stayed with a company for more than three years if they had experienced great onboarding. This means effective onboarding has the potential to radically reduce staff turnover by ensuring that employees are adequately welcomed to the business and introduced to their new roles.
Choosing the right Employee Onboarding Software
So now you understand the benefits of an effective onboarding program, we’re going to look at the features you need to look for in your new employee onboarding software.
Self-Service Functions
One of the main purposes of adopting employee onboarding software is to automate certain processes and this requires a level of self-service on the part of the users. If employees continually run into problems and seek tech support, this undermines the value of the software in providing a self-service onboarding process.
User-Friendly Experience
Your software must have an intuitive user experience both on the side of the administrator of the software and the end users (your new employees). It must be obvious and easy to use the software, or you will need help with adoption rates since employees may give up before they can complete the process.
Robust Training and Development Tools
Your employees aren’t just going to be checking boxes and uploading documents – they will likely require comprehensive training and development that gets them up to speed with their new role. Adopting a knowledge-sharing platform is therefore an important part of finding the right onboarding software.
Streamlined Workflow Automation
Reclaiming precious time is one of the purposes of investing in employee onboarding software, so you’ll want to automate certain workflows rather than completing them manually. For example, if an employee fails to complete a section of the onboarding program, this could trigger a follow-up email prompting them to return to the platform
Adaptability and Personalization
Every organization is different, and what you require from your employee onboarding software will differ depending on your requirements. One company might require its new employees to complete workflows or how-to tutorials, while another might need their hires to watch a series of videos. Flexibility and customization options in your onboarding software are key.
Seamless Integration Capabilities
Linking your tools together takes the whole experience of using onboarding software to another level, adding functionality such as messaging apps, accounting software, and more. When you integrate your tools, you benefit from the best of each solution.
Communication and Collaboration Tools
Enabling your employees to communicate and collaborate through your onboarding tool is a great way to enhance productivity. Onboarding need not be lonely when employees can connect, share experiences, and ask questions of others in the same boat.
Cultural Integration and Engagement Tools
The previous point links closely to culture and engagement features such as the ability to share blog posts, complete quizzes, and otherwise gamify the onboarding process to make it more engaging. Digital tools such as employee onboarding software are perfect for this purpose.
Top 6 Employee Onboarding Software
1. Document360
If you’re looking for employee onboarding software, then look no further than Document360. Primarily an AI-powered knowledge base, Document360 can be used as onboarding software to help your employees learn all the facts when beginning a new role. By using Document360 to share important documents with employees starting at your company, you can improve onboarding, speed up productivity, and enhance collaboration.
Document360 is unlike other onboarding software it helps you to create knowledge and share it with the relevant parties. Onboarding is a knowledge-intensive time in which new hires have an abundance of questions that can easily be answered using a highly searchable knowledge base.
Companies that choose Document360 for their onboarding can benefit from increased engagement and retention as employees have access to the information they need to flourish. Security and reliability are a top priority for Document360, as businesses know they can rely on the software to deliver an optimized onboarding experience.
2. Trainual
If you’ve been researching employee onboarding software, you may well have come across Trainual. Trainual is onboarding and training software that offers a great experience when it comes to creating SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and automating the employee onboarding process.
If you need to capture process documentation, you can use Trainual for templates, knowledge bases, policies, and wikis. Trainual is AI-driven, enabling you to write content more easily and also capture your screen so you can document processes step-by-step.
3. Zavvy
Zavvy is another people enablement platform that you can use to preboard and onboard your new hires and schedule events in your company. Zavvy’s extensive library of onboarding templates makes your job easier, while AI allows you to draft detailed career paths, create engaging training courses, and develop smart growth plans.
Zavvy is an end-to-end tool for HR that allows you to unite onboarding, performance, analytics, and training inside the same platform. Engaging your employees with Zavvy means you boost retention, cut costs, and achieve increased efficiencies in HR.
4. Enboarder
Enboarder is an employee experience platform for HR teams that helps you automate the onboarding process. Zavvy makes it fun for your employees to be introduced to your company with an intuitive platform and scalable, personalized employee journeys.
Enboarder is also a collaboration tool that helps your employees socialize with one another. Employees feel embedded in your culture, even if they work remotely, reducing staff turnover. Employees are engaged and included from day one, and ticking all the boxes required for onboarding every new staff member.
5. Kallidus (Formerly Sapling)
Businesses can use Kallidus to onboard their employees in a remote setting and scale formerly manual and clunky processes. Automate your workflows while creating personalized experiences for new employees entering your company.
Admin time is drastically reduced when you introduce automated checks and ensure that employees complete every single part of your onboarding process. Kallidus offers numerous features to increase the likelihood that your employees are engaged and feel part of the team.
6. Freshteam
Freshteam is HR software by Freshworks, enabling you to automate mundane tasks and drastically improve your productivity. Freshteam can be used for onboarding because you can use it to automate manual hiring workflows, complete onboarding checklists, automate follow-ups, and maintain a digital paper trail so you remain compliant.
Freshteam has advanced reporting to allow you to work out the kinks in the onboarding process. Not just restricted to onboarding, Freshteam offers capabilities for all manner of HR tasks that also involve interviewing, managing vacation time, and organizing the employee directory. By storing your employee records all in one place using Freshteam, you can reduce data silos and easily retrieve data.
Case Study of Successful Employee Onboarding Software
Outreach.io successfully used Kallidus to overhaul its onboarding process by eliminating manual processes and centralizing. During a period of high growth, Outreach.io wanted to onboard 1,100 employees using a team of only two people managing all HR activities. Kallidus enabled them to achieve this scale and vastly improve the employee onboarding experience.
Top Strategies for Boosting Employee Onboarding Effectiveness
Once you’ve decided upon your employee onboarding software, consider implementing these strategies to maximize its effectiveness.
Define Transparent Onboarding Objectives
Work out what you want to achieve with your onboarding software so you can build processes that support your objectives. Sometimes, there is no clear line between pre-boarding and later employee engagement, but someone needs to be responsible for what you define as onboarding.
Offer Continuous Training Options
Use your onboarding software to provide ongoing training opportunities for employees seeking professional development to keep them engaged and committed. You can use your onboarding software to share information and provide learning resources, promoting a knowledge culture in your organization.
Seek Input for Constant Improvement
Actively solicit feedback from your onboarding tool so you can continually improve your processes and ensure you are providing a great employee experience. Illogical or contradictory steps in the onboarding process may lead to dissatisfaction and confusion, so take pains to eliminate them.
Promote Interaction and Collaborative Efforts
Employees who interact and collaborate using your software build lasting relationships that span the company and create a cohesive culture. Encourage employees to create connections in your onboarding software rather than simply working solo.
Support Mentorship Programs
Mentorship between more experienced employees and new hires can prove fruitful because they can pass on their skills and knowledge. Onboarding software can create these connections between mentor and mentee, facilitating this knowledge exchange at very little cost to the company.
Wrapping up
Businesses that invest in employee onboarding software set themselves up for success from the first day of their new hire’s relationship with your company. Onboarding is a crucial time when you establish expectations, impart culture, and share important documents, convincing your new employees that they made the right decision to work for you.
Employee onboarding software can offer a myriad of features that work best for different companies, from AI to automation, to collaboration. If you choose a solution like Document360, you have access to an internal knowledge base that you can use to share vital onboarding documents.
