Remote Employee Onboarding Got You Stressed? Make it a Breeze with Evren

Employee Onboarding is the process wherein newly hired employees are integrated into the organization—spanning orientation, paperwork, setting up workstations, and giving the employee an understanding of the company’s culture and values. Depending on the particular organization, onboarding processes can last a few days or a few months. 

An effective onboarding helps properly integrate new hires into the organization, which in turn will lead to increased profitability for the company. Done correctly, onboarding is critical to the long-term benefit of the organization and the success of the employee within the workforce. Broadly, a successful onboarding process comprises four aspects:

1. Welcoming new employees with the necessary tools
2. Establishing useful and valuable relationships within the company
3. Acquainting employees to the company culture and workflow
4. Setting expectations and conveying the company’s goal, mission, and vision

According to a study by Gallup, only 12% of employees felt their company did a great job with onboarding. Even more interestingly, these employees were 3x more likely to report maximum job satisfaction. A research study conducted by Glassdoor found that a good onboarding experience can ensure 82% employee retention and increase productivity by more than 70%. Given that the cost of replacement for a single employee can reach up to 200% of their annual salary, ensuring employee retention can save businesses not just time but a lot of money as well.

Metrics of Effective Onboarding

To evaluate the quality of their organization's onboarding strategies, employers should use a variety of metrics. Some of these are:

1. Time-to-productivity, or the time it takes for a new employee to start performing in their role.
2. Employee retention rates, which is greatly influenced by the ability of the new hire to start being productive as quickly as possible. If the infrastructure of the organization or the role does not meet the employee expectation, there is a higher chance of quitting. 
3. Employee satisfaction and engagement, which is ensured by a seamless and easy initiation into the company’s workflow. The more disruptions an employee faces in getting started, the less the employee satisfaction—ultimately leading to a disgruntled new workforce.
4. Troubleshooting, wherein any issues faced by a new hire are resolved quickly and effectively. Left navigating obstacles on their own with inordinately long support response time discourages employees and impacts their performance. Sufficient support needs to be provided through the onboarding process and beyond to ensure that employee productivity is maintained to realize the maximum value of a new hire.

Employee Onboarding in a Remote-First World

The pandemic has overhauled the way we work—with a majority of companies shifting to either fully remote or hybrid work setups. With the workforce becoming increasingly distributed, employees are now being hired across regions and nations. Everything from application shortlisting and interview rounds to employee initiation and operations is now being conducted virtually. As such, many organizations are leaning into remote employee onboarding models to minimize disruptions and keep company workflow business as usual.

Remote work offers several benefits—increased productivity, more autonomy, and better work-life balance. But at the same time, it can be quite a challenge to ensure proper induction and onboarding of new hires, who are unfamiliar with the organization and its processes. New hires need to be able to navigate the system easily, get started right away, not run into technical issues, and have access to quick support for queries and troubleshooting. Short of these, the experience will be negatively impacted. 

The Growing Role of IT in Employee Onboarding

As a process, onboarding is often associated with the human resources (HR) department—but this perception is only partly accurate. On the background checks and paperwork side of things, of course, hiring managers and HR staff take centre stage. 

But once the focus shifts to getting the employee truly started from a work and productivity perspective, the IT team becomes key—from providing the new employee with the tools required for their role and ongoing IT support to ensuring a seamless workflow. In “Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success,” a report by the Society of Human Resources, Talya Bauer notes that efficient onboarding should address the 4Cs of “Compliance, Clarification, Culture, Connection,” all of which require IT management and support to some extent. 

In a remote setup, the role of IT in the employee onboarding process not only increases but also becomes more and more central. The bulk of the remote onboarding process requires major adaptations and adjustments by the IT team. The admin has to prepare for an expanded set of options available to new employees that suit their available options. For instance, the onboarding process is the time when the new employee is initiated into their workstation or work platform. The IT must not only set up their systems and devices but also ensure ease of learning and use for the employee to reduce downtime. If the employee struggles to navigate their system or runs into technical obstacles, it directly affects their ability to ease into their role—creating a negative outcome in terms of both employee satisfaction and business operations.

Thus, the IT admin must ensure that the new hire feels comfortable with their work setup and can be as productive as possible from day one. This includes setting up a ready-to-use system, with the right applications and devices for the employee’s role; being able to offer quick solutions for new application requirements, user privileges, device installations such as USBs and Bluetooth devices. A new hire getting blocked by IT issues as they are trying to settle into their role creates bad experience for the employee and affects the company’s business goals by delaying productivity. IT admins must take measures to ensure that minimal issues arise during this time, by reviewing the onboarding process. And when these issues do arise, they must be able to sort them out on priority.

From a security perspective, too, remote work models have added substantial pressure to the onboarding process. Admins need to work out all security aspects while onboarding new employees, including aspects such as security software or VPN installation, employee compliance on company protocols, and so on. Since the remote working model has taken security components off-premises, a lot of the burden of cybersecurity compliance and best practices fall on employees. In the case of a new hire, this creates the need for substantial training that the IT admin needs to ensure to avoid end-user negligence.

How Can Evren Ease the Remote Onboarding Process?

Understandably, the employee onboarding process is a time-consuming affair. At a human resources and work management level, each employee must be treated as a unique individual, with their own doubts and needs.

So how can you make the process faster, more efficient, and more valuable? 

Well, by automating as much of the process as possible and ensuring that troubleshooting for any teething issues is done quickly and efficiently. Especially for IT and administrative aspects, this is essential and makes employee onboarding much easier for both employees and the organization. Moreover, it frees up valuable human resources, which would otherwise be spent on a steep curve of learning the ropes.

With its focus on streamlining IT and enhancing security, Evren brings this exact advantage to the onboarding process. 

Easy Setup and Quick Deployment

Evren works on all laptop and PC devices, and comes with an automated installer. No more elaborate setup processes. Admins can simply download the installer on a bootable USB, plug it in, and have the device ready to be deployed in under 30 minutes. 

Moreover, the Evren user interface is familiar and easy to navigate, which eliminates the steep learning curve for employees usually associated with working in a new organization, or on new systems and devices. For fresh hires, this means increased ability to focus on their actual tasks with ease, instead of getting caught up in the nitty-gritties of the system itself.

Fully Remote Central IT Management

Evren allows IT administrators to ensure seamless setup for new employees, with all aspects of user, device, and browser remotely and effectively managed using a browser-based point-and-click interface. It ensures that all configurations are always up to date at the time of onboarding, and employees do not have to spend time on manual updates. 

Admins can remotely ensure that the required applications are installed or ready to be installed on the employee device—based on their specific job role. Other features such as certificate management and remote USB and Bluetooth management, enables admins to control the deployment, management, or removal of devices and device certificates.  From the POV of the new employee, this means a work setup that substantially reduces time-to-productivity by giving them everything needed to get started on their work from day one.

Minimal Downtime, Disruptions, & Distractions

In the case of any technical glitches, Evren helps admins provide quick support through the admin dashboard. Tickets are raised and resolved faster than ever before, decreasing IT response time drastically. Evren’s comprehensive monitoring features helps the IT team stay on top of all company devices, with detailed information on the apps, patches, and configuration on each device. The company can remotely install/uninstall and configure applications using the Evren application management feature, giving admins the power to permit apps that are used by the employees.

Remote work can lead to many distractions, especially when an employee is just getting started and does not have an established flow and rhythm of work in place. Evren features such as URL filtering, which allows admins to block and allow the relevant websites, and restricting Google accounts to certain domains to be used on the browser, can help reduce such distractions and create a focused workspace for the employee. 

Ultimately, the Evren OS guarantees minimal disruptions and distractions for the new hire—leading to greater productivity and employee satisfaction.

Comprehensive Endpoint Security

The Evren OS comes fully loaded with all necessary security features right from the get go. The moment Evren is installed on a device, it is fully protected against all cybersecurity threats, and all patch updates happen automatically in the background. End users are not allowed admin privileges, with device-specific admin passwords only available through the admin dashboard, valid for just 24 hours. 

Evren features ensure end-to-end protection against evolving cyber threats. Full disk encryption protects the entire volume and all files on the drive against unauthorized access. Application sandboxing ensures that a security breach on one software, if at all there’s one, does not affect other applications or the overall device. Web filtering ensures that access is denied to malicious websites. 

Thus, Evren eliminates end-user negligence while freeing up new employees from the burden of cybersecurity concerns. In effect, this improves employee productivity right from the start and saves on huge amounts of time and effort - and hence the cost - spent in training new hires on security protocols, best practices, and compliance. 

With Evren’s superior ability to ensure smooth IT functioning, optimize overall productivity and secure your business without putting undue pressure on employees. It is a must-have tool to take your organization’s remote employee onboarding to the next level.

—

Improve employee retention and increase workforce productivity by fortifying the remote employee onboarding with Evren. Get in touch to get started.

‍