Welcome to the next installment in our Ask the Expert Series. Here you’ll find insights on everything from User Experience (UX) to ecommerce directly from our team. Today, our Director of UX, David Mabury, shares tips for fixing a messy onboarding process for customers or employees.
A client company approached Lokion with a problem that many companies are struggling with today: they were losing promising new hires. The twist? The company was losing them after the applicant had already accepted a job with the company.
When a job applicant first interacted with the company, their pre-hire and clearance process -- applying for the job, screening, interviews, the offer, pre-clearance, hiring, and the welcome process -- ran smoothly. But then they were forced to wait with no communication, often for weeks, for actual onboarding.
The onboarding phase presented the new hire with a steady stream of hassles and confusion, involving dozens of manual or semi-automated processes relating to first-day tasks, data verification, network access, and obtaining equipment -- all requiring expensive support and lengthy waits. As a result, the new hire's first days and even weeks on the job were often spent waiting for the access and equipment they needed, with zero productivity and mounting frustration.
The result: New hires -- from the call center floor up to the executive level -- were quitting in frustration before they ever logged a single productive hour on the job.
We conducted hours of interviews and on-site observation sessions to build an understanding of the audiences and roles involved in the hiring and onboarding process. We attended an orientation day for new hires at a cell center, interviewed recent hires, called people who had quit during their onboarding process, met with managers trying to fill positions, and talked with HR and IT professionals struggling with dozens of legacy systems.
Based on our fact-finding, we created personas for the many roles involved in the process. We also created a process map of the 17 critical touchpoints required of new hires along with the back-end processes involved and compiled a comprehensive list of the 30-plus software applications and systems involved in the process. Next, we formulated dozens of recommendations for improvement in order to:
- Provide applicants and new hires with timely status communication at every step from recruiting to the first day.
- Automatically alert managers and their delegates when to prepare for a new hire's onboarding.
- Give managers and their delegates a one-stop portal to complete all required onboarding steps so they no longer have to rely on incomplete "tribal knowledge" of the steps and systems involved.
- Directly integrate data sources to data destinations so that network-account creation and access privileges happen automatically without reliance on manual kickstarting of custom scripts, data aggregators, or external data files.
- Coordinate tasks between HR and IT to provide new hires with a complete suite of equipment and access, so they can hit the ground running on their first day.
The process of fixing any complex system starts with listening to the people involved to identify needs and blockers, followed by documenting the entire process. Often, this complete map of the process has never been attempted before when many legacy systems are involved and the process has grown by accretion over many years.
Presenting a clear picture of participants’ needs along with the full process produces new insights and a new vision. The missing pieces and potential improvements come into focus, and the organization can confidently move forward to improve the process.
Stay tuned for the next installment of our Ask the Expert series where we discuss how to determine if QA automation is right for your organization. In the meantime, get a better look at Lokion’s UX services.
David Mabury, Director of UX, Bio
A Lokionite since 2007, David Mabury leads the team responsible for strategy, user experience, user interface design, and QA. Prior to joining Lokion, he worked with interactive and advertising agencies in Memphis as well as an arts site in New York. David is a member of the Industrial Advisory Board for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Memphis.
