It's been estimated that the average cost-per-hire is at least $4,125 per employee, with that new hire expected to be fully productive only after six months (!!!) on the job. What if you could cut that time down significantly using an automated, self-paced, Slack-first approach to onboarding with all of it built natively in Slack via the no-code Workflow Builder?
...would be worth a shot, right? Surely!
The Reality
“Research suggests that an employee’s first 90 days will in large part determine his or her performance, longevity, and contribution to the company. Therefore, a successful onboarding program is critical." - Matt Spielman - Inflection Point Partners LLC blog (source)
So there is no debating that a negative onboarding experience will alienate a new hire and may lead to them quitting before ever becoming productive. In some cases, companies mostly skip onboarding because of time, budget and/or resources. Phrases like "Thrown into the deep end" are said jokingly, while at the same time being the reality. This only exacerbates the issue, causing it to actually take longer to start being productive (9+ months), or worse, leading to the new hire quitting and having to re-hire the role. 🤦♂️
On top of the effect it has on those hired, it may also seem more as a hinderance to those who are responsible for the onboarding -- just "getting in the way" of busy managers and HR professionals instead of being core to their responsibilities. Causing them to be in a constant state of onboarding new hires instead of doing more strategic high value work.
Onboarding may seem like a soft HR process that gets in the way of busy managers, but the majority of companies are wasting real money... 98 percent said that onboarding programs are a key factor in retention efforts. - Brad Giles - CEO World Magazine (source)
The Solution
So how do you solve this problem for both parties? How can you engage new hires in an automated way and also reduce the amount of work on the team responsible for onboarding new hires?
By creating a self-paced, fully automated, onboarding with Slack and Workflow Builder. Sounds great right? But what is it really?
If you aren't familiar with Workflow Builder, it's a configurable no-code way to automate processes in Slack. As you can see above, the out of the box templates provide boilerplate use cases which can be extended to introduce a new hire to all required onboarding content (i.e. warm welcome template). Let's review an example.
You have 20 new hires expected to join Q1 2023, you want to get them introduced to:
The company overall, the hierarchy/org chart, teams, leaders, values, etc..
HR/Ops processes and tools (like payroll, PTO requests, Ops requests, etc..)
Specific team processes and tools (for engineering, think about things like Jira, ClickUp, Confluence, Github... and processes for each, etc...)
How to work in Slack (think about your companies standardized Slack policies and expectations)
First, let's imagine doing this all manually. We can assume many sessions, manually walking groups of new hires through content, repeating the same information many times. Potentially putting the person responsible for managing onboarding in a perpetual state of onboarding new hires especially if your company is continuously hiring. Add on things like 30-60-90 day plans, which require additional manual work, and the onboarding cycle never ends. This is obviously not ideal.
So, what if you could automate the process and reduce those manual tasks and save a ton of time? Well that's what Slack and Workflow Builder are here for!
All the HR/Ops person would have to do is add a user to a specific channel and 💥 the user starts their self-paced onboarding -- and even this can potentially be automated depending on your Slack plan with identity and access management (IAM) settings. The new hire will receive a message in Slack that provides them information, with details, links, content, etc. When they have reviewed the information and completed the link/step, they can click a button to proceed to the next step. With built in messages to HR/Ops which plans for user feedback and monitoring, the team can ensure that the new hire has what they need and continues on mostly asynchronously at their own pace. Best part, the steps can be created to cover content of any kind which covers all the scenarios above - plus any that we haven't listed.
At the end, you've given your new hire all they need to be successful at their own pace plus they can reference the material in their Slackbot DM at any point which off the bat gets them to use Slack for themselves. Instant a-ha moment! For your Ops, Hiring Managers and/or HR team, you've reduced their need to do a large majority of onboarding tasks -- being available for questions rather than driving the entire process manually. Giving them time to focus required live training sessions on higher value content or spending more time on improving the onboarding process overall.
Intrigued? Curious to see this in action? Wondering what other things you can automate with this kind of approach. 👉 Reach out, or book a time with us, to see how we can help solve this problem for your team!
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