In the last few years, the pace of staff turnovers has accelerated more than ever. Each onboarding process is a significant investment of time and resources, and successful onboardings are critical to having an efficient and effective support organization.
There are two ways to improve onboarding through onboarding insights. The first approach is to identify patterns of successful onboardings, to replicate what is working well – for example, effective trainers or useful onboarding guides. The second approach is to identify bottlenecks in the onboarding process to guide continual process improvements, focusing on the biggest delays that block new members of the organization from reaching peak productivity.
Learn from Onboarding Successes
The first step in understanding how the hiring process impacts your organization’s efficiency is to measure how quickly new members of the organization can get fully productive.
One measure is to examine how quickly members of the organization can take on a full workload. Whether your support organization works tickets, incidents, tasks, or cases, you can measure a member of the organization’s productivity by how many they are resolving.
The following report uses a calculation to see how quickly members can handle full loads of tasks and compares the outcome between different trainers. In this case, it uses IT Incidents, but the same report can be created for HR Cases, Facilities Incidents, or any other task your organization handles on a regular basis.
The report counts how many incidents assignees resolve within the first 12 weeks of their work. In order to measure the data, it requires a calculation: [Incident.Resolved] – [Incident.Assigned_To.Created]. The time duration between when the assignee resolved an incident and the assignee hire date.
By binning the results into three categories (less than one month, one to two months, and two to three months), we can see how many incidents are resolved by each member of the organization within their first three months.
By further grouping the data by trainer, we can identify which trainers’ methods are effectively enabling new team members to resolve more incidents quickly:
End Onboarding Bottlenecks
Another major pain point during the onboarding process is the time required to equip a new hire. After all, your organization’s members can’t be productive if they don’t have the proper tools at hand.
To reduce the delivery time, you need to identify and resolve process bottlenecks. Frequently, process issues leave new members of the organization waiting for their important devices to arrive. One of the most common issues is items being stuck in the approval process.
The next report shows how calculations can identify bottlenecks, by breaking up the end-to-end delivery time into stages. The calculation measures durations between different date-time fields that mark stages within the delivery process. Here, we also use a calculation to show what percent of the delivery time was spent waiting for approvals.
By identifying which stages in the process take up the most time, you can focus your attention on the process bottlenecks that, when resolved, will have the biggest impact on efficiently onboarding your team. In this example, we’re focused on approvals, but you can just as easily target other common steps in the fulfillment process (e.g. pulling from inventory, installation, etc.)
Focus on High-Impact Improvements to Onboarding
As we’ve seen, analytics provide the ability to focus your attention on improvements to the onboarding process that will yield high impact on your onboarding process.
By identifying onboarding successes and bottlenecks, you can build upon what’s working and improve what isn’t.
These are valuable lessons that can greatly improve the efficiency of your organization by ensuring that new members are quickly and easily brought to full productivity.