Find out how an onboarding portal for new employees can improve your public sector hiring process, including boosting new hire productivity.
Article Highlights
- Common problems with new hire onboarding
- Solution: NEOGOV’s onboarding portal
- Benefits of employee onboarding software
Bringing a new employee up to speed is no small feat. In addition to ensuring new hires complete each required onboarding task, Human Resources guides employees through their first days of employment and acquaints them with company culture.
This onboarding period plays an essential part in developing an employee’s productivity and satisfaction with their new role. Unfortunately, stellar onboarding processes are less common than we like to think. When surveyed by Gallup, a mere 12% of employees believed that their organization adequately onboarded new hires to their team.
Fortunately, there’s a straightforward way to improve your onboarding process: with an onboarding portal for new employees.
In this article, we’ll discuss some of the most common challenges new hires face when starting a new role. Then, we’ll share how NEOGOV's onboarding portal, Onboard, helps new hires succeed from day one on the job and wrap up our conversation with some takeaways about how employee onboarding software benefits your organization.
Common Problems With New Hire Onboarding
An effective onboarding process sets employees up for success and helps them attain productivity early on in their job. But if they aren’t adequately onboarded, new employees may feel like they don’t have sufficient new hire resources or that they aren’t connecting with their colleagues. Let’s dive a bit deeper into these challenges.
Insufficient new hire resources
After some time on the job, you begin to learn nuances of the workplace like when colleagues normally take lunch and what to wear to Council meetings. But when a new hire first starts a job, they may be wary of asking their supervisor or colleagues what seem like trivial questions.
If your organization doesn’t provide sufficient new hire resources, including information about organizational culture and logistics, your new employees may feel like you’ve thrown them into the deep end of the pool — and they don’t know how to swim.
Not only does this impact your employee’s ability to acclimate to organizational norms; it can also delay your return on investment with a longer time to productivity. After all, if a new hire spends all his time figuring out where he’s allowed to park, how can he focus on learning the ins and outs of his actual job?
Insufficient connection with the team
Hybrid work schedules offer many benefits. Unfortunately, connecting with team members isn’t always one of them. Hybrid work environments afford less opportunities for new hires to engage with colleagues, ask questions, and learn expectations. Because of this, it may take a new employee longer to understand the norms and expectations of their new organizational culture.
But insufficient connection and engagement isn't just relegated to hybrid or remote work schedules. If proper onboarding processes and tools aren't in place, it can be a challenge for agencies still working in-office full time.
This lack of connection has a negative impact beyond the interpersonal and cultural. Without proper face time, managers may struggle to determine whether their new employee is successfully adjusting to the organization. This can make it difficult to pinpoint how to improve new hire productivity.
Low productivity
Speaking of which, the average new hire time to productivity is eight months. No one is a productive employee on day one of a new job, which means that your organization naturally incurs some costs as it onboards new employees.
As your organization works to familiarize new hires with your policies, procedures, and practices, some of these costs might include:
- More mistakes as employees adapt to new processes
- The new employee takes longer to accomplish tasks than others on the team
- Lower morale as teammates “pick up the slack” from a lack of new hire productivity
An inadequate onboarding process extends your new hire time to productivity, meaning you lose money (and waste public funds) as employees struggle to learn the roles and responsibilities of their job.
How Onboarding Software Prepares New Hires to Succeed
Fortunately, your organization can overcome these new hire onboarding challenges with an employee onboarding portal. New hire onboarding software standardizes your onboarding process, ensuring each new hire has all the resources they need to succeed. Let’s find out how.
What is an employee onboarding portal?
An employee onboarding portal is a one-stop-shop where employees can get all the new hire resources they need to be successful, even in the early days of employment at a new organization.
Employee onboarding portals provide employees with access to useful documents, training, videos, and FAQs. These resources help new hires understand their roles and responsibilities, as well as organizational expectations and norms. A onboarding portal for new employees may include:
- An employee handbook
- Organizational policies and procedures
- Contact information for an employee’s new supervisor
- Org charts
- Health and retirement benefits information
- Onboarding paperwork
- An onboarding checklist
An onboard portal enables new hires to look at the onboarding process as a whole so they know exactly what to expect in the first few days and weeks of employment. This provides new employees with a sense of control during an overwhelming time in their professional lives.
Onboard: The NEOGOV onboarding portal
The new hire onboarding portal is a key feature of Onboard, NEOGOV’s employee onboarding software. Using this software, HR can greet new hires with a customized welcome page that’s easy to navigate and intuitive to use. You can easily add helpful new hire resources, including informational videos, text, company pictures, and additional resources that help promote enthusiasm for your organization.
You can also use the NEOGOV Onboard portal to create a sense of community by sharing your organizational mission, values, and goals. Then, make sure your new hires know how to connect with their team by listing contact information for HR, their hiring manager, and other colleagues.
HR can also use this online onboarding portal to create defined checklists for new hires to work through before their first day of work. New hires can log into Onboard to complete each employee onboarding form, including the I-9 and W-4, and any required training. This structured onboarding process ensures your organization meets reporting requirements and can even improve employee retention.
Because this information is all located in one centralized location, new hires never have to wonder whether they’re meeting the goals and expectations of their supervisor. Onboard promotes new employee productivity by providing all the resources an employee needs in one place, from benefits information to organizational policies and procedures.
Benefits of NEOGOV’s Employee Onboarding Software
Our employee onboarding software also saves time for Human Resources professionals. Onboard accomplishes this with several key tools:
- A global form bank
- Onboarding checklists
- Customizable workflows
Using NEOGOV’s form bank, HR can quickly pull and assign relevant forms for new hires to fill out. These include federally mandated forms, such as the W-4 and I-9, as well as custom forms that your organization needs new hires to complete.
HR can also easily check in on the progress of a new hire’s onboarding by reviewing completed items on the onboarding checklist. Similarly, human resources staff can create customizable workflows and assign tasks to individuals in other parts of the organization (such as Payroll). This ensures that all stages of the onboarding program are completed promptly.
To help new employees onboard to their specific roles, Human Resources can also configure unique sub-portals to supplement the main Onboard portal. These sub-portals can be customized based on an employee’s department, division, position, job description, and position type, so your new hires have information that is uniquely relevant to them. This customization is also available in NEOGOV’s offboarding portals.
A proper onboarding experience means that, rather than micromanaging the onboarding process, HR can prioritize meaningful tasks that improve the employee experience. This includes helping new employees adapt to the workplace culture by facilitating new hire orientation and hosting meet-and-greets. A structured onboarding program like Onboard ensures that every new hire experience is a great one.
Final Thoughts
Ready to boost new employee productivity, team cohesion, and new hire satisfaction with a stellar onboarding experience? Look no further than NEOGOV’s new hire onboarding software, Onboard. If you’re excited to see how Onboard can help your public sector organization, book a free demo with NEOGOV today.
