Feature of the month: Workflows

Introducing workflows: automate a streamlined onboarding process for all stakeholders involved

Today, there is a common misconception in many organisations that onboarding is only a task for the Human Resource department. However, to truly set up your new hires for success, we at Appical, believe active involvement of the hiring manager, team members, IT and other departments is absolutely paramount.

To increase the level of involvement and make it easy for stakeholders to stay on top of their new hires onboarding process, we added the workflow functionality to the Appical platform.

Workflows keep hiring managers, buddies, IT or other stakeholders in the loop through automatic email notifications that can be triggered based on different, real-time moments in the onboarding journey. By grouping new hires based on their role or location, workflow automation can help achieve a more streamlined and personal onboarding process for all new hires.

What makes workflows the perfect tool to automate a streamlined onboarding?

Workflows empower HR. Workflows empower Administrators.
By automating notifications along the new hires onboarding journey, relevant stakeholders can stay up-to-date about the new hires progress. This, in return, allows HR to win back some of their capacity by eliminating oversights and save time for other high-value tasks and projects.

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“Each month, Appical will save managers an average of 8 hours worth of ‘onboarding’ time.” - HR Manager, Conde Nast 

Workflows empower new hires. 
Although workflows are designed for use by administrators, new hires directly benefit from the fact that more eyes are monitoring their onboarding process. Alert team members, hiring managers or buddies, for example, can ensure that calendars are cleared, goodie bags are ordered or other necessary preparations are done ahead of a new arrival to guarantee a warm, personal welcome.

When can workflow automation help?

Workflow notifications can be set off based on unique, real-time moments in the employee journey of new hires. Three different triggers empower administrators to customise the notifications based on specific events:

Time-based trigger notifications:

A time-based trigger can be set in relation to the first day of the new hire. By choosing the amount of days before or after a new hire starts, a hiring manager, for example, can be notified that his new colleague is starting soon. 

Progress-based trigger notifications:

Setting a notification for progress-in-content makes it easier for stakeholders to stay on track of the new hires journey and assist them in their process. Progress-in-content can be tracked based on the completion of whole courses, stories, chapters of stories and individual pages. Calibrating automated notifications to those specific milestones permits the relevant stakeholders to offer streamlined support in moments that matter most.

Checklist item notifications:

If you are not familiar with the Appical platform, checklists serve as a task list for new hires (and managers) to keep an overview of the most important tasks to be completed in the onboarding journey. Those can range between important compliance measures like safety regulations or confidentiality requirements to signing the contract or setting up the IT and software connections. By setting a trigger for those critical tasks, key stakeholders can ensure costly and irritating delays are prevented by giving new hires a hand.

Why should you consider automating your onboarding process with workflows?

 Workflow automation helps your organisation coordinate and facilitate a structured, streamlined onboarding process for everyone involved. Research by Urbanbound (2018) shows that 77% of employees who enjoyed a structured onboarding experience hit their first performance goal out of the gate. On top, automation allows your organisation to save up to 175 hours of labor per year (SignNow, 2019) and as such helps hurdle internal onboarding obstacles.

Curious to find out more about workflow automation? An onboarding consultant is only two clicks away!