After recruiting and hiring new employees, onboarding is the next most important step in the hiring process. However, onboarding involves more than signing W-2 forms and filling out a waiver for the on-site health facility. It's a crucial three-month window in which you can train new employees and help them assimilate into the company culture. By not investing in the onboarding process, you risk not only losing the invested time and money, but also your new hire, according to Chris Buttenham, CEO and co-founder of Tasytt.
One in four employees who start at a company will leave within the first year if proper onboarding techniques aren't used, according to Buttenham. Even more alarming, one in every 25 employees will actually quit on the first day, he says, which only makes it even more important to help employees feel welcome from the moment they sign the dotted line.
"Making sure your new team members have the tools and know-how to succeed within your organization is critical to their longevity. Ensuring they feel comfortable, assimilated and welcome is equally as important during this stage," says Buttenham.
Cut onboarding costs
Hiring a new employee is expensive. Between recruitment, interviewing and negotiations, every new employee should be viewed as an investment. According to data from Undercover Recruiter, employees will spend, on average, 32 hours per year in training, which costs employers $1,200 per year, per employee. And that's just for employees who have already been hired and trained. Buttenham says the average cost to onboard a new employee is around $11,000, according to case studies and estimates done by their company.
Plus, when it comes to new hires, managers and coworkers have to take time out of their schedules to help train them on systems and processes. Overall, a lot of money, time and energy goes into every new hire, and Buttenham claims Tasytt can help cut down on those costs. With the onboarding app, Buttenham says companies get "over two times return on their investment when they use Tasytt to automate the process, not to mention an increase in engagement." It saves companies time, which ultimately saves them money. And by improving the onboarding experience, it helps ensure employees get acclimated, which helps with retention rates.
Unburden busy managers
The cloud-based app is designed to offer an interactive training platform that helps new employees get up to speed quickly and efficiently. It's aimed at streamlining that process by taking some of the grunt work out of the process for those involved in training new employees.
Within the app, new employees can browse through staff profiles to get to know names and faces before their first day, or to refresh their memory when they inevitably forget someone's name during those hectic first weeks. They'll have access to all the new hire documents they need, Buttenham says, as well as any other documents relevant to their job within the company. Rather than sending a new employee a ton of emails, and leaving it up to them to organize the information, it's included in the app. Managers can add information on regular meetings, daily schedules and other vital information that will help the new employee feel right at home, Buttenham says. The app also integrates with familiar services used in the enterprise, such as Google Drive, OneDrive and DropBox and it allows managers to quickly make new employee accounts for Google for Work, Trello, BaseCamp and GitHub.
Buttenham gives the example of a startup company that managed to save "countless hours for each new employee when they used the account provisioning feature on Tasytt to automatically create new accounts for the new team member." The app can help managers quickly get new employees registered on all the sites the department uses, like GitHub or Google for Work. With account provisioning, managers cut down on time spent registering logins and usernames, they'll already be setup and ready to use.
Not just for new employees
The Tasytt app isn't only for new employees, because onboarding and training doesn't necessarily end after those first three months of an employee's tenure. It can also serve as a continuing education platform or as a resource for team members to connect and share important documents and information. You might find that when processes change or if your company restructures, employees will need that same level of attention and training to stay motivated, no matter how long they have been with the company.
"You can update and add material that is automatically pushed out to members of the team. Admins can ensure proficiency on the new or updated material using the analytics dashboard that details quiz scores and content views," says Buttenham.
Sometimes introducing new technology can be viewed as simply introducing more work. The last thing you want employees to do is resent something that is meant to make their lives easier. Enter gamification, which turns the app experience into something that feels more like an interactive game experience with a little competition and quizzes, Buttenham says. Tasytt will keep a tally of what an employee has learned, what they've contributed to the platform and it even offers real-life incentives through the Tasytt marketplace, which is built right into the app.
Employees can access the platform via the Web or through an Android app, with an iOS app on the way. By making the app fun, engaging and easy to use, companies will likely see better participation rates across the board.
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