Onboarding new employees through intranet workflows

According to a 2019 report by Gallup, ‘Only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees’. However, creating a workflow through an intranet significantly improves the process. Here’s how:

Emails get missed, and paper gets misplaced. Communication issues in the workplace are one of the primary reasons our customers are drawn to Intranet Connections. As a new customer, one of the first applications our customers use is workflow functionality. Using this significantly improves communication while boosting efficiency, visibility, and accuracy in day-to-day tasks.

The most common example is creating a workflow for onboarding new employees. There are so many things that go on behind the scenes before an employee starts their first day. Many companies struggle to be prepared for the arrival of a new employee, and communication breaks down.

Departments typically involved include:

• Hiring department
• Human Resources
• IT

Using online forms when onboarding new employees

Using online forms, you can tackle the requirements and get approvals completed quickly. So when a new employee starts, they’ll have a working computer, access to relevant resources, and a smooth onboarding process.

Once you’ve built out your form, you may have something similar to the following:

Within your form, you may have some areas that will require including additional people to be notified or further calls to action. These are best handled by including checkboxes or radio buttons in your form.

Stepping through the workflow process for onboarding new employees

Depending on your organization, you may have differences in how the workflow will need to occur. An effective way of approaching workflow is figuring out all the moving parts. You may need input from different department heads to discover if some departments have additional criteria required.

1. Submitting User – Once the employee has accepted the job offer, this is a good point for the hiring manager to fill out the form.
2. Require action from HR and IT – this can either be done simultaneously or in a specific order.
   • Create an approval stage that targets HR and IT (separate stages will be required for approvals that are sent to a group rather than individual users)
   • HR and IT will complete their tasks and click ‘approve’ on the form response.
3. Conditional requirements – if you require additional action to occur, you can set triggers to automatically occur based on selected information (i.e., New employee requires a license to use the software).
4. Final notifications – who need to know that everything the employee needs for their first day has been completed.

Building the workflow

1. Stages:
   • Approval Stage – Choose Approval Stages for when action is required
   • Notification Stage – Choose Notification Stages for email notifications to be sent
2. Decision type – Will only one person at this stage need to approve, or all?
   • Select the user(s) or group as the ‘approval manager.’
3. After approval – Are there any additional people to notify once the employee is all set up?
   • The original submitting user will be notified automatically once the workflow has been fully approved.
4. Save Changes

Switching to the new process

Now that your workflow is configured, and the form has been built, it’s time to start promoting this process internally. One recommendation would be to use the Read & Confirm policy process to notify the management/department heads of the new employee onboarding process. Within the policy change, include a link to your new Employee Onboarding form so that managers know where to access it – it may even be worth adding to your navigation.

While this was just a basic overview of how you can quickly add an employee onboarding form and workflow, have you tried to implement something similar? What worked or didn’t work? Were there additional things added once you started using the form that is a definite must? We’d love to hear about them!

If you’d like to learn more about our online forms & automated workflows through the intranet, request a Free Demo today!