Digital onboarding has become a necessity for companies that have been hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic, and making investments in sales, marketing and revenue generation roles.
We dig into the details with Kiran Menon, CEO and co-founder of Tydy, a company that handles virtual and automated employee onboarding and experience management for Unilever, AB InBev, EXL, Genpact, Cipla and Airtel. Excerpts from an interview:
Could you describe what digital onboarding looks like?
Traditionally, when we think of onboarding, it is in the context of coming to office on Day 1 – sitting and filling out forms, potentially getting into classroom sessions with three to four hours of lectures about the company and its vision and all the departments.
A few years ago, people realized that onboarding needed to happen even before Day 1 so that employees would not be completing the rudimentary administrative and compliance processes on their day of joining. Digital started becoming an interest area for a lot of companies but it really picked up steam in April 2020 when the world turned upside down.
The fundamental reason was that, suddenly, you could not have manual, face-to-face interactions. Gone were the days you could fill up paper forms. Classroom sessions became pipe dreams. Companies needed people to get onboarded and become productive.
Onboarding is concerned with the time period it takes for a person to get from being zero to being productive. Companies want to squeeze that number lower and lower. Digital onboarding helps them to virtualize and automate everything.
Why should people get the same information if they are being hired for different departments, roles and levels? The entire experience is orchestrated but also super-personalized, and it can be done at scale – whether the company is onboarding 500 people or 30,000 per year.
Which sectors have been most enthusiastic about digital onboarding during the Covid-19 pandemic?
These would be the sectors that have been hiring a lot – fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), information technology (IT), digital transformation and consulting, pharma, and a couple of others such as insurance and financial services.
Is digital onboarding part of a broader shift in human resource (HR) practices during the pandemic?
Yes, HR is one function that people always assumed would be human, face to face, and with a lot of interaction and guidance. In the last 12 to 15 months, companies have been forced to evolve into a digital-first environment. If they need to onboard, get feedback, have a counselling session or introduce someone to mentors, all of that has to happen digitally.
Companies are being forced to rethink decades-old processes. Earlier, they would send a questionnaire to the employee after their first 30 or 60 days to check how they have been onboarded, whether they have settled in, if their buddy helped them or not, if they got the laptop they were supposed to. Now companies are asking for this feedback at the end of Day 1 itself.
What design and delivery challenges are companies likely to face when they adopt digital onboarding?
The biggest concern is change management. Digital transformation requires a shift in thinking. It would be really sad if a company took their existing 14 different paper forms, digitized them and asked every new hire to fill them... HR teams need to start on a clean slate, and create a new employee experience without any baggage from before.
The challenge for IT teams is to move out of monolithic enterprise systems that were not built for a completely integrated environment, and to create a new architecture. Employees have to access so many different systems for their payroll, documentation, attendance, leave management, and so on. These cannot function as separate units if the goal is to minimize manual work and make sure that each individual does everything in the most productive way.
How do new hires navigate the unfamiliarity and uncertainty of a new workplace when the onboarding process is digitized?
What used to happen before digital onboarding is that new hires would always have to go and find a lot of information on their own. They would have questions like: Where do I get my visiting cards? Who is going to be my mentor? Who am I going to work with? Digital onboarding can tell them what they need to know without going anywhere.
Tydy connects them to their buddy two days before the date of joining, and it manages that connection for them. They get their buddy’s profile with all the relevant details. The human interaction is not forgotten. Digital onboarding creates a better context for communication.
What are some of the best practices that have emerged with respect to employee retention during this pandemic?
Since there is minimal demarcation between personal and professional lives, companies are paying more attention to wellness in terms of both physical and mental health.
They are also investing a lot in digitizing processes that were time sucks. This has led to a big advantage from the employee-retention perspective. Because Tydy was deployed, and we were able to personalize the entire employee experience, a company like Unilever was able to see a 65% decrease in first-year attrition. We were able to massively increase their retention because of our digital onboarding processes. The global standard is that one out of three people look for a new job within the first six months, so what we managed to do for Unilever is pretty significant.
Your report “The State of Digital Onboarding: 2021, The Pandemic Edition” has international data. Could you share India-specific data about digital onboarding during the first and second waves of the Covid-19 pandemic?
A lot of our data is anonymized because it is company-owned. We onboard on their behalf. We cannot discuss specifics because that data is confidential. What we did see from January 2021 onwards was that a majority of the growth was primarily attributed to India hiring. With IT, digital transformation and FMCG companies, we saw that global headquarters were pumping a lot of money into Asia, specifically India, to grow their resource base here.
What are your projections for the third wave?
We track month-on-month numbers, and we are not seeing a slowdown. The growth is not flattening. Even until May 31, there was no drop in growth. We are seeing a growth of at least 5% every month.
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