First impressions, last.
The initial experience of a new starter’s onboarding to an organisation has long been accepted as playing a key role in the longevity of their employment and ultimately shaping the company’s attrition rate – be it positively or negatively so. Many of us know too well the pain and costs involved in a high churn organisation. Onboarding an employee, only to see them leave inside 12 months. From the time taken to interview to the dreaded recruitment fee. Let’s not forget the length of time and effort in onboarding them to your ways of working and specific technologies. Don’t delay, improve your onboarding experience today!
“One of the most critical areas of investment is onboarding”
In some organisations, you’re looking at 3 – 9 months of constant attention from a number of individuals across the immediate department and associated teams. This puts pressure on normal operations and has an overall and unavoidable cost.
To make matters worse, the pandemic’s acceleration of remote working has made it even harder for companies to retain their talent. Inflated salaries – however fleeting it may have been – and the expectation of remote or hybrid working roles has seen things like the coined term, “The great resignation” really take a foothold and cause widespread chaos for all sectors.
In a survey by Forbes, they found that “Nearly all CFOs—92%—believe that proper onboarding could decrease or eliminate the heavy costs associated with unwanted turnover”.
Find out how Ethical IT can improve your onboarding experience
Optimise, Standardise, and Automate
At Ethical IT we are strong believers in standardisation and automation as it reduces complexity and offers benefits such as cost savings through economies of scale, ease of integration, improved efficiency, and ultimately – better IT support.
“Work smarter, not harder”
In line with this ethos, our R&D team embarked on a project to tackle three key pain points to improve the onboarding experience that we also shared with our customers.
The Pain Points
- New starter account setup:
- New starter user accounts often took the full SLA lead time of 3 working days to deliver.
- Human error on either side meant that configurations needed adjusting, often after the new starter had started – not a good first impression!
- Legacy and non-standardised permissions structures (inherited from previous IT partners) posed an ongoing risk to sensitive data.
- New computer setup
- New computers would need to be sent to Ethical IT to be configured, then sent back with a typical 3-5 day turnaround.
- Courier costs and engineering time typically added around £350+VAT to the cost of each device.
- The organisations ‘Scope 3′ Carbon emissions increased with every courier mile
- Contractual documentation creation
- Hiring managers and HR teams complained about the endless pile of documentation they needed to create per employee.
- The time-to-offer letter was on average 3 working days
- Contractual and company documentation following within a working week from acceptance
The Requirements
- a solution that was low-cost, integrated seamlessly with the customer’s technology stack and was easy to replicate.
- buy-in from the relevant stakeholders e.g. HR, hiring managers, and Procurement.
- a robust approval mechanism as we were dealing with sensitive information and access to company data.
- an already optimised and standardised environment in which to test – making the assumption that rolling out these solutions to customers in the future would have to be preceded by standardisation e.g. permissions structure overhaul, moving to Role-based access control (RBAC) for access to company data, shared drives, SharePoint sites and folders etc
The Solution
Contractual Documentation & New Starter Account
With the majority of our customers being Microsoft users, it made sense for us to delve into their offerings. We found that Microsoft had invested heavily into their automation capabilities in recent years, creating powerful integrations between not only their own products but thousands of other software solutions (and growing!).
After researching Microsoft’s capabilities and specifically that of ‘Power Automate (PA)’, we quickly realised that this would become the driver for our automations within the Microsoft eco-system. We then integrated ‘Approval’s, ‘Microsoft Teams’, ‘SharePoint’ and ‘MS Azure AD’ to deliver a fully capable automation.
New Computer Setup
Leading on from the use of Power Automate, Ethical IT began getting to grips with Microsoft ‘Autopilot & InTune’ as it boasted centralised cloud-based enterprise management capabilities, automated device provisioning, standardisation in build and a shortened onboarding of the device with little to no input required – fewer touch points!
By going direct-to-user we:
- Instantly removed at least one courier journey, and
- Improved turnaround by 3-5 days, and
- Achieved considerable reductions in ‘Scope 3’ carbon emissions!
The Results
Fast forward a few months (..and without boring you with the technical detail) we had automated the new starter onboarding. From engagement to the new starter logging in for the first time. This automation now serves as a vital element in our standard offering and is available to all customers.
After it was all said and done, over and above the drastically improved new starter onboarding experience, our data indicated:
- Reduce engineering effort by around 45 hours per month
- Reduced HR administration by 28 hours per month
- Improved delivery of New starter accounts by 2.5 days
- Reduced customer direct costs by £350.00 per new starter
Let Ethical IT improve your onboarding experience
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