Originally posted on https://www.powerhousehub.com/blog/onboarding-your-business-groups-in-5-steps

 

An effective onboarding program is the essential foundation for your new staff. It should familiarise them with your business, product and facilities as efficiently as possible. This process may be straightforward for individuals, but an organisation which needs to onboard large teams of professionals, including staff, contractors and visitors, requires a versatile and adaptable onboarding program to cater to groups’ diverse needs.

Depending on their industry, an organisation may encounter some or all of these onboarding challenges:

• a diverse cross section of talent
• high staff turnover
• single site and/or multi-location businesses
• legal and WHS constraints, such as fire safety
• payroll with multiple hierarchies of staff across different locations
• a wide range of different policies based on work tasks, locations and positions
• regular job role adjustments
• the need to collect licences and insurance documentation from staff and contractors

 

Let’s take a look the best approach to onboarding for diverse business groups:

1. Go online

Using an online platform for your onboarding and induction program offers many powerful benefits:

• Saves time for your executives
• Reduces travel costs
• Keeps all staff productive
• Saves money and is cost effective
• Builds and retains critical employee data

Click here to download a detailed look at the key benefits and return on investment of online induction and onboarding platforms.

2. Create manager-accessible groups

Many platforms will allow you to create unique training groups for your different teams, locations and professionals which enables you to seamlessly deliver your onboarding and induction programs.

Once the training groups are created, which usually reflect the group structure in the payroll or HR system, you should be able to tailor the material shared with each specific group.

Through these groups, managers should have the functionality to be able to:

• view visual progress reports on individuals and their teams
• export data report on individuals or their team
• assign courses, webinars and events
• add staff or contractors to their groups
• view licence and insurance uploads
• receive alerts regarding licence expiration dates

 

The manager will be able to login and see all the staff in their group or groups and view their progress in visual and data export reports. They should also receive updates and alerts when their group’s certificates and licences are about to expire.

3. Enable registration for contractors

Automating the online registration process for your contractors is an essential component of a good onboarding program. Your software should have the ability for your contracting businesses to be able to self-register on the portal with its own dedicated group and upload their insurance documentation and other key documents.

This provides a great deal of security for your company as you can have the businesses provide their own terms and conditions and thereafter each contractor provides a digital signature to adhere to those terms.

Online induction software should have the ability for contractor managers to run their own administrative portal with the capacity to export the database at any time. There should also be the option for the contracting data to write automatically to your existing databases (CRM, Payroll, HR and Talent Systems).

4. Automate staff onboarding

Online induction for staff is often unique to the induction you run for your contractors. Self-registration is important for contractors but the ability for your onboarding software to integrate with your Payroll System, CRM or talent databases is now very important. This integration will deliver the following:

• enrol a new staff member in your LMS when they are added to your database
• change the status of a staff member if they are promoted, on leave or terminated
• change in training is automated when a staff member changes roles or is promoted
• After a staff member completes their induction and training the data is writes back

The onboarding software should also allow for single sign-on and LDAP so that the access for staff can be automated from intranets and other web portals without the need for logins.

In addition to accessing courses, learning programs, webinars and training events from their mobile device, your onboarding software should also allow managers to monitor their group’s progress; thereby delegating responsibility to managers rather than the onus being on HR.

Staff should be able to view their training courses, download policies, view their own training record and upload their own personal files; this gives your staff members a degree of responsibility for their own training and helps you to ascertain suitability for a role.

5. Allow visitor access

Depending on your industry, you may require onboarding for visitors as well. Online visitor induction is becoming progressively more popular to improve safety while visitors attend your venue. This can be a critical component, especially at larger venues or those which are under construction, as it ensures that health and safety standards are met.

Your onboarding software should allow your visitors to sign in, sign out or login as a returning visitor. As part of that process, a visitor will be presented with a mini course as part of the sign in for completion and assessment. If successful, a visitor pass should be automatically produced and printed.

Onboarding with PowerHouse Hub

PowerHouse Onboard streamlines and automates the onboarding process for new employees and contractors. The application builds customised onboarding workflows to match the requirements of each new hire group in an organisation.

In addition to providing a streamlined onboarding and induction program, PowerHouse Onboard provides AI datasets for managers to track and monitor their candidates, assisting with compliance management.

Want to book a demo of our onboarding platform? Click Here