Seamless Staff Onboarding In 2022: The Mobile App Your Shift Based Workers Need During Labour Shortages
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Whether you’re facing unprecedented challenges with onboarding new staff, or simply want to ensure your quality talent sticks around, your staff onboarding process can make all the difference. Quality onboarding software with mobile app features provides a fast, easy and compliant way to onboard new employees, which is especially important in times of high staff turnover or shortages.
The Importance of Staff Onboarding
Staff onboarding is the process of integrating new hires into your business and company culture, with a goal of helping them become productive as quickly as possible. It involves practical tasks such as filling out key paperwork, along with training new employees in your systems, processes and equipment.
More importantly, it’s about helping your new employee feel welcome in their new team. Activities like providing a personalised welcome package and warm introductions to other team members help ensure your employee onboarding process encourages new hires to stay. Humanforce’s mobile app, for example, sends out a customised message containing engaging snippets of information about new hires and inviting current employees to make them feel welcome.
Crucially, a positive new employee onboarding process isn’t just a nice to have – it’s financially prudent. According to talent management expert Dr John Sullivan, 50 percent of people working on an hourly rate basis quit or get fired within their first six months. The costs associated with lost productivity, staff shortages and recruiting replacements multiply, underscoring the value of an effective onboarding strategy.
According to the Society for Human Resources Management, the onboarding experience is especially important for Millennials who may be new to the workforce and unsure about exactly what to expect. As Talya Bauer, Ph.D., author of the Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success report, notes: "The faster new hires feel welcome and prepared for their jobs, the faster they will be able to successfully contribute to the firm's mission."
Your staff onboarding process also sets the tone and professionalism of your organisation. While the impact of this is hard to measure, you can be sure a disgruntled new hire will tell others. Conversely, an awesome experience can set your business apart as an employer of choice, helping you continue to attract and retain great people.
Staff Onboarding Process
In addition to helping your team members feel valued and get quickly up to full working speed, your onboarding of new staff must meet compliance requirements. In Australia, this helps you stay on the right side of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and Fair Work Ombudsman. These entities provide detailed guides to their requirements.
Current Challenges with Onboarding in the Retail and Hospitality Sectors
Businesses in the retail and hospitality sectors face additional challenges with onboarding. The constantly changing Covid environment, with its frequent updates to close contact rules, lockdown regulations and testing requirements, has left many businesses short staffed. Illustrating the point, figures from the National Skills Commission’s December 2021 Internet Vacancy Index (IVI) showed that while job ads declined overall, those for hospitality workers grew by 10.4 per cent.
Added to this, the enormous downward pressure from disrupted supply chains has left hospitality and retail businesses with ambiguous staffing needs.
Further complicating the situation is the gap between new staff hiring and starting, and the time and effort involved in setting new employees up in systems and rosters. Furthermore, multiple stakeholders are often involved in the process, including hiring managers, direct managers, and your HR team.
This makes it critical to take a comprehensive look at your onboarding program, ensuring it is a strategic process by which new hires can be onboarded quickly and seamlessly.
Staff Onboarding Software – Mobile App Onboarding
This is where Humanforce comes into its own. Our cloud-based software and mobile app have been specifically designed to facilitate a fast and effortless hiring process, with a focus on delivering an exceptional experience to drive high employee satisfaction and engagement.
Some of our software’s features that help streamline the onboarding process for deskless and shift-based workers include:
paperless onboarding using our mobile app, which easily captures key employee data including TFN, superannuation and bank details
digital input and experience-driven automation helps minimise the risk of errors, simplify your onboarding process and optimise your induction process
the ability to complete onboarding before your new employee’s first day, driving higher start rates and a premium onboarding experience
the ability to roster new staff right from their start date
the capacity to capture all the details you need for tax and super compliance and submit forms directly to the ATO, streamlining the entire process
the ability to mobilise large teams quickly as needed, creating a better experience for your customers.
Benefits of using Employee Onboarding Software
Our onboarding software is built to enhance the onboarding experience for both employees and employers. The user-friendliness of our mobile app for onboarding facilitates superior employee engagement. By easily taking care of routine tasks, it also frees up time and energy, allowing managers and HR professionals to invest more into making your new employee’s first few weeks and months more constructive and enjoyable.
In turn, this enhances business workflows and creates a favourable impression of professionalism, while also ensuring your compliance obligations are met.
As we come out of lockdowns and pass peak Covid numbers, the retail and hospitality sectors are likely to stabilise and experience more demand. Those who can get up and running quickly will gain a competitive edge with potential to bolster revenue and be positioned for long-term success.