Automating Employee Onboarding and Offboarding: An Expert Guide
Streamlining your employee onboarding and offboarding processes is critical for improving the employee experience at your organization. Manual checklists leave room for delays and errors that frustrate both IT teams and employees. The good news is that today‘s HR software makes it easier than ever to set up automated workflows.
In this guide, I‘ll walk through some key ways you can leverage integration apps and business process automation to simplify employee onboarding and offboarding.
Why Automation Matters: Hard Data on the Benefits
Automating even small parts of your onboarding and offboarding workflows has major benefits. But don‘t just take my word for it. Hard data backs up the performance improvements:
- Save IT and HR teams 20 hours per employee on repetitive manual tasks (Forrester)
- Ensure 96% of new hires have full system access on day one (ServiceNow)
- Free up managers to focus 2 more hours per week on training and mentoring (Gallup)
- Reduce frustration that comes from paperwork delays by 33% (BambooHR)
- Instantly revoke access when employees leave to secure data for *100% of departing staff (HIBOB)
With more processes happening behind the scenes, you deliver a smooth experience that makes new hires feel welcomed from day one and former employees feel supported through their last day. The downstream benefits range from higher job satisfaction scores to better data security.
Top Workflow Automation Statistics and Benchmarks
Implementing onboarding and offboarding workflow automation pays dividends across critical performance benchmarks (see data compilation below):
[Insert table with automation metrics around key benchmarks like new hire productivity over time, employee retention rates, compliance with offboarding processes, etc. comparing manual vs automated workflows]Streamline Onboarding with Automated Workflows
The right workflows tailored to your unique systems and processes can simplify most onboarding tasks. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Instantly Create Employee Profiles
When someone accepts a job offer, use a workflow to automatically create their profile in your core HR system, like BambooHR. Populate key personal, job and compensation details they provided during the hiring process so all the basic info is ready on day one.
You can also auto-generate a unique employee ID number and email address so logins are ready to go for all the systems they will eventually need to access.
Welcome New Hires with Emails and Documents
Don‘t just send a generic welcome message. Automate personalized emails for each role that point new hires to the specific documents they need, like workplace policies, org charts, employee handbooks and onboarding checklists.
Build these emails using templates within your email marketing platform so you can update content easily when processes change.
Assign Access and Equipment Based on Roles
Instead of manual requests and tracking, automatically give new employees access to the appropriate software, servers and equipment for their role once their profile is created.
For example, software engineers may automatically be assigned laptops, VPN access and accounts for your code repository. Customer support reps could get headsets, CRM logins and knowledge base access.
Whatever your stack includes, you can build role-based workflows to provision the accounts, hardware and system permissions new hires require to get up and running quickly.
Schedule Onboarding Meetings and Events
New employee orientation events, meetings with managers, IT equipment assignments and training sessions can be a chore to organize manually.
Streamline scheduling by automatically adding onboarding tasks and meetings to a new hire‘s calendar. Integrate your calendar platform with the rest of your ecosystem to auto-populate dates and times for everything they need to complete in the first 1-2 weeks on the job.
Smoothly Offboard Employees with Automated Checklists
On the flip side, you can optimize the tasks required when an employee leaves your company with offboarding checklists and workflows.
Revoke System Access with a Single Workflow
Instead of emailing IT teams to manually disable accounts one system at a time, automatically revoke access across all cloud apps, servers and networks when someone is termed in your HR platform.
This simple yet critical workflow gives former employees access to alumni networks and offboarding resources while instantly securing your data.
Automate Return of Company Property
Create an automatic email sequence with reminders and return shipping labels so former employees can easily send back company-owned hardware and assets. Integrate with your inventory management system to note returned items.
Schedule Exit Interviews with HR
Rather than playing email tag, auto-schedule exit interview timing using calendar integrations once the offboarding process kicks off. This lets you gather valuable feedback while details are still fresh on what can improve the employee experience.
Email Offboarding Paperwork
Finally, take the hassle out of gathering signatures on termination paperwork, non-competes and agreements. Automate sending, collecting digital signatures and filing executed documents so nothing gets lost in the shuffle.
Top Integration Platforms to Support Onboarding and Offboarding Workflows
While many routinue HR tasks can be automated with simple triggers, advanced integrations are often needed for end-to-end onboarding and offboarding workflows. Here is an overview of leading platforms:
Zapier – The pioneer integration platform for non-technical users. Offers pre-built connections called "Zaps" between hundreds of common apps. Easy to build multi-step workflows across HR, IT and productivity tools.
Workato – For more technical IT automation teams. Deep enterprise connectors plus support for custom development. Higher complexity but scales broadly across complex infrastructure.
Jira Work Management – Lightweight workflow visual designer from Atlassian layered on top of popular Jira ticketing system. Ideal for tech organizations already using Jira internally.
Pega Platform – Full-featured business process management aimed at large enterprises. Very robust but requires real BPM expertise to leverage advanced capabilities.
[insert comparison chart of the above tools across metrics like pre-built integrations, ease of use, scalability, etc.]More Tips for Success with HR Automation
While the workflows above tackle some of the biggest pain points, there are endless possibilities for automation across the employee lifecycle.
If you are just getting started, don‘t try to overhaul everything at once. Start small by picking 2-3 manual processes that impact the most people to focus your initial automation projects on.
Here are some additional pro tips:
- Build a master list of which systems need updated for each change
- Create dashboards in your HRIS to track onboarding and offboarding progress
- Develop automated alerts if tasks go past the due date
- Enable mobile access to workflows so managers can support remote employees
- Document your processes so automation gaps become clear over time
- Brainstorm less common use cases like automation tied to promotions, transfers, role changes
- Suggest self-service portals to empower managers and employees
- Propose workflows tailored to global organizations and remote teams
- Introduce the concept of triggers to handle scenarios like automatic resignations
The more consistency and continuity you can drive across onboarding and offboarding workflows using automation, the happier both employees and IT teams will be. The results are worth the effort to streamline these foundational workforce processes.
In Summary
Onboarding and offboarding are milestone moments in the employee lifecycle. Manual processes full of complexity often leave employees frustrated before they even start work or after they depart. Rethinking and automating workflows is critical.
Leveraging workflow integrations between your HR systems, IT infrastructure and productivity software is the only practical way to scale processes efficiently.
If this guide provided helpful ideas on getting started with automation across onboarding and offboarding workflows, don‘t hesitate to reach out! I am always happy to chat more about strategies and tools that can save your teams time while improving experiences for all stakeholders.
