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Whether a company is a budding startup or an established multinational corporation, the employee onboarding process plays an important role in its growth.

Onboarding is the first opportunity for a new employee to feel the culture and brand of the organisation. With technological advancements, it’s now easier than ever for employers to create and scale great new hire experiences for their increasingly digital, diverse, and distributed employees.

In today’s work-from-anywhere economy, organisations and HR professionals are increasingly relying on fully automated onboarding systems for employees, since many tasks are now carried out remotely or via digital environments.

With accelerated digitisation, onboarding processes can now be rethought and reimagined in ways that were not possible in the past.

With a faster and more efficient process from recruitment to onboarding, new hires can get on with doing what they were hired to do as soon as possible, and contribute to the business more quickly.

Only when businesses automate the recruitment and onboarding processes can they truly support the digital transformation of their organisations.

A seamless onboarding experience

Onboarding experiences that are positive lead to greater employee satisfaction and retention, which in turn leads to improved performance and fewer staff turnovers. As a result, automation is gaining traction in the workplace. Both attended and unattended automation have found niches in streamlining front and backend workflows.

Attended automation can enhance user experience and increase productivity through human-machine collaboration. On the other hand, unattended automations can optimise technology resources and maximise ROI from enterprise technology infrastructure.

With automation, it is possible to eliminate repetitive tasks, trigger tasks to run on demand, and allow employees to focus on core tasks rather than distractions. In self-learning algorithms, information is analysed and presented in the most relevant way.

In combination with automation, they result in faster and more accurate decision making. With respect to a user’s profile and location within an application, users can be presented with experiences that are highly relevant to their work.

Benefits of automating the onboarding process

It is important to consider how automation can enhance and optimise the onboarding process, given that it is an important element of the employer-employee relationship. Listed below are three ways automation will help deliver great onboarding experiences.

Personalisation: Based on the incoming employee’s role and profile, the onboarding experience can be highly personalised to reflect their specific nature of work, even on common and shared tools. Onboarding content that is only relevant to their specific needs can be showcased at the right time.

Time to Productivity: Automation eliminates the need to learn complicated and long-winded work processes. Automation combined with in-application guidance can reduce learning times significantly and make new employees productive faster than before.

Automation also allows different forms of content to be created rapidly and with minimal effort.

Diversifying learning experiences is made possible and learning needs for different users are catered to thanks to automation. Content updates can also be automated ensuring that information is always up to date and pertinent.

Impacting the future of work

As workplace automation advances, it will have a significant impact on the future of work. With an emphasis on improving productivity and end-user experience, automation is finding its way into more business applications. Through automation, employees will be able to gain expertise and become more work-ready in less time. Routine work will be replaced by automation.

Automation will result in significant changes to some current jobs and will create new, yet unimagined roles. With the rise of automation, we will also see an increase in employee upskilling and reskilling.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)