Posts

Onboarding New Employees At Multiple Locations

in /by

“You just need a little time to get your feet wet.” Onboarding new employees could be described as the process whereby a new employee gets her proverbial feet wet. It’s a process of discovering something for the first time, overcoming fear and anxiety, and gradually becoming familiar, comfortable with a new experience. It’s a slow, measured lowering into the water–starting with the feet. A summer dip in the pool.

Sadly, far too many new employees never experience that placid scene. Their experience is quite the opposite. It’s more akin to Uncle Larry running across the the pool deck in all his gut jostling glory, scooping up nieces, nephews, unaware bystanders– and an unfortunately placed inflatable–before lunging mercilessly into the deep end with all wrapped in his arms. “Uncle Larry I can’t swim!”

Of course, the “sink or swim” approach works at some places. When it’s planned. And when it involves experienced swimmers. And when Uncle Larry isn’t in charge. But regardless of whether your employee onboarding process is measured and methodical or fast and furious, it becomes exceedingly difficult to manage outcomes when onboarding employees at multiple locations.

Employee Onboarding without a lifeguard

No Guard On Duty

Onboarding new employees at multiple locations is a challenge because it’s rarely possible to have a person dedicated to guarding the process at each location. Things get dropped, forms don’t get signed (or counter-signed), documents are lost, important instructions are delivered secondhand or not at all…the list goes on. So for organizations who must onboard employees across multiple locations, many must default to the “sink or swim” approach because they simply do not have the HR staff to facilitate anything else.

However, when no one is around to determine whether a new employee is sinking or swimming in the early stages of employment, a number of negative outcomes can result. These include:

Inconsistent Service or Operations

New employees–to a business’s customers–are just employees. Customers don’t care if they are receiving subpar customer service from a new employee–it’s still subpar service, and it’s not appreciated. When new employees are thrown into a position without adequate preparation, operations and customer service will suffer.

Low Employee Morale

Perhaps a new employee is doing well, but no one is affirming her work in the early weeks. She thinks she’s doing well, but she’s not too sure and so anxious. Over time, that anxiety turns into ambivalence. Ambivalence will soon become resentment. Resentful employees don’t stick around; they start looking for new opportunities.

Low Productivity

Maximizing productivity depends on consistently executing optimized processes efficiently. New employees who are poorly onboarded may lack the knowledge or motivation (sometimes both) to execute a process efficiently, even if that process is optimal. In other words, bad employee onboarding may lead to bad business outcomes.

Rapid Employee Turnover

The initial results of bad employee onboarding are experienced by the employee and felt by the customer; however, eventually this all comes back to injure the employer–specifically, the employer’s brand. A negative employer brand makes it increasingly difficult to grow a business and hire new employees. And maintaining a constant hiring cycle with minimal growth is expensive and ultimately unsustainable for many small- to medium-sized businesses. Hand-in-hand with low employee morale, rapid employee turnover can have a lasting effect on an organization.

Employee Onboarding Pool Rules

Planning Your Pool Party

For organizations with multiple “pools” of employees spread across a geographic area, hiring an HR representative for each location is not likely feasible. So those organizations must find a way to ensure that they are consistently and effectively onboarding new employees at multiple locations. Here are a couple options:

Train Location Managers In Onboarding

Additional onboarding-related training for location managers could equip them with the skills to successfully handle new employee onboarding themselves. In a perfect world, managers would welcome and execute this with open arms, but in the real world it would be scoffed and scorned into oblivion (ain’t nobody got time for that).

Onboard In One Location

A more sophisticated, complex approach to onboarding could involve moving the process to one location. This would see new employees spending their first week at one location, learning the ropes, and then “graduating” to new locations after the onboarding period had ended. With perfect execution this could work too, but who’s to say that a new employee’s experience at the second location wouldn’t differ from her first?

Although the above approaches may work under certain circumstances, the introduction of onboarding software easily tops both.

Employee Onboarding Belly Flop

Cannonball!

To really make a splash during the new employee onboarding process, employers should seek to eliminate monotony and simplify complexity. Employee onboarding software can do this, and for organizations with employees at multiple locations, it has the added benefit of reducing the need for HR staff at every location. How?

By providing tools to digitally manage tasks, documents, and forms, employee onboarding software makes possible the following:

Enter Once, Populate Many

Once an employee enters information into a field, that information automatically populates other fields and documents that require it. No more entering your name and address multiple times.

Electronic Signatures

Collecting, counter-signing, and filing documents can be eliminated completely. Electronic signatures allow for documents and forms to be processed and stored digitally, saving time and resources–and avoiding the headaches of paper chasing.

Task Assignment and Completion Triggers

Schedule required onboarding tasks to be assigned contingent upon the completion of other tasks. This allows an organization to control the timing and pace of the process, which helps ensure that new hires feel comfortable and not overwhelmed.

E-Verify Integration

Onboarding software that features an E-Verify integration drastically reduces the time needed to verify the employment eligibility of new hires. Using information the employee submits electronically via the required Form I-9, software with this integration submits the information to E-Verify, where the information is checked against a federal database and a status returned almost immediately.

Bring The Employee Onboarding Process Alive!

Employee onboarding software succeeds in bringing consistency and quality to the new employee onboarding process by centralizing control of the process in the hands of the Human Resources Department. By automating many of the monotonous and complex tasks required of both new employees and HR, the software provides human resources professionals with the space and time to bring the employee onboarding process alive.

So the next time your organization is analyzing employee turnover metrics or brainstorming ideas for employee engagement and retention, take the time review your employee onboarding process. Are you inviting new hires to enjoy the cool, calm waters of your organization at reasonable, comfortable pace? Or are you bum rushing them into Uncle Larry’s wild pool party?

 

ExactHire offers hiring and employee onboarding software to growing small- to medium-sized businesses that are looking to efficiently attract, hire, and retain exceptional talent for continued growth. To learn more about ExactHire’s HR solutions, please submit a brief contact form.

Image credit: Document-management-workflow (Click on image/Press L for a full view) by Saad Faruque (contact)

No Lifeguard On Duty by Myrtle Beach TheDigitel (contact)

Belly Flop Contest by Steven Depolo (contact)

Pool Rules Girls Pool Party Lourdie by prayitnophotography (contact)

Time-Saving Strategies for Employee Onboarding

in /by

“I need more hours in the day to get everything done,” is something I used to constantly think. For Human Resources professionals, this thought often comes to mind during the onboarding phase of a new hire. There is so much to do, and so little time to do it.

The only way to get more hours in a day is to shed current “time-consumer” activities or to sleep less–and let’s be clear, my sleep hours are protected like Fort Knox. That leaves shedding current time-consumers, and even that doesn’t seem like a logical solution because those things still need to get done. So what’s the solution?

You need to have a strategy for approaching your work and optimizing your time. My two favorite time-saving strategies are called “One Touch” and the “4 D’s”.

One Touch

The One Touch strategy is something that most frequently applies to paperwork. It’s a way to cut through clutter. When you encounter a piece of paper, your goal is to touch it once. I like to think about it like my mailbox: when I get an item, I either toss it into the trash before entering the house, put the mail in the “to be paid” tray, or take action on it immediately. Same thing can be said for the papers that land on my desk or in my inbox.

4D’s

Most people consider “4D’s” and “One Touch” the same strategy, but whichever strategy works for you, and whatever you would like to call it is a-okay by me. Here are the 4D’s:

  1. Do it. These are typically important and urgent items with short-term deadlines. Take care of it and mark it DONE. Think of someone who brings you a completed I-9. That’s a “Do It” task.
  2. Dump it. These items are unnecessary clutter and unimportant. Think of sales fliers for items your company will not partake or purchase. Take that to the trash.
  3. Delegate it. If someone else possesses the skill set to handle an item, pass that item on. Think of an IT competency questionnaire that will result in the IT department training a new employee. Delegate the submission and scheduling of the IT training directly to the IT department.
  4. Defer it. This is an item that you need to do, no one else can do it, and the deadline is not soon. Make sure that by deferring an item, you do not become a bottleneck in the process. Think of a new hire that submits an apparel form, but you only order new hire apparel once a month. You defer this item until the regularly scheduled moment.

To help manage your employee onboarding process a bit better, implement one of the above strategies. Whichever strategy you choose will be better than none at all. For extra assistance in implementing these strategies, consider investing in technology as part of your total time-saving solution. Onboarding Software can help with workflow and reminders, and it will require fewer touches of virtual pieces of paper.

 

ExactHire works with small- and medium-sized organizations to help them leverage technology in hiring. For more information about our employee onboarding software, try our pricing estimator and/or schedule a live demo with us today.

Image credit: Clock on East Montague by North Charleston (contact)

Why Wait Longer for Electronic Submission and Storage of the Form I-9?

in /by

I recently read an article on SHRM’s website, “USCIS Publishes Proposed Form I-9” by FosterQuan, that indicated that in late March of this year, a notice to collect input regarding proposed revisions to the Form I-9 Employment Eligibility Verification was published in the Federal Register. The article noted that one of the changes seems to suggest that the future version of the form may 1) allow individuals to complete it electronically; and, 2) allow employers to store the Form I-9 electronically.

Currently, the Form I-9, available for download from the USCIS (U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services), does allow one to type information into most fields with the exception of the signature fields on the form. As a result, many employers are still printing out a hard copy for signature by both the employee and the employer representative, and then filing the hard copy away in (an often dusty) file cabinet. If this sounds like your organization, you know that it takes time and money to print out forms, shuffle them back and forth between people (and locations) for signature, and then actually get them filed into the appropriate cabinet (and isn’t that item on the top of everyone’s priority list?).

The good news is that for nearly a couple of years now, the government has given its blessing to employers who wish to electronically sign, submit and store their I-9 forms assuming the proper security guidelines are followed. This ruling was effective on August 23, 2010 and more information may be found in the Federal Register. So why wait any longer to use a form that may be signed and stored electronically?

Electronic signature and storage of the Form I-9, and all other new hire employment paperwork, can already be accomplished through the use of employee onboarding software. Here are some advantages to making your organization’s onboarding process paperless:

  • Onboarding Central Employee ViewEliminate the struggles associated with collecting paperwork from many employees across many different locations. All employees submit their paperwork electronically from the convenience of their own location. If individuals are unable to complete all forms in one sitting, they may easily log back in at a later time to finish.
    • Tip: Depending on the type of paperwork you are collecting, you may even prefer that some employees submit paperwork online prior to their first day of employment.
  • Take the guesswork and the redundancy out of employee onboarding paperwork. Instead of new hires having to navigate through a stack of different forms, they may answer a series of simple questions and that information will be used to automatically populate all of the required forms.
  • Onboarding Central Administrator ViewEnsure that data is collected and stored in a secure, web-based environment. With the proper administrative login credentials, information can then be accessed from any computer with an internet connection.
  • Continue to follow government guidelines regarding the completion of the Form I-9.
    • New hires will submit information that populates the employee section and then electronically sign the Form I-9.
    • Then, HR administrators will process new I-9’s electronically by reviewing and verifying employees’ acceptable documents to establish identity and employment authorization. Once this has been done, these employer representatives will electronically sign the form, as well.
  • Eliminate the frustration of receiving new employee paperwork that is missing important information. Use the employee onboarding software to require critical fields so that employees may not sign and submit their forms until all required fields are completed.
  • Change benefit vendors? No problem. Electronic forms for the new vendor(s) can easily be added and existing employee information may then populate the appropriate forms.
    • Then, employees may log back into the onboarding software to review, verify and sign any new or updated paperwork.

Here is a listing of just some of the employment forms that many organizations choose to incorporate into their web-based onboarding application:

  • Form I-9
  • Federal Form W-4
  • State tax forms
  • WOTC Form 8850
  • Direct deposit form
  • Emergency contact form
  • 401(k) enrollment form
  • Health insurance enrollment form
  • Long Term Disability insurance / Dental insurance enrollment form
  • Computer and Internet usage policy acknowledgement form
  • Confidentiality agreement form
  • Employee handbook acknowledgement form (with link to the employee handbook document)
  • Driver’s license check authorization form
  • New employee checklist form
  • Training schedule form
  • Continuous education program form
  • Payroll application user guide

So, are you ready to get rid of those dusty file cabinets in your office? For more information about ExactHire’s employee onboarding software, please contact us.