The ins and outs of streamlining onboarding

User348623 · ‎05-25-2022

Onboarding new employees often involves a lot of complexity and moving parts. One key success marker is to ensure that new hires have an intuitive and impactful onboarding process, which can also help mask that complexity.

First impressions matter – a new hire’s first hours and days in a new company or in a new role are a critical time to ensure they are set up for success, feel cared for, and are excited to take on a new role. This article outlines different product capabilities that make onboarding meaningful to your new employees and your organization.

Different ways to kick off onboarding

First, consider your current employee experience and how to fit Onboarding into that flow. There are multiple ways to get your new hires into the system and introduce them to your organization.

Manual Creation: Agents or admins can create user records in the platform view, or personas such as a hiring manager can create new hire records via a record producer in your portal. This is not a very scalable process but may be a good starting point.

Automatic Creation via Integration: One of the popular ways customers create new user records is to have an integration with your HCM system. Once a user is created on the HCM side, ServiceNow can automate the creation of a user record and associated HR Profile.

Consider your new hire’s primary device access

Once a user record is created in ServiceNow, another workflow can kick off an Onboarding Journey (check out our more in-depth Lifecycle Event documentation). Your employee will then get a notification and access to your ServiceNow instance. This is typically an automated email which you can configure within the Lifecycle Event (LE) application.

Figure 1: The out-of-box email template for new user creation will include links to the web portal and the mobile app. You will want to modify this to fit your use cases.

Web Portal

Granting a user access to the web portal is the most typical path. Users will have access to the full functionality of the employee experience you have configured for them.

It is important to note that the portal experience can be tailored to limit access or visibility by user role. For example, an onboarding user may only need access to their onboarding content and to-do's, since other services may not be relevant at this time. This is useful for streamlining the onboarding process and not overwhelming new hires with too much information.

Mobile App

Above and beyond the web portal experience, mobile offers another way to give new hires access to their onboarding experience. Read on to learn more about mobile considerations.

Figure 2: A typical Onboarding Lifecycle Event in Now Mobile

Considerations for when and why to use Now Mobile for onboarding

Increase onboarding velocity

Most people have access to a mobile device. By having the onboarding experience at their fingertips, new hires have more opportunities to be engaged with completing tasks and ramping into their new position. They also have a way to find knowledge and reach out with any questions at any time. A mobile experience can bridge the gap between accepting an offer and the first day of work.

Additionally, mobile can give a more comprehensive employee experience, which can go a long way in building excitement toward working for your company.

Solve for deskless employees

We know that onboarding can go beyond the first day on the job. Employees may have training and tasks to complete 7, 14, and 30 days, or more, into their tenure. Therefore, it is important to consider whether the employee will have access to a computer.

If some — or all — of your workers are deskless or regularly in the field, mobile may be an important component of onboarding (and beyond).

Seamless transition to Now Mobile usage post-onboarding

In Rome, we introduced onboarding flows directly within Now Mobile (rather than a separate app). This means that once their onboarding period is over, your employees have already set up the Now Mobile app and have access to the same knowledge and services as other employees. If you have already invested in a Now Mobile strategy for employees, incorporating Onboarding is a great way to drive adoption.

Implementation and maintenance resources

Keep in mind that implementing a mobile experience is separate from building the Onboarding Journey itself. Mobile has its own configuration, requires a planning strategy to roll out, and will need maintenance apart from your standard Onboarding work.

While the investment can be worth it, make sure that you have the resources and buy-in to plan, execute, and maintain the mobile experience.

Branding your mobile app

So, you want to leverage mobile for onboarding, great! Another consideration is whether you want to brand your mobile app.

ServiceNow offers a standard out-of-the-box (OOB) app, but we also support branded apps that can be made available only to your employees.

You can learn more about branded mobile apps in the product documentation here.

Approaching the authentication piece

Controlling access to ServiceNow can be a complicated subject. How you decide to authenticate new hires before they formally join your company’s single sign-on (SSO) is entirely based on your use cases, and influenced by IT and Security guidelines. Out of the box, we provide workflows within our standard Onboarding Lifecycle Event to log the user out on their first day and prompt them to switch over to SSO. We offer a few options to further configure that:

Figure 3: The ‘Logout and Send Notification’ Flow is set to trigger on a user’s first day on the job

Local Login --> Corporate SSO

You may decide to have your new hires use a traditional username and password before their Day 1.

New Hire SSO --> Corporate SSO

Another option may be that new hires are on one SSO setup and must move to your primary SSO on Day 1. We also provide support for that — follow our Mobile Auth documentation to learn more about multiple SSO scenarios.

Giving feedback

Doing onboarding well requires some thought and planning, but ServiceNow offers a wide variety of options to suit your employee’s experience needs.

We will continue to innovate in future releases on both Journeys as well as the mobile experience that supports them. As always, we are interested in hearing your thoughts and requests. Contact us on Community or Idea Portal.

Learn more with these documentation resources