First impressions last. That’s why having a well-structured and smooth employee onboarding experience is a must. Many companies already use Slack or Micrososft Teams for daily communication. While you can use these popular collaboration tools by itself to create #welcome or #onboarding channels to help in your employee onboarding workflow, using it in tandem with apps like HappyFox’s Assist AI can be a great way of initiating new hires into the company and introducing them to the company culture.
What is employee onboarding and why do you need it?
Employee onboarding is simply the process of initiating new hires into a company or organization by making them familiar with the workspace, company policies and culture, their team, and their roles and responsibilities.
It helps you make your new employee feel welcome and valued in a new environment. It also helps them find their space in the organizational family faster and without any major roadblocks. A negative experience can lead to a poor first impression, dictating their perceptions about your company. Activities conducted during onboarding also lead them to understand their role better, helping them perform their responsibilities better and thereby, furthering your business. A better onboarding process also helps minimize the chaos caused by paperwork for the HR team. Using apps, integration, and ticketing workflows on Slack or Teams helps in many ways such as shortening the onboarding lifecycle, reducing the burden on the HR team, and providing a consistent experience to new hires with a lower probability of human error.
How to Make Onboarding Easier
It is natural for new employees to feel lost in the first few days of their joining a new company. They have questions and often do not know where to head to or who to approach for answers. Even simple questions about parking, dress codes, or health benefits can add to the anxiety of the new hire. One thing that may help is adding the new hire to your Slack and Teams a few days before they join to help them get acquainted with your channels and manner of communication and ask any questions they might have ahead of their joining. Using a tool like Assist AI on Slack anord Teams can help take the anxiety out of asking questions and make new hire support possible 24×7.
A negative first experience can lead to a poor first impression, dictating long-term employee perceptions about your company.
1. Help new employees adopt company culture from day one
According to the Harvard Business Review, organizations with a smooth and consistent onboarding process enjoy 62% greater new hire productivity, along with 50% higher new hire retention. With Assist AI, new employees can ask as many questions, as many times as they wish to, without feeling like they are disturbing someone. In the case that Assist AI can not answer a question, users can submit a ticket with a single click. You can also initiate and store conversations on a #new-hires channel to bring your new hire up to speed.
2. Be prepared with relevant software and hardware
For all workplaces, especially the ones that deal primarily with technology, it is vital for any employee to have access to devices, software, and other requirements like wifi and the intranet that will help them work and perform better. Creating a clear channel of communication between the hiring manager, IT department, and immediate team to ensure that the new hire has all anticipated tools necessary. You can leverage conversational ticketing to allow the relevant people, including the new employee, to make requests that can be dealt with in the familiar environment of Slack or Teams.
3. Keep your knowledge bases up-to-date
Using Slack or Teams ticketing or solutions like Assist AI can be a huge help in the onboarding process, making your new hire feel comfortable while reducing the workload of your HR team. But these processes work better when the knowledge bases are regularly updated to reflect the latest company policy and other information. Giving a dated answer to any employee, especially a new hire, would confuse and frustrate them. One way to simplify this process is to leverage leverage tools that use Natural Langauge Processing, a part of artificial intelligence to respond to user query more accurately and efficiently in your knowledge management efforts. Use them through Assist AI to streamline knowledge search, update, delivery, and onboard new employees without putting in the extra work. Specifically, on Slack channels, it helps to have important messages and files pinned to the chat to ensure that your employees can hit the ground running.
4. Add an element of fun to the onboarding process
Finally, you must ensure that you can positively reinforce the company culture through unique onboarding activities. Look at your new hire as a person who has a life outside of the workplace rather than just an employee by thinking of onboarding as beyond the paperwork and instructions. Leverage Slack and Micrososft Teams as a tool to initiate conversations with polls, fun quizzes, and other sessions where your new hire can get to know the community they have just met. Using bots that greet new members to the workspace is an interesting touch.
Provide better employee experiences and improve retention rates with a smooth onboarding process
There are many upsides to a thorough and smooth onboarding process. It almost always results in happier, more productive, and engaged employees and can be a big deciding factor in your employee retention rates. Use Assist AI to promote adoption of self-service as a culture using Slack and Microsoft Teams — where they’d communicate the most. Learn more about how you can leverage Assist AI to improve your onboarding process and improve the performance and profit of your business by scheduling a one-on-one session with our product specialists. Assist AI offers free plans and also premium plans for enterprise customers.
