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How data-led onboarding can boost your bottom line

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If there’s one time during the entire employee lifecycle when the most data is collected, that’s got to be employee onboarding. Yet, beyond and after compliance, that data - which we all would agree is a gold mine of information - lies nused in a dump for 8-9 years or for as long as the statutory requirements are.

That’s the thing about data!

We all seem to understand how valuable it is and have so many means, from surveys to NPS scores to what not, to gather data. But when it comes to utilizing it to drive business decisions, most companies and teams fail.

So how can you effectively use the data that you collect during onboarding to improve an employee’s onboarding experience and thereby, also boost your bottom line?

Let’s find out.

How data-led onboarding can boost your bottom line

Employee onboarding is more than just a hygiene practice at an organization.

When new hires have a great onboarding experience, it can result in a win-win for both the employee and employer.

The employee feels welcome, more engaged and set up to succeed. And the employer can avoid high turnover costs of early attrition and get new hires to be fully contributing members faster.

Here’s how you can use data to deliver a great onboarding experience:

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1. Data for FASTER onboarding

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The ideal scenario for enterprises would be to finish employee onboarding in the shortest time possible, especially when hiring needs to happen as soon as possible and when businesses require new hires to hit the ground running.

However, that’s far from what happens on ground.

A Tik-tok video went viral recently. It showed a woman having a conversation over phone regarding a laptop she was supposed to receive for work. After some back and forth, she is told that it could take up to 30 to 45 days after her start date for her to receive it!

And this is no one-off case.

Multiple back and forth between new hires, HR teams and vendors, manual processes, and disparate systems among other things often tend to delay the onboarding process in unforeseeable ways, hampering the new hire’s productivity and ultimately, impacting the company’s bottom line.

Solution?

Use data to bring the much needed predictability to employee onboarding timelines and achieve the best time to hire.

Here’s an example of how that can work.

At Tydy, we create well-orchestrated onboarding workflows for our customers to ensure data flows across multiple systems without manual intervention. This means, a new hire will only receive forms that are relevant to their role, location and seniority —saving time on that front. Once these are filled in, the data automatically gets sent for background checks. And when that’s completed, a notification is triggered to IT team for laptop allocation and to Admin team for ID creation. All of this without the time lost in miscommunication, manual errors, data discrepancies and more. And that’s a lot of time! In one of our customer’s cases, data-enabled onboarding reduced the data and document collection time from 2 hours to 15 minutes for each new hire.

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2. Data for PROACTIVE TEAMS

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Data can enable onboarding teams and managers to be more responsive and on their toes. The last thing you want a new hire to feel is unwelcome or lost because they aren’t receiving timely support and guidance. Like these folks!

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But when you are hiring at scale, keeping on top of every small detail in onboarding can be hard.

That’s where data can help! Let’s understand with an example.

Company ABC assigns a buddy to every new hire. These buddies are responsible for giving a new employee a walkthrough of the organization on Day 1. On Day 2, a single-question pulse survey is triggered to the new hire to find out if the walkthrough is complete. If the new hire responds with a ‘no’, the system automatically triggers a reminder to the buddy.

Through similar data-enabled nudges, reminders, notifications and escalations, proactiveness can be inculcated in cross-functional teams and can ensure the onboarding experience is a delightful one for every new hire.

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3. Data for EFFICIENT PRACTICES

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Do you know where your onboarding bottlenecks are?

Without data to look at, forget resolving bottlenecks, even identifying that they exist can be difficult, just like at Company ABC.

Global Company ABC has multiple background verification vendors at all its office locations. Over time, the company’s turnaround time for background checks has increased. But with no data to look at, all it could do was send mass memos to all vendors and depend on the observations from onboarding teams to identify bottlenecks.

Enter TAT data.

With access to data, the company can now identify vendors that have a higher TAT or turnaround time. With this insight handy, they can then reallocate cases to a vendor whose TAT is faster, as a result, improving the efficiency of the overall process. This also allows them to identify and resolve issues in order to enhance process efficiency once and for all.

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4. Data for PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCES

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Personalization is an unsaid expectation among consumers. It impacts their brand engagement and loyalty.

An HR team’s consumers are the organization’s employees.

For smaller teams, delivering personalization without data may be possible. But for enterprises that are hiring in large numbers, personalization at scale requires data.

An apt example would be from our own experience working with EXL. As part of its employee onboarding experience, EXL wanted to send its new hires a bouquet before the day of joining the company. But for a company that hires globally in the hundreds every month, manually managing this process was next to impossible. But with a data-led onboarding process, EXL could automate the delivery of the bouquets by creating a workflow that automatically picks up a new hire’s address and sends it to a florist in the right location.

During employee onboarding, data-led personalization can happen at three levels:

Personalized journeys - The entire employee onboarding journey can be personalized to suit the role, location, seniority level and any other criteria you wish to consider. For instance, the onboarding journey of a VP joining the Mumbai location in the engineering team will be very different from an intern joining the New York office in the Communications team. When employee journeys are personalized to the last detail, it delights the new hires. And that’s only possible if you have the data and know how to put it to use at the right time.

Personalized communication - New hires would love to receive communication that is addressed to them and caters to their specific needs. For instance, a new hire with 2-3 years of experience would like to know more about career growth and learning opportunities for them within your organization as opposed to a Senior executive who is going to head APAC sales and needs to know more about how their role will enable the organization in its vision. A young parent might care most about flexible timings, or creche facilities and receiving this information without having to ask for it can make them feel cared for right from the start.

Personalized processes - The biggest challenge with paperwork and compliance is that only once that’s completed can a new hire actually get started with what they were hired to do. And the more complex this process is for the new hire to navigate, the more time is lost, the more frustration builds up and chances of disengagement heightens.

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Being sent a wrong laptop and waiting for that to be replaced or being sent a Google Drive full of Policy documents to be read and signed are not pleasant experiences for new hires. A better and more efficient way of doing the same thing would be to personalize every process based on an employee’s level, role, band, location and any other data that’s required. This means, a woman VP of Sales joining the Canada office is only signing documents relevant to her, seeing policy documents that are applicable for her and accessing benefits that are unique to her.

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5. Data to UNLOCK BEHAVIORAL INSIGHTS

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Behavioral data points are as important as signals that indicate a new hire’s level of engagement with the organization.

For instance, you can study trends on content consumption. Have new hires been reading emails more or accessing videos or text-based documents more often? This will give you more scope for experimentation and identification of communication channels that work best. Or, if you notice that a person who accepted the job offer two weeks ago has become inactive suddenly in the last few days, it could be an indication of likely drop off, urging HR teams to act on this case fast.

So a new hire’s behavior during the entire onboarding journey can hold a lot of clues for HR teams.

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6. Data for EMPLOYEE’S PERSONAL GROWTH

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Personal growth plays a huge role in employee retention. An employee who feels like their growth and development is being prioritized by the company will, in turn, be more loyal and engaged.

Data collected during onboarding can be used to enable an employee’s personal growth.

How?

Here are examples.

A gap in the employee’s declared skill sets and job role can mean a relevant training program can be assigned to them.

An employee can be assigned a mentor based on their experience data shared during onboarding.

All of these will not only enable an employee’s personal growth but also their contribution to the company and ultimately, impact the company’s bottom line.

Summing Up: Tydy for data-led employee onboarding

Tydy does all the above and more.

Tydy engages with a new hire from onboarding, collecting all necessary information to not only create a seamless and personalized onboarding journey but also to empower companies to use that data to deliver further personalized experiences throughout the employee lifecycle.

A unified employee profile like the one below brings together data from multiple locations like HRMS, ATS, LMS, etc., so HR teams can see the whole picture in one place. This is the true power of data!