Pitfalls/Solutions for Employee Onboarding

Three Critical Suggestions for Employee Onboarding in 2021 

While employee onboarding is crucial to support the success of a new hire, it is too often an ill-managed process for most companies. Whether the procedure is slow-moving, there are logistical problems between HR and IT, or employee identity setup is hindered by a laundry list of SaaS applications – there is a slew of common challenges that can contribute to a chaotic initiation for both the employee and the company. 

There are three things to consider when looking to improve employee onboarding in 2021 and beyond: 

Track and Automate the Process 

The top issue for all companies is onboarding speed without sacrificing quality or accuracy. When a recent hire joins the team, everyone is anxious to get started – especially the manager and new employee! There are legal, compliance, and company policy items that need to be covered to get a new person on board. When a company is rapidly expanding, these steps are sometimes missed and slow the whole process down. 

A complete tracking process that includes all of the necessary onboarding items and their dependencies is critical to a smooth and efficient process. For instance, should the employee be given their email credentials before they pass a background check? Without a good process, companies tend to have a disjointed onboarding with stops and starts that slow everything down and create potential risks to the business. When the process is not well run, people often try to rush things bypassing the process to get the new hire on board – opening the company to potential legal or industry compliance issues.  

If the steps for onboarding are also tracked through software – that’s even better! With the right automated tracking process, onboarding can go from as much as four weeks to less than a week while still completing all the necessary steps. 

Eliminate the Insecurity of Email 

Increasingly, all companies and industries are being affected by cyber-security issues – from ransomware to phishing attacks. Everyone has been hit or knows someone who has. For this reason, industry compliance frameworks like HIPAA, FINRA, and NIST CSF, are limiting companies’ ability to use email to onboard new employees. 

It is no longer okay to ask an employee to fill out a W-4 or I-9 and send it back via email, much less fill out background check or drug screening information. Companies are left with either executing these processes in person – which is slow and sometimes impossible – or using secure portal software to automate the process. Finding a cost-effective way to implement one of these systems is an increasingly necessary challenge for companies in 2021 and beyond. 

Get HR and IT Coordinated 

It’s no secret – HR and IT people have trouble communicating. Though they come from different worlds, your organization’s HR and IT professionals stand to benefit the most from a fast, automated employee onboarding process. From security risks to unnecessary hours and costs, botched onboarding puts a lot at stake. How can your HR and IT staff manage onboarding when they aren’t equipped with the tools to do so efficiently or effectively? 

Typically, a new hire moves between their hiring manager, the HR department, and the IT department, throughout their onboarding to handle basic tasks like establishing their identity and access to SaaS applications they will need. This back-and-forth leads to inconsistency in important identifying information, security access, management structure, and software applications that have been licensed for their use.  

Conclusion 

Companies attempting to manage employee onboarding without controls and automation risk serious repercussions down the line. Companies should look for software and service providers that not only streamline onboarding, but can also provide tools to manage employee information and identity during their employment. Additionally, such providers should also have the capabilities to automate and de-risk the employee off-boarding process (more on that later). With the right technology partner, you can rest assured the entire employee life cycle is handled with speed, compliance, and accuracy.  

Engaging MSPs: What Should Customers Look For?

Why Engage an MSP? (Part 1)

Managed IT services is external support for a company’s core IT functions. Specifically, it entails end-user support, cloud, security, and device management. Typically billed at a flat rate calculated on supported users or devices, managed IT services offers professional, expert support at a cost that remains the same regardless of how frequently the support is needed.

There are several reasons why a company should engage a managed services provider (MSP) for their IT needs:

Growing Complexity in Cybersecurity Compliance

First, a limited internal IT team may be challenged by the increasing number of clients asking companies to comply with their cybersecurity standards. These compliance projects are time-consuming to manage and often stretch the expertise of in-house IT, triggering the need for outside tools and expertise. These cybersecurity audits almost always expose areas that require remediation to bring the company into compliance. MSPs can provide much-needed expertise and capacity to help with the additional projects created by an audit.

Limited Internal Capacity

Operations small to large reach a point of maximum capacity with their in-house IT resources. Maybe it’s only one individual who was needed to meet the business’ IT needs when the company was founded. With success, a business grows – and this is to be celebrated.

This growth and success, however, comes with additional IT needs. At this point, businesses can experience substantial benefits from hiring an MSP to supplement their IT needs. An MSP can easily alleviate the burden of in-house IT management and take charge over the company’s IT core operations so in-house staff can focus on strategic IT initiatives, or even projects outside of IT.

Migration to the Cloud

When transitioning to cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications, the IT professional’s job description changes. Ultimately, cloud and SaaS applications lighten the IT burden for maintaining application servers and all the associated support functions. The nature of IT work changes as the business looks to IT to focus less on keeping the systems running and more on data analytics, information workflows, employee productivity and security issues. A great MSP can help with the complexity of shifting data and processes to the cloud, while helping the company define and manage new workflows that maximize the benefit from all the cloud services that are being used.

Yellow Lights and Red Lights

There are acute emergencies (red light events) like cyber attacks that cause businesses to look elsewhere for help. There are also mid-level pain points (yellow lights), or areas where businesses know they need to improve but are slow to take action. Most MSPs are equipped to handle all the possible events that can occur, but great MSPs will be able to identify minor issues before they become major issues with software tools and expertise that ensure no interruption to your day-to-day business operations.

Tedious Tasks

Employee onboarding, offboarding, device management, SaaS management – think of the bottom half of the list of IT tasks your company needs to handle for things to run smoothly. These are responsibilities that no one internal is particularly excited to tackle but they need to be managed regardless. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone else could just handle all of it for you instead? Yes, that’s also what MSPs do – everything that you don’t want to. A great MSP will not only handle these tasks but will also bring software and expertise for ways to automate and improve the operation of these important but uninteresting tasks.

Why Engage an MSP?

Why Engage an MSP? (Part 1)

Managed IT services is external support for a company’s core IT functions. Specifically, it entails end-user support, cloud, security, and device management. Typically billed at a flat rate calculated on supported users or devices, managed IT services offers professional, expert support at a cost that remains the same regardless of how frequently the support is needed.

There are several reasons why a company should engage a managed services provider (MSP) for their IT needs:

Growing Complexity in Cybersecurity Compliance

First, a limited internal IT team may be challenged by the increasing number of clients asking companies to comply with their cybersecurity standards. These compliance projects are time-consuming to manage and often stretch the expertise of in-house IT, triggering the need for outside tools and expertise. These cybersecurity audits almost always expose areas that require remediation to bring the company into compliance. MSPs can provide much-needed expertise and capacity to help with the additional projects created by an audit.

Limited Internal Capacity

Operations small to large reach a point of maximum capacity with their in-house IT resources. Maybe it’s only one individual who was needed to meet the business’ IT needs when the company was founded. With success, a business grows – and this is to be celebrated.

This growth and success, however, comes with additional IT needs. At this point, businesses can experience substantial benefits from hiring an MSP to supplement their IT needs. An MSP can easily alleviate the burden of in-house IT management and take charge over the company’s IT core operations so in-house staff can focus on strategic IT initiatives, or even projects outside of IT.

Migration to the Cloud

When transitioning to cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications, the IT professional’s job description changes. Ultimately, cloud and SaaS applications lighten the IT burden for maintaining application servers and all the associated support functions. The nature of IT work changes as the business looks to IT to focus less on keeping the systems running and more on data analytics, information workflows, employee productivity and security issues. A great MSP can help with the complexity of shifting data and processes to the cloud, while helping the company define and manage new workflows that maximize the benefit from all the cloud services that are being used.

Yellow Lights and Red Lights

There are acute emergencies (red light events) like cyber attacks that cause businesses to look elsewhere for help. There are also mid-level pain points (yellow lights), or areas where businesses know they need to improve but are slow to take action. Most MSPs are equipped to handle all the possible events that can occur, but great MSPs will be able to identify minor issues before they become major issues with software tools and expertise that ensure no interruption to your day-to-day business operations.

Tedious Tasks

Employee onboarding, offboarding, device management, SaaS management – think of the bottom half of the list of IT tasks your company needs to handle for things to run smoothly. These are responsibilities that no one internal is particularly excited to tackle but they need to be managed regardless. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone else could just handle all of it for you instead? Yes, that’s also what MSPs do – everything that you don’t want to. A great MSP will not only handle these tasks but will also bring software and expertise for ways to automate and improve the operation of these important but uninteresting tasks.