A successful onboarding process can set your employees on the right track, increase employee retention, and improve productivity. But when you need to onboard hundreds of new employees, giving them fast access to resources can be a challenge. This blog post addresses some of the biggest technology hurdles organizations face when onboarding new employees in the digital era and offers suggestions on how to streamline the process.

How Do Digital Work Models Change the Basics of Onboarding?

What is Digital Employee Onboarding?

Onboarding employees is always a complex process. The new hire needs to be introduced to your work culture and the procedures and workflows in your organization. Then there are legal and taxation requirements. Lately, technology has come to the aid of HR managers as digital tools make the onboarding process easier.

Digital employee onboarding is the process of using digital tools to simplify onboarding new employees, improving efficiency, and reducing cost.

The traditional onboarding process often requires new hires to participate in training programs that can take hours — or days. Understandably, this is a time-consuming process both for employees and employers.

Successful onboarding meets four requirements known as The 4Cs of Onboarding: compliance, clarification, culture, and connection. In today’s hybrid and remote work models, addressing these four aspects of onboarding can be challenging.

  • Compliance: This involves filling out the paperwork and learning the basic rules of the organization. Technology helps simplify this part of onboarding. For instance, by using digital documents, the employee can confirm they have watched presentations and video material explaining the organization’s rules using a digital signature.
  • Clarification: This stage involves making sure the new hires understand their responsibilities and the projects and tasks they will work on. Here also, video conferences and webinars can simplify the process for remote workers.
  • Culture: Management and HR usually explain the way things are done in the organization and outline the company’s values. This aspect is harder to convey digitally, but sometimes assigning another employee as a mentor can help the new hire understand the culture.
  • Connection: This is probably the hardest aspect to deliver digitally. In traditional onboarding, where the employee has a physical presence in the office, they can develop relationships within the organization. In a digital environment, it may be difficult and require a bit of creative thinking to encourage employees to develop work relationships. Collaboration tools and messaging can help.

With digital onboarding, employees can access the information they need 24/7, enabling them to learn on the job.

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4 Trends You Need to Know About the Digital Employee Onboarding Experience

1. The Increase in Remote Workforce and Third-Party Contractors Has Put a Burden on IT Support

Recent years have seen an increase in the number of remote workers and third-party contractors. Onboarding thousands of remote workers can be challenging for companies used to the lengthy process of traditional onboarding.

Remote workers use various unmanaged devices, including a wide variety of peripherals connected to the company network. IT teams need to be flexible to enable multiple types of corporate issued devices. This situation often results in a variety of issues for employees trying to navigate the new employer’s systems, which have spiked IT ticket calls.

According to one report, 77 percent of employees said they experienced VPN issues, 65 percent said the quality of video calls was poor, and half experienced problems with Wi-Fi connections. The burden on IT support teams accelerated the appearance of self-service support for employees.

2. BYOD Security Challenges

Increased remote and hybrid employees mean more unmanaged devices. Having unprotected devices connecting to the network regularly can create security challenges; for instance, an attacker can hack an employee’s device and use it to infiltrate the company’s network. Other security risks threatening BYOD devices include data leakage, ransomware, and device infection.

3. Latency

The increasing number of connected remote workers can overwhelm the company’s systems, creating a sluggish user experience. Latency is one of the frustrations remote employees experience when the company doesn’t have a high performing digital workspace. Similarly, a company that wants to stick to traditional onboarding in this digital era will have a sluggish user experience for new candidates.

4. Onboarding Becomes Longer and More Guided

Onboarding can last anywhere from a week to three months. With hybrid and remote jobs, employees usually still require guidance after the first weeks. Studies have shown that extended onboarding support increases retention. Thus, investing in a user-friendly, more-documented, and guided onboarding helps organizations solve high turnover rates.

6 Ways to Improve the Digital Employee Onboarding Experience — Without Creating More Work for IT

Here are six tips you can follow to improve your new hires’ onboarding experiences.

1. Analyze Your Current Onboarding Process

Assess your current process and look for areas where it can be improved. Ask for feedback from recent hires to know what issues they had and what worked for them. Remember, paperless onboarding is more efficient and user friendly. You can repurpose digital documents, videos, and presentations.

2. Create a Standard Onboarding Process

Once you know what works and what doesn’t, use this information to create a streamlined process. Leveraging automation can make things easy for your employees in their first days. With automated tools, you can streamline the process, for instance, of filling out paperwork and providing digital signatures, or following tutorials on an internal onboarding site. This saves time for your new employees.

Digital onboarding also unburdens your IT support team from having to take care of basic issues that can be solved with an FAQ page.

3. Engage Your New Employees

Lack of feedback is one of the top challenges for organizations trying to build the right onboarding system. Requesting and analyzing the feedback from your recent hires can prove invaluable when designing an efficient onboarding process. Ask them which tools and materials were more user friendly, which ones helped them understand their role, and which ones helped them understand the organization. Then use this information to simplify the onboarding process.

4. Customize Onboarding as Much as Possible

Each candidate is unique, as is their learning style. Try to understand the learning style of every new employee and give them what they need to succeed in these early days. Some will benefit more from an introduction video, others from virtual meetings or digital documentation. Provide new hires the flexibility of choosing the type of material they want to learn from.

5. Assign a Mentor for the First 90 Days

This is a key aspect of any successful onboarding process, and it is especially important for remote employees. Find a senior team member who is willing, friendly, and experienced to mentor your new hires. This mentor will show your new employees the ropes, guide them in their roles and tasks, and explain the company culture.

6. Measure KPIs, Set Timelines and Expectations

It’s important to track the progress of new hires. A timeline with milestones to achieve or a checklist can help new employees know where they stand.

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Tracking your new employees’ performance doesn’t end when the onboarding process finishes. Ensure timelines and requirements are clearly communicated in the onboarding process. The organization should have a system to track employees’ KPIs and check how well they’re adjusting to their new role and meeting expectations. A monthly or bi-monthly check-in call can help answer questions, clarify points, and guide the employee’s progress.

Benefits of Accelerating Digital Onboarding

Today’s businesses can’t waste time with lengthy onboarding processes. Most organizations need to hire immediately, and employees must adapt quickly. Digital onboarding processes save time and provide employees with the flexibility of learning at their own pace.

Any organization that needs to onboard new employees remotely and quickly will benefit from digital workspace technology. A digital workspace enables organizations to easily deploy IT resources, data, and documents to new employees — making onboarding hundreds or thousands of new hires much easier.

Citrix solutions deliver a complete suite that simplifies and automates onboarding, ensures business continuity, and enhances security. You can give new hires full access to the apps and resources they need with the Citrix Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution. Because Citrix DaaS can replace your VPN, third-party contractors and flex workers can get to work right away.

A desktop-as-a-service technology enables new hires to get started in minutes, with a user-friendly, intuitive interface that enhances productivity and the user experience. Citrix DaaS for hybrid and multi-cloud environments provides a secure workspace on any device, which improves your security posture. Sensitive data is protected across environments, while users can access resources from on-premises and the cloud seamlessly from any location. Citrix DaaS optimizes app response times, minimizes login times, and improves overall management, increasing business agility.

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