Employee Onboarding with Ultimate Forms on SharePoint made easy

As I’m sure you well know, the hiring process can be a very difficult task in mid to large-size businesses. finding the right candidate can feel like looking for a needle in the haystack, a mad search for an acceptable prospect with the right qualifications who will be a good fit for your team. Once you finally do find the right person and set about hiring them, the next step in the process involves settling them into the team and delineating the responsibilities of their new role. This step is generally referred to as onboarding and is an absolutely crucial responsibility of your HR team. Onboarding sets the tone for a new employee's future tenure as part of the institution and can either set them on a path towards success or failure in their role. For this reason, it is very important that when a new employee is onboarded, the process is done prudently and with great care.  

Poor onboarding practices can result in a variety of negative effects on a business, the first of which is a confused and ineffective employee. An employee who is hired without effective onboarding is likely to have an unclear or incomplete understanding of their responsibilities as well as optimal workflow and best practices. This can range from not knowing which software to use for a particular task to not knowing which employees to collaborate with on a given task. Generally speaking, this sort of confusion introduces a significant risk of the new employee underperforming due to the fact that they don’t know exactly what good performance entails or don’t know how to achieve it.  Another issue that may arise from poor onboarding practices is that new employees can become confused about their responsibilities in their new professional environment and can quickly lose morale and become fearful that they are underperforming (and in this circumstance they probably are). This alienation drives productivity down and acts to create an uncomfortable work environment and also puts management in a position where they have to constantly chastise new employees.   

The pitfalls of poor onboarding are rather apparent, so now let us explore how to avoid them by developing a strong onboarding strategy. As with any element of business, the ideal approach to onboarding is a methodically created and complete strategic structure, in this case, one that addresses all of the most significant friction points of the journey from new hire to assimilated and effective employee. These types of “cover all bases” strategies can be difficult to formulate and even more difficult to properly implement, so I recommend the use of digital tools to get the job done right. Using some form of tool makes identifying and then addressing each sticking point much easier due to the fact that all relevant information is consolidated within the tool.  The alternative of just developing a plan freely outside of any sort of structured tool is prone to missing important considerations and only realizing too late or even not at all.    

Here at Infowise we saw the issue of onboarding and decided to develop a solution to it among many other business considerations with the Ultimate Forms expansion for Microsoft Sharepoint.  Ultimate Forms is a complete enterprise tool that addresses all logistical elements of business through the excellent intranet capabilities of Sharepoint.  It comes prebuilt with a variety of onboarding-relevant tools with everything from CV submission to employee training and beyond that to basically every other aspect of an employee’s day-to-day operations and can be configured and customized such that entire work pipelines can be developed all without any coding at all.  We know that each business has its own unique needs, so we created a system that allows for every individual business or institution to be able to develop its own solutions.  

The development of a complete onboarding pipeline in Sharepoint using Ultimate Forms is something our in-house Sharepoint experts can help you with when the time comes, but in the meantime, I invite you to watch a webinar segment on the topic and sign up for a free live demo.  Our demo program is a rather extensive offering that allows us to share our tools with potential clients in order to see if we are a good match for one another.  The demos can be guided by our team and should give you a good idea of whether or not our systems will be a good fit for your business. 

The key to good onboarding is a step-by-step methodical approach that spans from hiring to settling into work, and we feel that the Ultimate Forms toolset is an excellent way to oversee the process.  In our next installment, I’ll be exploring some employee feedback tools, but in the meantime, I urge you to explore our excellent catalogue of webinars and articles which can give you some insight into what we do here at Infowise.  If you have any questions or would like to participate in a demo, please reach out to us.  Until next time.