How can software onboarding become more effective?
Here’s the thing: Employee onboarding and software onboarding share many similarities… And in fact, we can learn from employee onboarding to make software onboarding a much smoother process.
Why is Employee Onboarding Crucial for an Effective Workplace?
If you are an employee, I am sure you are familiar with the employee onboarding process. As you might know, this stage is extremely important for both the employee and the employer.
Why?
Employee onboarding is crucial for employee success. Without the onboarding process, employees wouldn’t know how to operate within the work environment.
You see, in big organizations, employees are usually part of a big team. The jobs executed by employees depend heavily on input from other employees and lots of internal systems.
For employees to be able to collaborate with other employees, the HR department invests heavily in these areas:
- Establishing a list of jobs and KPIs and the definition of success for the position in question.
- Education about company policies.
- Creating credentials to access systems.
- Coaching on how to use existing software.
- Training on the processes and procedures.
- Ongoing activities to introduce to other team members.
Now, who's responsible to ensure proper onboarding?
The HR team is the main player when it comes to successful onboarding.
By coordinating with the business owner to some extent, the HR onboarding team sets the plan for onboarding and works on executing it.
That’s right- instead of the recruitment agency, it’s the HR team that executes onboarding.
Why Does Software Onboarding Often Fail?
Let's take a look at the typical process when an organization onboards new software.
- The IT team issues a tender.
- They receive multiple options to choose from.
- They select one of the options.
- The providers deploy the software.
- The IT team asks the provider to integrate the software with all existing systems.
- An email announcement is sent out about the new software.
And the onboarding is done.
But if you analyze this process, you will see that onboarding is assigned to an external party.
This external party has no clue about the internal environment and fatal errors that cause more than 80% of complex software deployment failures.
On the other hand, if you think about employee onboarding, the recruitment agency wouldn’t be responsible for successful onboarding. That’s the HR team’s job.
How Can You Manage Software Onboarding Properly?
At Exceed, we execute 104 activities for employee onboarding.
At the same time, software onboarding isn't done properly at most organizations. In fact, no one is responsible for it. It's actually not even a function within the organization. Unfortunately, the most critical activity usually gets assigned to an external provider.
But who should be responsible for software onboarding?
In the future, IT departments will hopefully be in charge of software acquisition and onboarding. I am sure many might not understand why, but when you think of software as another employee and IT as the HR department, then this idea becomes much clearer.
In the end, this is what is needed to make software onboarding a smooth and effective process. After all, both software and employees have a major impact on your organization’s future success.
How You Can Start Today
That’s it! Now you know how to make your software onboarding more effective. You need to get your IT department to take charge of the process… Just like HR is responsible for employee onboarding.
At Exceed, we don't offer onboarding services because we recognize that it should be an internal team who understands the whole environment.
Instead, we help organizations build software onboarding processes by providing the tools, processes, marketing, and training material. We have years of experience doing this and know what you need to do to use the software in the most effective way possible.
Want to know more? Take a look at our data-driven hiring and internal employee management software Hub Recruit.