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Employee onboarding

How HR Chatbots Are Transforming Employee Onboarding Experiences

There is a famous American author and salesman, Hilary Hinton, who once quoted that almost all the employees have three primary needs– 

  • work that interests them
  • recognition for good performance, and 
  • involvement in the things happening in the organization.

The first two needs act as a source of motivation to push their limits at work, while the last need is a desire to be a part of something bigger. When new employees are about to join a company, they expect a warm welcome, brief about their roles and responsibilities, and relevant company norms.

Yet several enterprises overlook the significance of employee onboarding programs. They do not understand how a well-planned onboarding program can help new employees acclimatize to the new role within the organization.

Having said that, this blog walks you through the challenges that HRs and new joiners face during the onboarding process and how to overcome them and revolutionize the onboarding process through an HR chatbot.

What are the challenges that HRs and new hires currently face during onboarding? 

HR Chatbots for employee onboarding

Employee onboarding is one of the most critical parts of the hiring process. This stage consists of paperwork, legal formalities, employee introduction, etc. And with so many things to take care of, it becomes the most challenging one for HRs and employees alike.

Employees feel overwhelmed, nervous, and even ecstatic on their first day at work. An office is a new place, the people around them are unfamiliar, the culture is different, the exact role and responsibilities are still not mapped– the feeling is entirely like day one of school. 

HRs should not expect their newly hired employees to remember all the key points about their new position and the company. Sometimes, and humanly so, HRs might be tempted to speed up the process, but this might overwhelm the candidates and add to more onboarding challenges. 

Misinterpretation of job roles 

One of the most common onboarding challenges is that many employees do not have enough clarity about their work. They do not know what they have to do precisely. There are even cases when employees realize after a few days of joining that the role they applied for is different from what they anticipated.

To avoid such scenarios, HRs should ensure that team leaders and managers meet the employees and provide enough clarity on the job role. Employees should also be aware of how this role can give them a boost in their careers. The right kind of material and introductions should be ready before they start misinterpreting their scope of work!

Inability to gauge employee knowledge

There are certain aspects of the job that HRs assume employees to be familiar with. It could be running the software, knowledge about various processes, when to involve the management, etc. HRs expect employees to have a decent level of understanding about all these. However, this is not always the case. 

In their initial workdays, employees might face issues with their tasks and hesitate to ask. Or, in worst cases, they might not even know whom to ask. That is why it becomes essential for you to provide your employees with the learning material and access to a knowledge base that helps them come up to speed. 

Ineffective and prolonged employee onboarding process

It is no more feasible for HRs to manually welcome and onboard a new employee. With more organizations hiring distributed teams, the physical touch is hard to deliver, and team collaboration tools are inadequate.

It has resulted in onboarding processes either turning out to be ineffective or prolonged – especially in the cases where several new hires join on the same day. HRs have started to feel overwhelmed during the delivery of the process; right from documenting to introducing the new hire to the team and more, it has become harder to keep track of the little introductory steps into an organization. 

Studies indicate that this has resulted in some onboarding processes getting stretched to a few weeks and even months. Further, manually running the onboarding program while documentation leads to human error in many cases. 

Unpleasant onboarding experience for new hires 

An average onboarding process typically walks a new hire through a series of steps that are predefined and considered necessary by the organization. However, expecting the new hires to get started with their work post the minimal onboarding is the primary reason for new-hire attrition in organizations.

it is either the monotony of the process or the ambiguity that results in new hires quickly losing interest in the new role. With HRs getting no insight into the shortcomings of the onboarding process from the new hires, it is hard to fix this leaky funnel for most organizations.

How do onboarding chatbots simplify the lives of HRs and new hires

HR Chatbot for employee onboarding

Pre-onboarding

Pre-onboarding is one of the most crucial stages for welcoming new employees to the company. It is a critical juncture where even a tiny onboarding or organizational issue can affect a candidate’s motivation to work in the company. 

HRs can leverage the HR chatbot to engage new hires by automating information sharing during their wait period. You can use this waiting period to get them up to speed with things like the company’s vision and mission and start introducing them to the team through automated introductions. 

The idea is to make them feel welcomed and engaged from the day they decide to work in the organization to the day they join.

Streamline joining formalities 

Once new hires accept the offer letter, the next step requires both candidates and HRs to submit and collect documents respectively. The previous employment records, bank details, and tax forms are some of the many documents that employees submit. Typically, HRs have to nudge employees to share these documents, and this eventually creates a feeling of irritation on both sides. 

An HR chatbot for employee onboarding automates the entire process of collecting data/documents and storing them in the right place. It helps you and your hired candidates avoid the headache that the whole documentation process tends to give during the initial days.

Day one planning and automated introductions

Once the employee is on board, HRs have to handle many responsibilities. They have to brief the employees about the company policies, introduce the employees to their colleagues, and, more importantly, make them comfortable in the working environment. 

Performing the same steps repeatedly for all the new hires becomes overwhelming for HRs.

HR chatbot for employee onboarding enables HRs to send new hires a clear to-do list and instructions to give more structure to their first day. HRs can further automate introductions in a phased and strategic manner to curb the anxiety of new joiners when they meet unknowns, not knowing whom to talk to first. 

It gives new joiners more room to feel comfortable in the new workplace. The predefined structure gives them the strength to move past the first few days! 

FAQ automation and case management 

Expecting new hires to be able to consume all the information in a week is not practical. They always have some doubts regarding the role, the company policies, and processes. But the answers to each of these questions are repetitive, and the information is already available in the company’s knowledge base.

Instead of HR answering these questions, AI-powered chatbots should be used for FAQ automation. These chatbots use an existing database to provide instant answers to new hires’ questions.

The same applies to case management – times when a new hire may want to get an issue or concern addressed. An AI chatbot helps streamline the queries or requests made by a new joiner, either by automatic resolution or escalating them to HR for a more one-on-one conversation. 

For example, if the case request is around maternity leave, the AI chatbot automatically resolves the concern with the information available, approving or declining the request. But in times when an issue requires special attention, the HR chatbot forwards the request or automatically schedules a one-on-one session with HR.  

Feedbacks and surveys 

Every employee is different, but you cannot tailor an employee onboarding process to address individual needs. That is when gathering regular feedback from new hires via surveys becomes essential for the organization to understand what they can do better for their employees.

In a typical scenario, HR asks for feedback on onboarding after the process is complete. But what about a new joiner’s experience after walking through each stage of the onboarding process? It is paramount to capture the little details as the new joiner moves through your employee lifecycle from the day they step into their roles. 

An AI chatbot helps in automating the feedback and survey process at scale during and after onboarding. It helps organizations keep a close watch on how new joiners feel during their initial days and the feeling with which they step into actually doing the work once the introductions finish. It also helps optimize on the go, making sure that the new joiner does not drop off during the process. 

Why is artificial intelligence the way forward to revolutionize the employee onboarding process?

Considering several challenges that HRs and employees face during the onboarding process, it only makes sense to incline towards software empowered by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and Natural language processing (NLP) to make the program more efficient. 

Benefits for HRs:

  • Automates all the routine conversations that HRs ought to have with an employee during the onboarding process. It saves them time and makes the whole process more efficient
  • Allows HRs to onboard new employees at scale, keeping the communication and documentation process extremely streamlined and organized from day one
  • Automation throughout the onboarding process helps keep the new hires engaged and excited about the new roles
  • Helps HRs monitor the progress of new employees during the onboarding and optimize their journey for maximum engagement
  • Provides actionable insights to make the onboarding better with the help of frequent feedback and survey
  • Fastens case management with automated ticket resolution and seamless hand-offs for special requests

Benefits for employees:

  • HR chatbots reduce the back and forth conversations with HR for the initial documentation.
  • Helps understand and adopt organizational processes better from day one to bring efficiency.
  • Ensures effective and streamlined team interactions by introducing the right people at the right time.
  • Structures out the initial days of new employees to provide a complete understanding of job roles and expectations at a comfortable pace, thus boosting productivity.

Automate your employee onboarding process with Leena AI

With each passing day, the utilization of chatbots in human resources space is becoming a norm. And onboarding processes are not the first ones to change with automation. 

Technology is making processes simple for both the HRs and employees in the organization, improving the overall employee engagement and experience at scale.

Ready to leverage AI chatbots for employee onboarding? Book a demo today!

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