Insta-Hack Your Employee Onboarding Process Flow With Clustdoc

In one of our recent blog posts, we’ve discussed why effective employee onboarding is so important for the success of your business. I’m linking that ultimate employee onboarding process guide below (give it a read), but here are some key takeaways:

• 69% of new hires are more likely to stay long-term after a great onboarding experience;
• successful employee onboarding results in a 70% increase in productivity;
• structured onboarding also increases manager satisfaction scores by 20%.

Talk about a massive business win when you dial that process in, right?

In this post, I’ll show you, step-by-step, how a successful digital employee onboarding flow template looks like so you can be sure you’re doing it right in your HR department. You’ll see how Clustdoc (our time-saving, process-hacking document collection software) enables you to speed through this faster, more accurately, and with a greater success rate. (Actually, see if — there’s a video available for every step of the process).

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• New employee preboarding – what happens before Day #1?
• Day #1 onboarding activities
• The first months mapped out for everyone involved
• The 6-months & 1-year-mark performance & onboarding success review

See?

You’re already saving time because an intensive process (that used to include week-in, week-out planning), is now completely mappable weeks (or even months) in advance.

Ready to make your new employee onboarding process work for both you AND your employees?

Then let’s get to it.

1. Designing a Slick, Smart & Smooth Preboarding Phase

When does the preboarding start? Well, it starts as soon as you send the offer letter and the applicant agrees that yes, you both want to proceed full speed ahead.

And what does it include? A good preboarding process takes the pressure off of the new hire. Often, it’s going to include elementary HR activities that you’re now doing manually (or through frustrating chain emails).

This like:

• scheduling important first-week meetings well in advance;
• assigning a team member as an onboarding buddy to the new hire;
• sending over (and requesting) important documentation (with instructions);
• forwarding relevant information (company policies, benefits breakdown, etc.);
• granting access to tools and systems (where it’s possible to do it virtually).

With Clustdoc, all this is as easy as pie… 

… you send meeting invites days in advance (so everyone can mark them on their calendars)…

… assign an onboarding buddy and fit important first-week activities into their schedule…

… send over important documents and information…

… request signed copies that are automatically available to relevant departments…

All activities are arranged in an intuitive workflow right there on the platform. You can mark them as outstanding, pending, urgent, or resolved — and know what you’re missing at a glance.

What used to take weeks sometimes – well after your new hire has already started in their role – now takes days, or even just hours.

2. Zooming Through (Mapped Out) Day #1 Activities Like a PRO

That day #1 at a new job is important for both you and the new hire. That’s why you want to make sure that it has a special place in your employee onboarding process flow.

Because… there’s nothing worse than showing up to a new job and being greeted by a puzzled security guy who had no idea you were coming.

You shouldn’t do that to a fresh, scared employee — it doesn’t leave a good impression.

Instead, on their first day on the job, you should treat your company’s new asset to a deluxe package experience:

• there’s someone there to greet them at the door (and it’s their onboarding buddy);
• their first stop is a meet-and-greet with their department colleagues & manager;
• the rest of their day is planned out & and their itinerary is shared with them.

You used to have to do this yourself, right?

Like, take the new hire by hand, and walk them from office to office… take them over to IT and finance to sign important documents… show them around the department… the whole rigmarole.

With Clustdoc, it’s just a matter of taking 15 minutes out of your busy day to set all of this up. Your new employees get the best onboarding experience.

What a surprise?!

Again, you can schedule these meetings well in advance for seamless onboarding. But – and this is important – you can empower the new hire to be independent. Include a floor plan into the documentation that you send to them. Mark all important offices where they’ll need to make a stop (as well as what they need to do there). And create a flowchart that guides them through their  first days process.

Once they’re done, they tick things off the list, and voila! — one less thing for you to worry about.

And the best part?

They can do this directly from their smartphone.

How’s that for an employee onboarding process hack?

3. An Employee Onboarding Process Flow That Nails the First Few Months… In a Matter of Minutes

The first couple of months of employee onboarding can be pretty labor-intensive for everyone involved:

• additional get-up-to-speed meetings with managers and coworkers;
• team-building & company culture dive-ins with the onboarding buddy & colleagues;
• resolving any questions that the new hire might have about the tools & systems;
• assessing how onboarding efforts are progressing;
• checking in on payroll and benefits to make sure they’re properly activated.

Usually, there’s a lot of back and forth that goes into this — a lot of meetings to be scheduled, and a lot of conflicting timetables to reconcile.

Clustdoc provides a platform in which you can map this out in detail, so you don’t skip any of the important steps.

For example, you can add a reminder for the new hire, a payroll specialist, and yourself that you need to get together to go through payroll and benefits. Or create a targeted onboarding progress survey, and assign it to all the stakeholders for completion without the need to chase anyone down to answer your questions.

Again, this part of the employee onboarding flow is done in a mere day. You set it and forget it until you’re reminded by Clustdoc that something is either overdue or missing.

4. That Employee Onboarding Activities Still Top-of-Mind (Even After One Full Year)

After a new employee has been with you for six months or a full year, you stop thinking about them as ‘that new marketing person.’ Now, they’re part of the team and almost fully integrated. But that doesn’t mean that their employee onboarding process is finished (as much as it might seem that way). This is the period in which most HR teams drop the ball ever so slightly.

Deadlines are missed. Review and check-in meetings are pushed back (indefinitely). Important questions about the onboarding experience are not asked. But your work is still not done. Not really.

You still have to:

• figure out the employee’s level of integration into their team & the overall culture;
• schedule meetings to ask probing questions about performance & onboarding:
• coordinate additional training so that the new hire can function across teams;
• hold a definitive one-year-mark performance review session;
• assess whether or not further onboarding & training activities are necessary.

In addition to scheduling all of this in advance, you can just as easily send prep questions to the employee, so they know what the conversations will focus on.

You can collect those answers in a secure Clustdoc document portal. Share those documents with interested parties (direct managers, HR, payroll). And have a recorded trail of employee onboarding activities (for review purposes).

This approach allows you to see what was missed or delayed, so you can tweak the whole process in the future. For example, if the new hire regularly missed deadlines on turning in surveys or documentation, you can either allow for more time or schedule face-to-face interviews to collect the data you need.

5. Clustdoc — A Complete Makeover of Your Employee Onboarding Process Flow in Just a Few Days

Out with the old, in with the new.

If you’re tired of missing the mark because of a wonky employee onboarding process flow, now is your chance to flip things around.

With Clustdoc– the best employee onboarding software, you’ll get stuff done:

• 25% faster and you can focus on the critical internal processes and important stuffs (like sorting your paperclips);
• more accurately — no more double-checking to see if you have everything you need ;
• extra easy for the new hire, making their experience stress-free & memorable.

Recommended reading: 5 Steps You Need to Follow to Go Paper-Free in 2021 (+ 7 Benefits of Running a Paperless Organisation) 

Also, Learn how Shelby Erectors, a leading premier and rebar contractor, transformed their recruiting process and reduced time to onboard new employees to only five days with Clustdoc

If that sounds good, then definitely sign up for your 7-day, no-credit-card-required test drive of our document collection and onboarding portal. We’ll be there to guide you through every step of the process — from the sign-up to creating your first digital onboarding process flows.