Modern companies invest a lot of resources in finding new employees and, in turn, expect a return on investment. However,

• half of all senior employees within 18 months do not cope with a new position,

• half of all employees leave new jobs within the first 120 days,

• 80% of employees who quit in the first 6 months after starting work made this decision in the first 2 weeks in a new place, that is, during the adaptation period.

Employees who have been offered a good onboarding program are 69% more likely to stay with the company for up to 3 years.

Therefore, the process of adaptation is an important period in the relationship between the employee and the company, and its main purpose is to help the new person to get acquainted with the organization and its culture, get a clear idea of their working goals and establish good relations with colleagues. Further work and efficiency will depend on this. After all, starting work in a new place is always the stress of unfamiliar habits and surroundings.

There are common pain points in onboarding that most organizations experience: paperwork, boredom, information overload, cultural and role confusion, and a lack of feedback and personal interaction.

Modern IT makes it possible to use new adaptation approaches, which greatly simplify the work of HR services, namely:

• To provide a transparent scenario of immersion of an employee into work.

• Minimize the chaos created by paperwork.

• Reduce the costs associated with the adaptation of the employee.

• Reduce manual labor and human errors.

• Reduce the load on the HR department.

• Provide a positive experience for all new employees.

How do onboarding programs help HR and business?

Modern adaptation programs are based on the best international practices of HR services. And there are detailed studies on their positive impact on business as a whole.

Very often in companies, for example, in large retailers, you can see that there is one HR-specialist per store, even with high staff turnover. Therefore, such companies inevitably face the necessity to automate adaptation processes. Our company develops exactly such solutions. That's why we are ready to share our experience and show by example how it works. To solve this problem, we use Microsoft 365 ecosystem including Power Platform, Teams chat bots and Power BI. With this approach, employees get a single interface to interact with the company's internal services, as well as an adaptation assistant.

The solution includes several stages:

1) Preparing for the employee to go to work

Pre-training includes any interaction with a new employee from the moment he is hired until the start of work. Since employee engagement is part of job satisfaction and company loyalty, why not start this engagement ASAP? The business process of preparing for employee engagement begins approximately 1-2 weeks before going to work. HR creates a ticket in Microsoft Teams, which is approved by all responsible persons.

2) Appointment of a mentor

Organizations with successful adaptation programmes are assigned a mentor to each new employee. He becomes the entry point for building relationships and the available contact for solving issues. In doing so, the use of software, video, online collaboration groups and other digital tools makes the mentoring process more efficient, cost-effective and flexible without compromising the performance of the mentor himself.

3) Rule of the first day

On the 1st day of the employee's departure to work, a process should be automatically launched that sends a welcome letter: a message from a chatbot in Microsoft Teams and a letter in Outlook, including basic regulations, methods of receiving office supplies or forms, a checklist from a manager, a video tour by company and other useful links. This approach allows new hires to feel more confident and not feel abandoned.

4) Adaptation route

Hiring ends at the lowest level for most employees. To improve the adaptation process, during the first 120 days of the employee's work, the system sends training materials to the employee, organizes a chat with Buddy, which allows you to quickly resolve emerging issues, and regularly collects feedback on employee satisfaction.

5) Remote resolving of typical questions

The resolving of typical questions is integrated with the Knowledge Base, which is constantly updated by the responsible employee. It is a separate information website containing reference information, corporate documents, department pages and other wiki content. The Knowledge Base is connected to Teams by adding a tab with a link to the Teams channel or a chat-bot dialog.

6) ChatBot help

The chat-bot helps the employee to initiate requests remotely, and also knows how to process notification sending scenarios reflected in the business process description.

7) Chatbot surveys

This solution also implemented polling functionality in Microsoft Forms. The survey allows you to understand the general "well-being" of the newcomer and conduct a survey of employees.

8) Reporting and analytics

It is difficult to efficiently optimize employee onboarding without real data. In our solution, reports are displayed in the form of convenient and simple dashboards, which give a visual understanding of quantitative indicators (how many people are on probation or vacation), survey results, and the degree of employee satisfaction.

For what other industries is this solution relevant?

In addition to retail, such solutions are also relevant for other industries, for example, for e-commerce, banking, telecom, IT development, as well as for organizations with a high turnover of personnel.

Finally:

Of course, COVID has also influenced adaptation processes in many organizations. The period of the pandemic literally cut back offices from frontline colleagues. The new environment has accelerated the transition of such companies to automated employee onboarding solutions. But even if we remove the quarantine factor, it is important to understand that now we live in a world where everything is changing very quickly. And if earlier the classic 120 days were considered the adaptation period, today the adaptation process has become endless and requires a new approach using modern technologies.