Create the decisive factor for employees to stay by leveraging HR Cloud technologies

“Onboarding is your first opportunity to integrate and enable your employees. It starts much earlier than you think and lasts a lot longer than traditionally believed.”

Onboarding describes how employees are prepared, organized, and integrated by an organization. Employees are supported by the organization to optimally perform their roles. They are provided with knowledge about the structure, culture, and vision of the organization. Onboarding starts from the moment new employees sign the contract and can last for several months as employees settle into their new role. During this time, while the expectations of employees meet the actual perception of the new role and organization, they will decide whether to stay or start looking for another job. The importance of this phase is supported by a study that reveals that a strong Onboarding process increases employee retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. But what constitutes an optimal Onboarding for employees? A decisive factor is the experience that the employee perceives during the Onboarding process. This is the reason we need to focus on the employee experience, which embraces all the experiences and touchpoints that employees acquire during their journey in the organization. Another supporting factor for valuable Onboarding can be the extensive use of HR Cloud technologies, which is why we include the benefits of HR Cloud vendors while asking how to improve employee experience in Onboarding.

Phases of the employee-centric Onboarding journey

To find out what constitutes a good employee experience during Onboarding and how HR Cloud technologies can support the experience, we conducted interviews with employee experience experts and gained valuable insights. We used the findings of these interviews to create the optimal employee-centric Onboarding journey:

The Onboarding journey consists of three Onboarding phases with specific objectives: pre-boarding, acclimation, and belonging and performance excellence. These phases are examined more closely based on four layers of experience we identified: admin and technological, professional, and content-related, organization and cultural, and social and network. By analyzing different HR Cloud vendors, we found out where the HR Cloud delivers added value in the defined Onboarding phases. Before looking deeper into the Onboarding phases, their experience layers, and the potential HR Cloud support, it is crucial to consider that HR is not alone in influencing the experience. IT and business also play their own roles. Considering this, we examine the importance of cross-functional collaboration. Another factor to consider is that Onboarding processes can be split into global, centrally governed processes and local, decentralized processes.

The three aforementioned Onboarding phases will be explained in detail in subsequent, individual blogs, forming a blog series on how to improve the employee experience in Onboarding by leveraging HR Cloud technologies. The trends outlined are focusing on areas such as Onboarding, Pre-boarding, Cultural adoption, Gamification, AI and Automation, and Personalization. To discover how different HR Cloud Technology vendors support these trends, also check out our HR CloudWatch study  2021/22.

HR Cloud in Onboarding

This blog series builds upon research conducted last year, takes new insights into account, and demonstrates how Capgemini Invent creates value for its customers. The focus is on giving a comprehensive view of the Onboarding journey from an employee experience perspective. By sharing our expertise and experience on both process excellence and state-of-the-art technologies, our objective is to highlight how to improve the employee experience in Onboarding by leveraging HR Cloud technologies. We make a connection to different HR Cloud technology vendors, this time by underpinning the Onboarding journey with examples from different vendors in real life.

Our next blog #2 takes a closer look at how HR Cloud technologies can ensure the best first experience for employees.

Part of Capgemini’s HR CloudWatch Blog, hosted by Dr. Sandra Duesing, Vice President of Capgemini Invent Germany, and the Global Head of “Reinventing HR.”