We’ve all experienced being the new person at a company, it can be a really stressful time when you’re taking in lots of information whilst simultaneously attempting (and failing!) to memorise the name of every new person that you’re introduced to – something that is impossible no matter how hard you try.
All of these new starter nerves are only exacerbated when your onboarding isn’t as efficient as it could be. When onboarding lacks structure and order, it can harm the entire employee experience.
What do the stats say?
According to a study from Gallup, only 12 percent of employees believe their organisations do a great job onboarding new employees. As a result, companies of all sizes have a huge opportunity to better their onboarding process and have more efficient and productive employees.
It’s not difficult to see the benefits from an efficient onboarding, when research by Glassdoor shows that organisations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and employees who go through effective onboarding are 18 times more likely to feel committed to their organisation.
Using Slack for Onboarding
Luckily if your organisation uses Slack, you already have half of the tools needed to create an efficient and effective onboarding process.
What’s the other tool you need, I hear you ask? It’s The Bot Platform of course! (what do you mean you already guessed that?! You have a gift! 🔮)
By integrating The Bot Platform with Slack, you can easily create bespoke onboarding programs, as bots allow you to…
👋 Provide a personalized and relevant welcome for new starters
✅ Automate the completion of onboarding checklists
⌛ Save HR and onboarding teams huge amounts of time while providing a more consistent onboarding experience
🚀 Increase new starter time to productivity, engagement, integration and tool usage
😊 Answer commonly asked questions and collect feedback to improve the onboarding experience over time
Do you want to create an efficient onboarding process using bots? Here are some best practice tips!
Connection through Communication
Onboarding should start the moment an employee accepts their new job position, helping them to get a feel of the company’s culture and expectations before they begin their role and follow them through the critical first weeks of their new employment.
A number of our customers have built onboarding assistants to help with getting their new starters introduced to the company and set up for success. For example, Leading Agile built an onboarding bot that welcomes new starters with video messages from the leadership team and sends new hires training videos to watch. Over their first 20 days they are then sent daily messages from the Chief Cultural Officer that talk about aspects of working life and company culture. This adds a personal touch and makes employees feel appreciated and cared about, which hopefully helps them feel more excited about joining the company and, ultimately, be more engaged.
Streamline Administrative HR Tasks
According to a study from ServiceNow, more than half of corporate managers say it takes 10 or more interactions across an average of five departments to prepare for a new employee’s first day. Instead of lengthy and outdated paper onboarding, you can share relevant documents — such as your employee handbook and benefits digitally, so they can fill out most paperwork before they begin and enable them to start contributing to the business sooner.
Our New Starter Bots can remove the entire process of manual paper-based onboarding, which is often repetitive, slow and fragmented. Using bots and automation, you can have a far more consistent approach to onboarding. Plus, free up your team’s time so that they can spend more of it on building relationships and less on repetitive admin.
Access to Training
Research from the Harvard Business Review has shown that being systematic in onboarding brings new employees up to speed 50% faster, which means they’re more quickly and efficiently able to contribute to achieving desired goals.
Onboarding heavily relies on getting new starters up to speed with the technology tools, systems and ways of working at a company and this can also take up a huge amount of time. Bots and Digital Assistants can help with this too – for example, a Slack Training Assistant. The bot could automatically train new starters on how to use the breadth of features and functionality available on Slack, taking users on an automated training course that runs through how to connect, communicate and collaborate with their new colleagues.
Training Assistants can even be custom built for your own company training programmes and can even track completions, so that managers, HR and IT teams can be alerted to when staff have completed the training.
Employee Mentoring
An article by Glass Door quotes that 91% of employees who went through effective onboarding felt a strong connectedness at work, and mentoring is a great way to build connection with new employees.
For many remote teams, companies are looking to technology to help nurture these connections between staff, when in-person collaboration isn’t possible, which is especially important when it comes to mentoring new employees.
Technology allows us to connect with each other at any time and in any place, and the Buddy Bot is one solution from The Bot Platform designed to nurture such connections. Built to improve internal networking and collaboration opportunities, Buddy Bot matches up staff members and encourages them to jump on a video call for a coffee and a catch up, even providing conversation starters! In this scenario, bots can actually help to connect staff and create a sense of community regardless of location, by helping to promote bonding and culture in a spontaneous way.
Access to Company Benefits & Perks
How often are new hires left searching for basic information, like company benefits? LinkedIn invests hundreds of millions of dollars each year on employee perks and benefits, but found that many of these benefits were left unclaimed because new employees were insufficiently trained on how to access them and failed to fully understand what was available. As such, the company now spends an outsize portion of the onboarding process explaining the benefits programs in detail. And with good reason, research shows that effective onboarding sees 50% higher benefits utilisation.
Our Perks Portal is where you can list all your benefits in one easy-to-access, easy-to-use digital portal, helping to better promote the benefits you offer, gather feedback and benefit related requests. Businesses can also maintain benefit program awareness by sending annual benefit reminder broadcasts and introducing the company benefit program to new starters.
Onboarding Bots in Action
Ennismore
Hotels and Hospitality Group, Ennismore built a bot called “Your Guide to…”, which acts as a digital handbook for HR information, employee benefits, company values and information, FAQs and more.
The bot acts as a digital signposting tool that directs staff to more in-depth posts, helping ensure quality control, reduce their paper/carbon footprint and eliminate printing costs. By creating a digitally managed and easy-to-update central source of truth, Ennismore can ensure their staff can access everything they need to know from whichever device suits them best.
Results:
- 500,000+ bot interactions per month
- 30+ bots built and deployed
- 93% of staff use at least 2+ bots per month
GSK
GSK’s Steven the Onboarding Bot gives a consistent and streamlined onboarding process for new users. It serves as a personal guide, ensuring that each employee receives a warm welcome and a comprehensive introduction. Equipping new starters with the necessary knowledge to effectively navigate and utilise all features to their fullest potential.
Results:
- Has freed up human resources to focus on more complex or specialised aspects of onboarding.
- Ensures consistency in the onboarding experience.
- 14,000 people interacting and engaging with the bot.
- Hundreds of hours saved in repetitive admin tasks.
Leading Agile
IT Services and Digital Transformation consultancy company, LeadingAgile, built a number of bots to improve the quality of their onboarding for new hires – including automating the completion of onboarding related processes and tasks, providing daily encouragement and advice during a new starter’s first few weeks, and conducting new hire feedback and surveys.
Using bots to automate these tasks not only saved LeadingAgile huge amounts of time and money, but also led to a better and more consistent onboarding experience for new starters.
Results:
- 2 – 5X increase in course completions
- 87% more effective than previous processes
- 80 hours of time saved every month
When your organisation provides an excellent employee onboarding experience, new hires can get started in their roles more quickly and channel their excitement and enthusiasm into doing their best work. Using bots on Slack allows companies to digitise and automate all these practices into one efficient and effective onboarding process. All new employees get access to information quickly, easily, and in a centralised location, creating a seamless onboarding experience that saves hours of time across the entire company.
Get in touch today if you would like to explore how The Bot Platform can help you with onboarding on Slack.
