How will RPA Improve the Employee Onboarding Process?

Are you looking at onboarding a new employee? The employee onboarding process across IT organizations is the first impression that an organization gives to new hires, and it can actually make or break their experience with the organization. No matter how many times someone switches jobs, starting a new one is always overwhelming. All the fresh faces and new daily ritual tasks always take a lot of time to get used to. Additionally, the cost to replace salaried employees is an average of 6-9 months’ salary.

However, this onboarding experience must be simple. Organizations can use a better approach to streamline and simplify the onboarding experience for employees. If we talk about employee onboarding in an IT organization, right from offer acceptance to six months check-in and everything else in between, there is a lot of administrative work, unnecessary stress, and coordination for new hires to wrap their heads around. And if your IT organization is not in the right place and working on the right process, then challenges are evident.

But how do you make employee onboarding smooth and hassle-free? Is there anything that you can do to ease some of the burdens on HR teams in an IT organization? Let’s discover the answer to smooth employee onboarding in an IT organization.

What is the Employee Onboarding Process and its Challenges?

A successful employee onboarding process requires developing and implementing strategies to transform promising potential employees into high-performing employees. The employee onboarding process begins the second you make an offer, and it continues until the employee is operating efficiently in their role. Also, the onboarding process includes basically every activity that takes place within a particular time frame, right from the orientation program and training strategy to the performance metrics cycle and feedback style.

Performing all these processes requires a lot of manual effort, time, and focus. Also, IT service desk agents have to go through multiple challenges and roadblocks, like accessing data collected from new hires, verifying data, updating data in the system, and enabling data access to new hires. As per a report around 12% of employees agree that their company offers decent employee onboarding experience,

Removing these challenges indeed requires a solution and technology that takes care of all the repetitive processes and gives employees ample time to focus on quality work and the decision-making process.

RPA & AI- The Answer to Improve Employee Onboarding Process in IT

Instead of the IT service desk handling the manual execution of the employee onboarding process right from selecting new hires to giving them access to company tools and data, the RPA bot can automate the repetitive process and give the service desk ample time. Using technologies like machine learning, OCR, and NLP, along with RPA, IT organizations can automate the process that requires decision-making. With an RPA bot implementation in employee onboarding, enterprises can-

• Program bot to send and share email letters to employees
• Create a self-service portal for data and tool access
• Review & verify data using OCR and Intelligent Data processing
• Create a centralized data system for easy access
• Offer AI-agent assistance to help service desk agents
• Provide bot assistance for service ticket and query resolution
• Create cross-function process automation for easy coordination among HR, finance, and admin with IT

How do RPA and AI Bring Benefits to IT Organizations?

Employee onboarding is often considered a process closely related to the HR department in an IT organization. But, automating employee onboarding not only gives ample benefits and time to the HR department, but various departments like finance and admin can also get benefits from it. Moreover, RPA and AI make this possible by creating cross-function process automation to enable enterprises to do more with lower time investment. Let’s see how automating employee onboarding helps multiple departments like HR, finance, customer service, and others

1. Finance & Account

   In an IT organization, the accounts and finance departments walk new employees through payroll setup, benefits enrollment, retirement programs, stock benefits, and others. And enabling new hires to walk through these benefits account departments requires a lot of data access from multiple sources and multiple systems. Manually handling this volume of data, verifying it, and initiating allowances are time-consuming and error-prone. Accounting and finance departments can use RPA bots to autonomously –

   • Access to employees’ information and submit payment
   • Enable automated signup and account setup
   • Offer automated timesheet and time management system
   • Track inefficiencies in data and create match programs for employees

2. IT Team

   When a new employee joins the office, it’s an iterative process to give tools and data access to them. At this junction, using RPA, both IT teams in the back office can track employees’ allocation needs. For example, instead of IT teams handling the procurement of computers, ID card, VPN access, and WiFi, RPA bots can easily handle the iterative process to create an automated workflow to create-

   • Create checklists and task lists
   • Set deadlines
   • Send notifications and messages with additional resources
   • Gather metrics and track progress for real-time management
   • Identify process changes and document depreciation

3. HR Department

   The HR team is mostly entitled or closely related to new hires when they join the company. Verifying new employees’ data, adding information to the system, tracking employees’ performance, and contacting multiple departments to perform employee assessments. Manually performing these tasks is indeed a time-consuming and iterative process. Leveraging the RPA bot in the employee onboarding process HR team can-

   • Pinpoint areas of frustration and offer help
   • Identify areas for improvement
   • Track document opening and consumption
   • Create a custom learning path
   • Alert employees of potential flight risks
   • Increase the Chance of Retention

Why RPA in Employee Onboarding?

During the onboarding process, the HR team requires a lot of work, right from new hires joining to sharing the data access to them for workplace experience. An RPA bot can enhance the employee onboarding process and create a great employee experience. When mundane and repetitive tasks are delegated to RPA bots, HR staff can focus on more meaningful work. Hence, streamlining and optimizing employee onboarding with automation technologies like RPA and AI is the key to scaling employee and customer experience.