ITSM for a Simplified Employee Onboarding Process

As per research published by Hosting Advice, over 56% of employees who felt disengaged at work marked inadequate training as the key reason for it. Over 53% of employees felt that they would be able to perform better at their jobs if they received adequate training. And over 31% of respondents to the research survey stated that they had to quit their jobs less than six months after being hired. Olivia was one of those last set of employees at her first job out of graduate school.

Olivia had worked with the Peace Corps and United Nations right after studying classic literature at her undergrad college in Boston. She always had an eye for spotting what elements have the highest value in a given system, and based on her observational skills; she did great work at both her organizations. However, to propel her career goals, she joined a business school and graduated with an MBA in finance. Right after it, she was hired by a Fortune 500 company in the FP&A Division.

Not So Warm Welcome

Olivia was excited about her new role. She planned to deploy her budgeting and financial planning skills at the firm, and later pivot into another non-profit or start her operation. Little did she know that she will have to take a detour because of a small hiccup at her first job – the firm did not have a cohesive employee onboarding program.

Since there was no induction, Olivia found herself in deep waters right on the first day. She was accustomed to working on a Windows machine while everyone at the firm was using Mac OS so she was not as productive as her teammates despite having great fundamental skills. She tried raising the matter to the IT team, but she did not know how to use the ITSM system and couldn’t find the time to travel to the other side of the campus and register an issue in person with the IT team.

Another time, she decided to explore the ITSM system to get help to recover an important document that she accidentally while looking for some historical budgeting plans. But as she wasn’t trained, she could not figure out how to raise a request to the IT team and had to go to her boss for help. Turns out he was also baffled, and then had to call the reception to contact the IT team for a resolution.

Olivia felt that the young and dynamic people working at the firm were a sign of the firm’s open culture. Later she realized it was the aftermath of a very high attrition rate. In less than six months of joining, she also decided to leave the firm.

If You Want To Fly, You have to go through Onboarding

Fortunately, she found an opening relevant to her profile at another firm and immediately took the job. At her new job, she was relieved to know that there was a proper induction planned. To her surprise, every day, she would get automated emails from the firm, telling her more about the culture and facilities at the premises. She even got an email from the IT team directing her to important links in the Knowledge Base. The HR Team had also sent her forms via email, and she had to fill the data digitally.

Understanding that all the processes were automated using an ITSM tool, Olivia could sense the significance of efficiency in the firm. On her first day of joining, she was shown how to use the ITSM system for onboarding processes. It already had her account created, and since she was new, the IT and HR teams gave her a guided session on how to operate it. She also learned how to communicate with other teams, access information, ask for authorization, and update data – all integrated into a seamless system.

As a test of the organization, she would ask everyone she met about how long they had been with the firm. Over 75% of them said they had been at the firm for over half-a-decade and were happy to continue. She took a sigh of relief and was happy with her new role, finally!

Leveraging ITSM for Creating Onboarding Plans

As we see from Olivia’s experience, a largely automated plan can be created using an ITSM solution to help employees perform well on their jobs from the minute they enter the office. Using a Service Catalogue can be a great way to achieve this.

With the right ITSM tool in place, a licensed service-provider who generally happens to be the HR director in most cases can set up tasks and workflows for every stage of the onboarding process.

Understanding and defining a Service Catalogue is quite easy. If you have the right authority, you can create a concurrent or conditional task assignment that takes into account the sequential inputs entered by the user.

For instance, a conditional task may answer questions like – does an employee need a new computer system? If yes, will it be a Mac or a PC? And so on. Depending on the data, the IT team will get the notification for the inventory, the HR team will take care of the documentation, and the entire authorization process will be automated using a simple Service Catalogue-driven onboarding process. It also gives you the traceable data points to ensure all software and hardware licenses are taken care of in due time.

Here is how you can create such processes:

1. Workflow: The HR Manager will initiate the onboarding process. Using the self-service portal, she will send a digital form to the hiring manager and the employee asking for the necessary information. This information can carry data like the type of technology and software they seek, and so on. Once all the data is aggregated, it will be used by the IT team to execute the onboarding request.
2. Setting Up Digital Forms: The administration team configures the onboarding forms by adding items from the Service Catalogue, which is then used by the HR team and the reporting manager. For instance, the manager can choose items like digital IDs, parking authorization, etc.
3. Setting Up Tasks and Creating Onboarding Checklist: A list of onboarding tickets will be created to be assigned to personnel in different business units. Once the information relevant to each group has been assigned, the items relevant to the associated fields can be added to the onboarding form.

Establish an Onboarding System to Avoid Giving ‘Olivia-Like’ Induction Programs

This happens more frequently than most of us would like to admit. The primary reason behind such profound debacles in setting up a proficient onboarding system is that there is hardly any cross-functional collaboration between teams and managers. This does not come from a place of the lack of will to collaborate. It’s just that the teams don’t have the right tools in hand to streamline all processes.

A robust ITSM tool plays an important role in enabling the IT, HR, and Finance teams to work in cohesion. If they are unable to collaborate for onboarding new employees, the entire employee experience will go for a toss and result in obvious high attrition. Here are some key errors you can avoid to retain people like Olivia in your firm:

1. Don’t Wait for the Employee’s First Day: Any amount of time available between an employee accepting an offer to an employee joining the firm can be used to integrate her into the organization and its systems using the built-in Knowledge Base of an ITSM tool. Expectations for the employees can be set on the very first day of their work and they can be brought up to speed with the onboarding processes like accounts and documentation.
2. Avoid Using Physical Forms: There is no reasonable rationale to use paper-based forms. They are time-consuming, not friendly to the environment, and take up more resources for storage. Instead, digital forms integrated into the ITSM platform can be used to save valuable resources and time.
3. Keep the Workplace Ready: This is where it helps to have some form of collaboration between the HR, Finance, and IT teams. With the right ITSM solution, workstations can be made ready with the computer, software, applications, and necessary third-party licenses even before an individual comes in for her first day at work.With Multi-level Approval Workflow, all the approvals and integrations necessary for the equipment can be taken from the respective teams. This way, no time is wasted in keeping the employee stalled while authorizations are being collected.
4. Establish Expectations and Follow Up: The employer-employee relationship extends in both directions. As an employer, you can ensure that the employee understands what is expected of her. At the same time, you can take feedback from the employee on what her onboarding experience was like. This can help you optimize the new employee experience.

Benefits of Having a Comprehensive Onboarding Process

1. Avoid Inefficient Communication: ITSM-driven onboarding systems eliminate the need for verbal communication across inefficient channels. Instead, it creates an automated query that collects information from different sources and intuitively aggregates it to keep the system ready for the new personnel.
2. Inclusivity for Efficiency: Much more than an employer branding attribute, inclusivity in the system ensures that the information necessary to be collected by all the sources like HR, Finance, IT agents, and even new employees is collected efficiently. Any new ticket is quickly detected and resolved by the IT team.
3. Optimize Employee Experience: Such streamlined onboarding begins the employee engagement process on the right foot. It eventually amplifies the employee morale and improves the retention rate.

The Onboarding process automated with ITSM unifies the entire set of business processes across all functions. It ensures that no team is working in a silo and sources the information necessary to keep the IT systems efficient. Eventually, these systems pay off in the form of higher productivity and seamless collaboration across functions like IT, HR, Finance, Administration, Compliance, and so on. To know more about how ITSM can help you produce value for your firm outside of IT, click here.