If you think back to when you joined your Healthcare organization, you’ll probably remember the experience. It might have been super slick with everything in place for your first day at work. However, employee onboarding can be complicated, with Sapling HR stating that the average new hire is expected to complete 54 activities during onboarding. This figure is likely to be even higher in Healthcare environments.

For many Healthcare organizations, the onboarding and offboarding of both permanent and temporary employees (or contractors) can be problematic, with it taking far longer than it should. Even worse, an employee can find themselves starting without the full complement of equipment they need to be a fully functioning staff member. The quality of onboarding can also affect employee retention, with research by Brandon Hall Group finding that great employee onboarding can improve employee retention by 82%.

To help, this blog looks at the common challenges of employee onboarding before explaining how existing IT practices can be used to improve your Healthcare organization’s onboarding and offboarding capabilities.

This @SysAid blog looks at the common challenges of employee onboarding before explaining how existing IT practices can be used to improve your Healthcare organization’s onboarding and offboarding capabilities. #healthcare #ITSM #ServiceDesk Click To Tweet

The common challenges with employee onboarding

Many organizations will say that their employee onboarding process takes too long and is filled with examples of “dropped batons,” where tasks are delayed or even lost. These are the symptoms, though, with the root causes likely to be one or more of the following:

• A lack of process structure and consistency
• Communication gaps, which can include unclear expectations on responsibilities and timeframes as well as onboarding messages (that likely have tasks) being lost in busy inboxes
• Time and resource limitations, which skilled-labor shortages might exacerbate
• Insufficient technology enablement, with people reliant on personal productivity tools and paper rather than workflow management technology
• Delays caused by the inability to deal with legislation or regulatory requirements efficiently.

There are likely more potential root causes in your Healthcare organization. Still, hopefully, these points are sufficient to offer insight into the “Pandora’s box” of issues many organizations face with employee onboarding and offboarding.

The complexity of employee onboarding

The average employee onboarding process is likely to have many elements; once a new employee has accepted their offer, a multitude of required tasks need to be fulfilled before they start employment. For some Healthcare organizations, there might be an overlap between recruitment and onboarding such that the onboarding process is even more complex; for example:

• Human Resources (HR) first handles various recruitment tasks. This work might include agreeing on a suitable roles-and-responsibilities document with the recruiting manager, advertising the vacancy, and interviewing, selecting, and notifying the successful candidate.
• HR also starts the onboarding process but relies on other business functions for delivery. This is where the real complexity starts, and the “It’s like herding cats” analogy might apply without formalized processes and workflow automation.
• The common employee onboarding tasks required of other business functions include the following:
  • The Legal department arranges the employment contract and perhaps employee background checks
• • The IT organization deals with IT equipment, services, and access provisionThe Facilities team arranges the required office equipment
• • The Security or Facilities team gives appropriate physical access capabilities.
• HR handles any new-employee inquiries, even though these might relate to what the other business functions will deliver – this requires intra-business-function communications.
• HR provides employee induction training and arranges any other job-required training.
• HR ensures that the employee onboarding process is fully executed in a timely manner.

The onboarding process is likely similar in your Healthcare organization, with perhaps even more tasks required before an employee’s start date. Not only is the task management complex, but so are the communication needs. This issue is because there’s no corporate capability for these disparate business functions to work together toward a common goal. In addition to this challenge, the delivery of employee onboarding tasks can also be adversely affected by various people-based delays.

The solution to this employee onboarding complexity – workflow automation

You might have guessed it already – workflow automation is the answer to the challenge of employee onboarding. Hopefully, these capabilities are already available in your organization’s IT service management (ITSM) tool through what the IT industry has called enterprise service management. The HR department can then create a single ticket to onboard an employee, with tasks and subtasks that are progressed in the right order by the various business function contributors.

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The technology takes away many of the challenges encountered in the traditional manual approach to employee onboarding, with all the required tasks built into the onboarding workflow(s) such that there’s a consistent approach that follows the required and optimized journey. The workflow optimization is further enabled through capabilities such as groups (so the first available authorized person can action the task), dependencies, notifications, alerts, and escalation settings such that the workflow keeps moving and delays, bottlenecks, and other issues can be flagged and addressed.

The fact that the onboarding process is now digital also means that it’s easy for HR personnel to answer employee inquiries on progress (they can simply check the status of tasks), and the onboarding process can be analyzed to identify inherent issues and opportunities for improvement. For example, the IT organization might need to hold a buffer stock of IT equipment in times of peak onboarding.

The workflow automation, which can also leverage native and third-party orchestration capabilities, significantly increases employee onboarding efficiency but also reduces operational costs, improves the onboarding experience, and reduces errors. All of which contribute positively to business operations and outcomes.

And don’t forget about employee offboarding

In many ways, employee offboarding is similar to employee onboarding, sometimes in reverse, with the employee and service providers also needing to complete a specific set of activities. Using workflow automation and a predefined workflow (or workflows), your Healthcare organization will be able to systematically conduct all the necessary leaver tasks across the involved business functions. For example, the IT organization will reclaim equipment and cease IT services and system access. The Security or Facilities team will cancel the employee’s access to physical locations. All of these and other tasks are done as and when needed, ideally using automation rather than manual intervention.

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Examples of onboarding successes

The use of workflow and automation can significantly improve employee onboarding and offboarding, as shown in these SysAid customer case studies:

• BBAM uses SysAid workflows for new hire onboarding and offboarding, incorporating all credentialing, asset and access provisioning processes, as well as including the relevant managers and HR personnel as needed. The process originally took up to one month – with a lot of in-house communications and manual steps – but now takes just one or two days.
• City of Allen’s employee onboarding and offboarding have been radically improved. The two workflows are now automated, customized, and coordinated between the HR department and other business functions. For IT, employee IDs are quickly set up or terminated in the context of a single ticket. In the past, the same tasks required four or five tickets.
• ORIOR used SysAid Workflow Designer to quickly create and edit business function workflows, including for onboarding employees – from approval input from the manager, the CFO, and the HR department; through tasks for the infrastructure and applications teams; to tasks for HR.

To learn more, please visit our dedicated Healthcare solution page.