Today’s economy is in a state of turmoil and flux, thanks largely to COVID-19 and its countless disruptions. 114 million Americans lost their jobs in 2021 alone. While employment numbers have been recovering in 2021, it’s going to be a long time until things settle into a new normal.
Lost jobs are just one way that the Coronavirus has disrupted the workforce. Over 21 million employees plan on switching jobs once the pandemic settles down to a manageable level.
That’s a lot of people switching jobs. It’s all happening all at once, to boot.
Onboarding tools are going to be absolutely essential in the coming months and years. Here are a few of the most essential tools to facilitate the onboarding process, to make the transition as smooth and efficient as possible for your future employees and yourself.
Why Onboarding Tools Matter
Before we dive into our list of onboarding tools in earnest, let’s take just a moment to discuss why employee onboarding is so important. Proper onboarding is an integral part of helping a new employee feel like a part of your business from Day One. It also gives them all the tools they need to succeed and to hit the ground running as soon as they start.
Proper onboarding also helps to make sure that everything’s clear and above-board. Onboarding materials spell out your company culture explicitly. They also make expectations clear, giving your new hire every tool they need to progress in their professional journey.
Making things clear and understandable helps employees to know where they stand with you and your company. They help to give a sense of security and increase employee morale while boosting productivity at the same time.
It’s truly a win/win. There’s no reason not to implement a solid employee onboarding process for everybody’s benefit.
Bit.AI
We’ll begin our deep dive into the best tools for onboarding new employees with one of the best document management platforms we’ve found to date. Bit.ai is a modern document management and workplace collaboration tool that facilitates the onboarding process in a wide variety of ways.
Onboarding a new employee can require a ton of documentation. There’s HR guidelines, training manuals, sales materials, and so on. Having one centralized platform that’s accessible to everybody highly streamlines that process.
It’s also an easy, foolproof way to make sure that everybody’s on the same page and working with the same materials.
Bit.ai makes it a snap for multiple people or departments to be able to create documents in one workspace. Even better, it supports uploading and displaying files straight from the interface as well.
Bit.ai also lets you keep track of where your employees are in their onboarding process. It supports document tracking so you can see who’s opened which documents and when they were opened.
Factor in the fact that Bit.ai offers a number of useful templates for common types of projects and support for managing a company asset library and it makes Bit.ai a powerful, extremely useful tool to have in your arsenal for the onboarding process.
Qualtrics EmployeeXM
Monitoring your employees to make sure everyone’s needs are being met and they’re living up to their potential doesn’t stop after onboarding ends. It’s an ongoing process that lasts for the duration of an employee’s tenure at your company. That means you need some sort of tool to keep track of an employee’s performance across their entire career.
Enter Qualtrics EmployeeXM, a powerful performance monitoring tool to empower every single member of your enterprise. EmployeeXM lets you customize different benchmarks to give you a detailed picture of an employee’s performance. These detailed insights allow you to put policies into practice to boost productivity and help individual team members succeed.
Qualtrics EmployeeXM also gives you tools to keep track of company morale. It has tools to create census surveys and pulse surveys. These tools help you to know not only how your employees are performing but also why.
Qualtrics EmployeeXM offers a number of features similar to Bit.ai that are useful for the onboarding process. Library management and custom templates mean you don’t have to start from scratch every time there’s a new hire.
An extensive employee database. with a number of deep features seals the deal. Qualtics EmployeeXM is well worth having in your HR stack, especially if you’re serious about your employees’ satisfaction.
KiSSFLOW
One thing you need to keep an eye out for with business software is the tendency to over-complicate things. Technology’s here to make our lives easier not more complicated. We don’t necessarily want to have to master a whole programming language just to make sure our new employees are onboarded properly.
Enter KiSSFLOW, an all-inclusive workspace management platform that is highly useful for employee onboarding. KiSSFLOW automates a number of HR processes. It also makes sure your new hires understand your company organization with clear, easily understandable diagrams and charts.
KiSSFLOW offers a number of tools that are useful for HR. You’re able to create onboarding documents in a matter of minutes with just a few clicks. These can then be easily shared with just a few clicks.
KiSSFLOW is also widely customizable, easily integrating with APIs so it fits in nicely with the rest of your business software.
Finally, KiSSFLOW allows you to visualize nearly every aspect of your organization in real-time with a deep, powerful dashboard. This makes KiSSFLOW not just a useful onboarding tool but a good productivity management solution in general.
Scoro
A number of the best onboarding tools on our list don’t just stop at hiring. Some applications, like Scoro, are excellent project management in their own right. They just happen to also handle the onboarding process extremely well.
Scoro is a robust. end-to-end tool for managing remote teams. Considering how important remote work and hybrid workplaces have been over the last 2 years, a lot of business owners are going to be looking for a good remote management solution.
Scoro isn’t just a remote workforce manager, either. It also features a built-in CRM tool, as well as solutions for billing and reporting. Scoro easily integrates with nearly any 3rd-Party application you can think of, from Mailchimp to Zapier to Google Calendar.
Scoro also lets you keep track of the status of various projects. It offers team visualization tools, as well, so you’ll know precisely who’s doing what and what each team member’s responsibilities are.
Zenefits
Here’s another full-featured HR solution that handles a lot of different duties, including onboarding. Zenefits is used by some of the biggest corporations on Earth. It’s equally as capable of handling small- and medium-sized businesses, however. It’s also equally adept at managing remote workforces as well as traditional offices.
Zenefits has been around since 2013, so it’s one of the more established onboarding solutions on our list. In the nearly 10 years it’s been in business it’s won awards as both HR software and benefits administration. It’s capable of much more, besides, which is part of the reason for its popularity.
Zenefits’ main strength is at managing employee benefits. It easily integrates with virtually any HR app you can think of. It offers features for comprehensive Plan Building as well as Electronic Data Interchange, making it a one-stop shop for managing all of your employees’ benefit needs.
Zenefits also handles a number of other common HR tasks, such as background checks. 3rd-Party app integration makes it easy to share these results with almost any business software you can think of. Need to share an insurance quote with a Slack channel?
Zenefits handles that without even having to think about it.
Finally, Zenefits does a lot of the work for you so your HR department is freed up to work on more important tasks. Many of the data entry tasks are automated directly from the employee’s input. That way they’re guaranteed to be accurate, as well.
Zenefits is an excellent full-featured HR solution that makes sure your employees are well taken care of, Zenefits is it!
Lessonly
Onboarding an employee often involves getting them informed and up to speed in a hurry. That means that educational tools and lesson-planning software are a necessary part of your onboarding process. Lessonly is among the best that we’ve found, which is the reason we’re including it in our onboarding checklist.
First of all, Lessonly gives you all the tools you need to make high-quality instructional materials. Most notably, Lessonly lets you create video instructional materials which is one of the main reasons for its popularity. That’s just the beginning, however.
Lessonly also offers features to help your team learn new skills. Lessonly has features for practicing skills as well as offering employees the chance to return to lessons even after they’re completed. This way your employees never stop learning, even after the onboarding process is complete.
Video lessons are just the beginning of what Lessonly is capable of, however. You can also create PowerPoint presentations and regular documents in Lessonly, as well. All of these capabilities make Lessonly the only educational software you’ll need to get your employees well-trained in no time.
Typelane
Sometimes you just need a simple, relatively straightforward employee onboarding tool. Typelane could be a good fit if you don’t need a ton of additional HR resources. What it does, it does very well, which is making sure that your new employees and hiring managers have everything they need to be successful during the hiring process.
Typelane offers a detailed timeline and overview of the entire onboarding process. You’ll be able to see what a new employee was hired and when they’ve signed all of their paperwork.
Typelane can be customized to suit your particular brand in a variety of ways, as well. You can create onboarding checklists to make sure your new hires have all of the necessary equipment before they start their position. You can also change add your own custom branding to make it more uniquely your own.
If you’re looking for a simple but powerful tool to monitor the entire onboarding status, from start to finish, Typelane could be a good fit.
Workbright
We’ll end our onboarding roundup with an online tool in case you need to deploy your training materials to a lot of different locations. This is most likely extra important with so much of the world happening virtually at the moment.
Workbright makes it extra simple for employees to get set up and handle most of their pre-employment requirements entirely virtually. The powerful, popular online onboarding tool has a portal for uploading photos and identification directly through the website. New hires can also fill out W4s through the online portal and there’s also a function for digitally signing documents.
Workbright also has a robust mobile app with a number of features that make the onboarding process as simple as possible. Your employees can scan photos and documents directly through the app. These documents are fully in compliance with federal regulations, as they follow all the guidelines for complying with an audit trail and timestamps.
If you’re looking for the right HR software, you should give Workbright a chance.
Onboarding is such a vital part of the employment process. It helps establish the relationship between you and your employee that will last their entire employment. Taking the time to find the right onboarding solution sets everybody, from the managers to the new hire to your C-suite, up for success.
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