If you run a small-to-medium business, you probably know that you need to have an induction process to ensure your new staff have a positive experience on their first day.
A good induction process will span the first few months of employee engagement, and will ensure they become productive quickly and feel valuable.
The HR experts are telling us that new employees are more likely to form a positive attitude towards the company based on the induction experience, and are likely to stay with the business longer if that experience is positive.
So, clearly, there is value in creating an induction program and a business process around it. In this article, I want to explore how IT can play a role in this…
The first thing is to create some digital assets. By this, I mean written instructions, advisories and possibly an induction manual that can be modified for each new starter or standardised for specific repeatable roles. These should be stored electronically so they can be centrally accessed, reproduced, modified, and kept up-to-date.
A great place to store such documents is an intranet, which can be run on a server or in the cloud. SharePoint offers some good options for this sort of information management. This is also a great place to store company policy documents and work procedures that can be linked to from the induction manual to ensure new employees – as well as current staff – always see the most up-to-date versions of your advisory documents. This also has positive legal implications should there ever be a breach of company policy requiring action to be taken against an employee.
More specifically to the IT department, each new starter needs to have digital tools and a digital profile. Put simply, they need stuff like a phone, PC, tablet, and they need login accounts set up so they can start working. It pays to have checklists of your standard equipment and security groups so you can quickly select without omissions.
Having a staff member turn up to a pile of the last staff member’s paperwork, and a desk with no digital tools or profile, is going to leave the new staff member feeling transient, unappreciated and under-valued. Essentially, it’s the equivalent of hiring a new chef before you build the kitchen. Yet, we do it all the time because we forget how complex it really is to pull all the information and systems together, meaning we just have to muddle through.
Clearly, the cost of not getting the IT department involved early enough is measurable in dollars per day of wasted salary, but it is also costing us in terms of having employees who are disenfranchised from the very beginning. Having a good process and structured workflow created on computers and managed by people with realistic timeframes will help you to manage this process smoothly each time you hire a new recruit.
No matter what size your business is, you need to have an administrative process backed up by good in-house or external IT people to make your induction process work. If you’re not large enough to have spare computers in stock, you either need to partner with someone who is or you need to allow days to get the right equipment in place and properly configured. This planning will help you keep your equipment consistent, and reduce the total cost of ownership in many ways.
Clearly, if your business is growing – finding, keeping and motivating the best people will be part of your value creation process. So, plan ahead, and make sure that your IT is not impeding that growth.
David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.
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