How to Make Onboarding Beautiful for Your Remote Digital Workforce
Author: Pat Wadors, Chief Talent Officer, ServiceNow
Enhancing the employee experience through digital onboarding
Globally, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic placed remote working at the top of the employee experience agenda. Very quickly organizations found themselves needing to react and ensure that their workers were equipped with the right digital workplace collaboration tools that would allow them to carry on working from the safety of their own homes. Then as lockdowns were extended around the globe and workplaces remain closed, business came to realize that many of the temporary fixes they had put in place would need to become more permanent solutions.
One such opportunity was the employee onboarding process.
Onboarding has always been a uniquely difficult task, even when employees could do it in person in a physical workplace.
Now, due to unprecedented circumstances, employers who hadn’t digitized employee onboarding were having to rethink how to get new employees up to speed when they’re distributed across many locations.
In this blog, I will focus on why it’s critical to digitize the onboarding part of the employee experience and make it possible for employees to choose anywhere, anytime work options. And I’ll delve into how we at ServiceNow have managed to make the experience rather…well, beautiful.
Old problem, new predicament
Businesses that had started along or were more advanced in their digital transformation journeys were the ones able to transition to remote work the most smoothly.
That’s because they had digitized their routine, manual processes and made it possible for employees to get their jobs done anywhere, anytime, across different business activities – IT, benefits, HR, travel needs, and much more. They were able to achieve that goal by learning to navigate processes across functional silos and create a seamless partnership in service of their employees.
That’s especially true for onboarding, which has different requirements. Onboarding is an incredibly personal experience. And much like any other first impression, you only have one chance to make it a good one.
To ensure onboarding is a good experience, employers need to be able to meet all their employees’ expectations. This means creating an experience that is friendly, personalized, predictive and seamless.
At ServiceNow, we’ve done in-person and digital onboarding for quite some time. A significant percentage of our employees work outside a physical office location. Plus, we’re located around the world. When the 2020 pandemic struck, we leaned into our digital onboarding experience with confidence.
The digital workplace – taking a customer zero approach
As a digital workflow company, we believe that behind every great experience is a great workflow. Our solutions unlock productivity and deliver great experiences to employees and customers.
Before this crisis, we approached everything we offered with a customer zero mentality – making sure we use our solutions to digitize workflows across our company, just as our customers do.
So, once we moved to work from home, our transition to digital onboarding was seamless. We continued to focus on our two main onboarding priorities:
Pre-boarding and day one effectiveness (new hire orientation)
Making employees successful in their first 90 days.
We had to change some processes to deliver on those priorities. For example, we had to send hardware (laptops) to new employees before their new hire orientation. This has been a good way to make sure new hires feel prepared and physically part of the team even before their first day.
Then, we made sure new hires could proceed through onboarding in a digital way, with our onboarding app, our Employee Service Portal, and other digital tools that help get them up to speed on ServiceNow, our culture, and their role. Where possible, we’ve even digitized common new hire to-dos, so they can get those out of the way and be as prepared as possible for day one.
The beauty comes from creating an employee experience where they always feel heard. However, that empathy only gets you so far.
That’s why I always like to say: empathy + technology = compassion. Compassion only comes when you take action to address the problem. In this case, we leverage technology to address our opportunities.
Workforce transformation – creating a new landscape
Since our partnership with Fujitsu in 2009, we’ve managed to deliver more than 1200 ServiceNow projects. We now have more than 1200 ServiceNow skill certifications available and over 700 active customers.
And just in the last 12 months, both global and EMEA ServiceNow won IT Workflow Partner of the Year, as well as 2019 APJ Partner of the Year.
However, we’ve entered a new era. The 2020 pandemic managed to supercharge digital workplace transformation efforts across the board, and as a result, work has changed forever.
It’s the companies that continue along on their digital workforce transformation journeys that will make it through to the other side in the best shape. And while digital transformation has a great deal to do with technology, what makes it successful is ensuring that at every step of the way, technology is being put to work in service of people.
Think about the end-to-end design of the onboarding process, and what you want new hires to know and feel when they start.
By using workflow technology, employees’ daily routines can become easier, simpler and faster – freeing them up to focus on the more challenging, essential and fulfilling aspects of their new jobs.
Speak to our specialists and discover how we can help you to transform your onboarding experience.
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