The onboarding of new staff is often the most complex process faced by HR departments. With different teams specialised for workloads such as identity management, payroll, desktop provisioning and facilities access, a welcoming experience for new starters requires significant coordination across the organisation.
Furthermore, it is well known that the onboarding experience has a direct impact on business’ ability to retain staff. A frequently cited study by the Brandon Hall group from 2015 demonstrated this fact:
“Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. Companies with weak onboarding programs lose the confidence of their candidates and are more likely to lose these individuals in the first year”
Of course, the difficulties involved with onboarding mean that it is often a low priority when it comes to automation – access management is particularly neglected. In a 2022 report StrongDM found that 44% of responding organisations required four or more staff members to be involved in access requests. In terms of time taken, 29% reported that access requests were processed in hours, 21% in a matter of days, and 8% took weeks, significantly increasing the time taken for new employees to become productive.
To address these concerns, Specialised Human Resources applications are readily available – and these can be a valid choice for business. However, HR functions can also be performed by any general workflow automation platform. Here, we outline one such example, when Lida worked with one large organisation to develop an enterprise-wide automated onboarding solution using toolsets that were already in place – thereby requiring no additional investments in software or training.
Defining The Problem
Lida conducted an internal review of existing onboarding practice and found that:
Hiring managers would log onboarding requests too late, with little lead time for downstream teams to complete tasks before the employee’s first day
IT had limited staff – as a result they were focused on break/fix, which had created a backlog of several days for dealing with requests
Processes were not well-documented – this caused a high error rate in delivery of technical tasks like network and application access
The existing process only covered IT – other teams critical to onboard staff were often not engaged, significantly delaying tasks such as facilities and payroll
Hiring managers had no end-to-end, business wide view of the progress of their onboarding requests, meaning that they had no way of knowing that everything would be in place when their new hire arrived.
Service Design
Lida worked with the client to design an onboarding service that would include onboarding tasks across the enterprise.
Domain review
First, domain workshops were held so that teams and subject experts could share their knowledge of the various tasks required to onboard new staff, such as:
Their roles within the overall request
Information needed from the point of request submission, and from other departments
Touchpoints with other teams at each point in the process
Process Development
Next, Lida developed an improved onboarding process. This formalised a whole-of business approach which:
Included areas outside of IT into the workflow,
Established points of communication between teams, managers and (ultimately) the customer, and
Laid the basis for a single view of the entire onboarding experience.
Capability Review
A review was conducted to determine what relevant technologies and capabilities were already available in the client’s environment. A technology-agnostic approach, which makes use of previous investments in systems and expertise, can significantly reduce both the effort and cost of implementation.
Systems already in-place were:
SAP, for payroll and dedicated HR workloads
Alemba Service Manager (known to the client by its earlier brand, “vFire”), which provided a ready-made solution for portal-based self-service, smart forms, and a highly capable automated workflow engine and integration layer, and
VMware Realize Orchestrator for cross-system workflows, available to any organisation on the VMware platform.
Organisational Change Management
Despite making use of existing system, it was anticipated that such an all-encompassing project would present challenges in terms of business acceptance, as well as project management/delivery.
To manage this level of organisational change, the onboarding process was implemented iteratively over more than a year. This enabled the client to realise the benefits of some early 'quick wins' and, build the favour of key stakeholders, helping the project maintain momentum.
Solution
Figure 1 (below) describes the agreed onboarding workflow. Green boxes represent fully automated tasks at the time of project completion.
Task candidates for automation were identified at the completion of the design phase but weren’t all implemented immediately. This was in line with the organisational change strategy. Rather, manual activities were quickly swapped out with automated tasks as the project progressed through its phases. This ensured that as different teams were brought into the project implementation, they saw rapid improvement, without feeling overwhelmed by too much change.
Figure 1: The improved Onboarding workflow
Getting requests logged faster
Analysis had shown that, due to hiring managers’ workloads, onboarding requests were often logged late. This caused downstream issues for teams tasked with implementation.
Hiring more hiring managers wasn’t on the table – and, perhaps perversely, would only make the situation even worse in the short term.
However, during conversations with HR staff, they had explained that a partial SAP record was created for each new starter, immediately upon hiring.
So, Lida developers built a service that triggers a new request in Alemba Service Manager as soon as the partial SAP record is created, and pushes the information across into the request, through ASM’s REST-based API.
Improving hiring manager engagement
SAP provides only a partial record containing name, start date, job title, and manager. This is enough to initiate the onboarding workflow, but to achieve an end-to-end solution more information is required, including:
What application licenses should to be assigned,
Whether a standard desktop or high-spec laptop should be provided,
Assignment of mobile devices, and
Allocation of corporate credit cards.
These decisions are made by hiring managers. Therefore, once the request is initiated from SAP, managers receive an email prepopulated with the SAP information, and a link to a smart portal form which collects this additional information.
While we’re still dependent upon HR managers responding to these emails, getting the request automatically logged into an automated workflow means that reminders can be triggered, advising them of cutoff dates. The increased visibility of service levels and reports allows for direct intervention when responses are taking too long. Additionally, teams are now aware of future workloads coming down the pipeline as they’re aware of upstream requests.
Automating IT
Through the consultation phase we had learned that due to staff shortages, IT were having difficulties in responding to technical tasks required for the onboarding process.
vRealize Orchestrator was available to the client through as part of their VMware. This provided a powerful, highly flexible orchestration platform, accessible via connectors from their ASM workflow platform. Complex onboarding tasks are now fully automated, including:
The creation of user accounts in Active Directory
Providing Office.com access
Allocation of VoIP numbers
Application installation, and
Access to SAP, shared network drives, mailboxes and distribution lists
As a result, hours of valuable IT time are now saved for every new starter. Tasks that previously took several days are no achieved in minutes. On average a new starter’s login details are now sent to the hiring manager within two hours of request submission.
Beyond IT
Onboarding is a complex process because it touches on multiple business areas. Tasks are now allocated from ASM to these teams as part of the automated process:
Physical building access
Corporate credit cards
Learning Portal access
Payroll setup
Tasks are pre-populated with relevant information from the hiring manager’s submission, ensuring that teams have immediate visibility over what is required. This has effectively eliminated the need for follow-up emails and calls for clarification.
Visibility
The entire workflow is now captured in a single system, which provides both an end-to-end overview, and the ability to drill into individual tasks, to check on progress.
Request statuses are updated automatically by the workflow as it progresses, and managers can see where things are up to immediately in the Self-Service Portal. Finally, email updates are now automatically sent to managers at key points in the process.
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