How To Build A Business Case For Employee Onboarding Software

Globally, onboarding has evolved into a mature HR practice. Successful strategic onboarding is especially important given the increasing pace of change and mobility. Research has shown repeatedly that onboarding influences whether new employees decide to remain with or leave an organization. Most organizations recognize they don't execute onboarding well. The challenge is convincing leadership that onboarding software represents a valuable investment rather than a marginal expense.

Let's Review The Problem

The first step in constructing any business case involves establishing the problem being solved.

• 80% of new employees decide within their first few months whether to stay with their organization
• 88% of employees surveyed by Gallup indicated their organization was not good at onboarding
• Only 12% of employees agree strongly that their organization does a great job onboarding new people
• 76% of HR leaders report they believe they are ineffectively onboarding new employees

Top reasons managers neglect onboarding:

• 57% cited insufficient time
• 55% noted absence of tools to measure effectiveness
• 39% reported lack of digital onboarding technology to automate the process

Why It's Worth A Strong Business Case

Building a business case for onboarding software is not difficult; the problem is most people attempt purchasing it without one. Understanding and supporting the plan determines how your team and leadership communicate it to the rest of the organization.

How To Introduce Your Business Case

Acknowledging engagement's role is key to understanding onboarding's business case. To be truly productive in work, employees must be engaged. To be engaged, they need purpose. The challenge for both is resources. Without appropriate resources, managers become task-focused rather than purpose-driven, essentially sabotaging engagement.

Major contributors to employee engagement include culture, connection, clarification, and the WOW factor. People generally have no problem with mundane tasks as long as it leads to intrinsic rewards. These could include connecting with customers and colleagues, making the world better, feelings of accomplishment, seeing their role in something bigger, or career advancement.

How To Get Leadership To See This Your Way

Consider this: The higher someone is in an organization, the more time and effort required to understand the business and its people. Yet, this investment typically decreases dramatically for middle management down to junior employees and frontline customer-facing workers — where onboarding is frequently executed poorly.

What would happen to frontline workers if they received CEO-level treatment during onboarding? Would they stay longer? Become managers? Become highly engaged business fans? While impossible to give all new hires CEO treatment literally, the analogy drives understanding. Exceeding new hire expectations and ensuring employees feel valued should factor into onboarding program design.

5 Strong Arguments To Get Your Business Case Through

1. Employee Onboarding Strengthens Employee Engagement and Retention

Managers are evaluated on employee turnover rates, and the entire workplace is impacted when employees quit above industry average. Recruiting costs increase, customer service suffers, colleagues bear more work during unplanned terminations, and management feels the strain.

• Gallup: 88% of employees indicated their organization was not good at onboarding
• Society for HR Management: 86% of new employees decide whether to stay within their first few months
• Harvard Business Review: 87% of employees worldwide are disengaged

2. Shorten the Time to Maximum Performance for New Hires

Organizations recoup the highest onboarding return on investment in time-to-productivity. Organizations with standardized onboarding processes experience 50 percent greater new-hire productivity compared to companies with unstructured processes. A well-designed, science-based onboarding program with supporting tools reduces time-to-productivity.

3. Improve Employer Branding to Attract Top Talent

Brands create strategically curated images and public perceptions. Potential candidates are influenced by social media conversations, review sites, negative word-of-mouth, and personal connections. Sites like Glassdoor, where employees rate employers, are commonly used by job seekers. Bad onboarding is a common theme in poor employee reviews. Investing in employee experience during the onboarding phase is critical for employer branding.

4. Stronger, Happier, and Inclusive Workplace Culture

Onboarding is key to forming, maintaining, and changing organizational culture, starting when the job offer is signed during pre-boarding. Onboarding tasks like getting new hires to post in social networks and chat tools like Slack, Workplace from Facebook, and Microsoft Teams help coworkers connect and share for heightened inclusion and familiarity. Culture is at the apex of mature onboarding and optimal employee engagement.

5. Relieve the Strain on Managers and Avoid Burnout

Welcoming new employees is a mixed blessing for managers. While relieved and hopeful about new hire value, it can feel burdensome during early onboarding weeks and months. Bad onboarding structure increases burden and represents strain on company resources. The right onboarding plan implemented by the right software automates tedious tasks weighing down managers, enabling them to focus on job purpose and colleague connections.

How To Close The Deal — This Is About Brand Building

A brand is a promise — delivery of service and quality standards meeting or exceeding customer expectations. What happens when a new hire experiencing bad onboarding is customer-facing? Due to the customer-experience and employee-experience link, great onboarding is the solution.

The lifetime value of each hire extends beyond employment duration. Consider the thousands of employees departing after brief employment — they'll tell friends and family about your business. Optimizing these experiences so each new hire speaks positively about your company regardless of tenure is key to employer branding.

How To Build Your Actual Business Case For Employee Onboarding Software

If your onboarding plan is the map and your team is the train, then onboarding software is the engine moving it forward. Depending on workforce size, onboarding software can do the work of one full-time HR assistant. Without software, creating individual emails, messages, reminders, follow-ups, measuring, data storing, and reporting is time-consuming. All can be completed with onboarding software, saving management team time and strain associated with manual onboarding plans.