Webinar Recap | The Power of Process | Streamline Employee Onboarding with The Power Platform

Thanks for your interest in “The Power of Process | Streamline Employee Onboarding with The Power Platform.”  If you were able to join us for the webinar, we sincerely thank you for being there. We hope you had as much fun learning about Power Platform and onboarding/offboarding as our speaker did sharing their knowledge with you. 

Didn’t get a chance to catch our session live? We’ve got you covered. 

This session:

Employee onboarding & offboarding is crucial to an organization’s success and significantly impact the employee experience. Waiting for access to essential tools can make new employees feel unwelcome, leading to a slow initiation and poor connection with peers. Manual tasks like emailing forms and storing repetitive information waste valuable time and pose security risks. But there is an opportunity to empower your employees, enhance productivity, save time, and strengthen security through automation!

Episode takeaways:

• Learn how to enhance employee experience through automated onboarding/offboarding processes using Power Apps, Power Automate, Teams, SharePoint, and more!
• Discover how to boost productivity and efficiency with seamless transitions powered by enterprise integrations
• Save time and resources through streamlined workflows and reduced manual tasks
• Strengthen security measures and ensure compliance with automated onboarding solutions.

Key takeaways:

Employee onboarding & offboarding is crucial to an organization’s success and significantly impact the employee experience. Waiting for access to essential tools can make new employees feel unwelcome, leading to a slow initiation and poor connection with peers. Manual tasks like emailing forms and storing repetitive information waste valuable time and pose security risks. But there is an opportunity to empower your employees, enhance productivity, save time, and strengthen security through automation!

Before jumping into what automation can do to enhance your onboarding/offboarding procedures, Microsoft MVP and Creospark CTO Noorez Khamis started us off by explaining the impacts of poor onboarding/offboarding procedures, with some recommendations to combat this:

Impacts of poor onboarding/offboarding  

Good onboarding is so important for every organization. It fosters that sense of belonging and connection right away with the employee and helps them integrate into organizational culture, improving employee morale and encouraging collaboration and teamwork within the new work environment. Good onboarding programs provide new employees with the necessary knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their new roles, and they empower employees to feel confident and capable, leading to increased job satisfaction and employee engagement.

Poor onboarding/offboarding procedures create an extended learning curve for employees and delay their contributions to the company. Additionally, if these procedures are manual, they can take valuable time away from HR and IT. The detrimental effects of poor onboarding/offboarding procedures extend beyond individual employees and departments. They ultimately hinder the overall growth and success of the company. Employees who do not experience a smooth transition into their roles may feel disconnected or undervalued, leading to decreased job satisfaction and employee engagement.

Some recommendations to fight this include empowering new hires with easy-to-use automated systems and empowering IT & HR by saving them time — we’ll expand on this later! After applying these recommendations, new hires will experience enhanced productivity, enabling them to contribute to the organization sooner. Your HR, IT, Marketing, and Leadership teams will spend less time day-to-day setting up new hires, and it will reduce the risk of breach of security protocols.

This session focuses on some easy ways to provide a great employee experience for all users by employing tools and services you probably already have at your fingertips within Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform. So next, let’s talk a bit about the Power Platform and how you can accelerate your processes with it. Our speaker Noorez Khamis walked us through this:

Microsoft Power Platform  

The Microsoft Power Platform is bigger than the sum of its parts. PowerApps, along with Power BI, Power Virtual Agents, Power Pages and Power Automate, makes up Microsoft Power Platform. This is an end-to-end platform for low-code and rapid development for Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, or your own custom app development or customization. Dataverse, Data Connectors, and the new AI Builder are common building blocks across the Microsoft Power Platform.

Then, we talked about how we need to empower employees when it comes to onboarding.

Empowering the New Hire Experience  

A well-designed onboarding process accelerates the learning curve for new employees. By quickly acquiring essential information and understanding their roles, employees can start contributing to the organization’s goals sooner. All new employees want to make a positive impact in their new roles, don’t hinder this progress by allowing them to get started on the wrong foot. Standardizing your onboarding process improves new hire productivity by 50%!

Some suggestions are to:

• Automatically connect new employees with essential first-day resources, such as team members, policies, and handbooks

• Automatically set employees up with an email and internal chats/teams

• Automatically send them their corporate credentials on their first day

• Automatically add users to the Microsoft Teams, distribution lists and groups that they should be part of

• Automatically send them their onboarding tasks on their first day and have them go through them

Successful onboarding can help all of your employees save time day-to-day, especially IT and HR.

Empowering IT & HR    

Using an onboarding/offboarding framework with automated processes allows HR & IT to spend less time setting up new hires. The onboarding process for small to mid-level firms can typically take up to 10 days, so by automating resources and tools, this time can be shortened, leaving more space for forming relationships with new team members, and integrating them into the company culture.

Automating onboarding processes also helps ensure the consistent application of security protocols. We went through how we can streamline security processes with automation tools:

Strengthening Security Through Automation  

There are many ways that automation can bolster your security. For example, automatically removing all data and systems access prevents departed employees from accessing sensitive data. If you have a manual process, it may take a while to turn off their access to different systems – but by automating this, you can reduce the risk of things like unauthorized access, data breaches, and, most importantly, safeguards on the organization’s sensitive and IP data.

From a technical perspective, you can create the Microsoft 365 Active Directory or Azure Active Directory automatically and add them to Microsoft 365 groups, distribution groups, different shared mailboxes, or Azure groups automatically. From a security perspective, you can automatically set conditional access for where they’re living — for example, if they are living overseas, you can make sure that the location has conditional access. Additionally, you could automatically set up multi-factor authentication and even set their access level to the types of sensitive content you’re allowed to view. For example, if an executive is being onboarded, you want them to have access to the top-secret stuff!

Microsoft 365 & Power Platform – Works great for Onboarding tasks!   

As part of our session, Noorez walked us through a demo scenario where we’re using all of these different services from an onboarding perspective. First, we use Microsoft Forms to gather information about the new employee that is onboarding. Then, we kick off a Power Automate workflow that does things like create the Microsoft 365 account, go through approvals, add users to groups they need to be a part of, send out their usernames, and assign tasks to departments — you’re doing that via Power Automate. On the Power Apps side, you can create these applications to do certain things once employees have been onboarded to your organization. In the scenario, Noorez showed us a Power App where we’re going to maintain the user’s personal and corporate information up to date.

DEMO  

Our speaker Noorez Khamis walked us through an in-depth demo on how Microsoft 365 and Power Platform can revolutionize your onboarding processes and tasks. Check out the recording to see it in action!

And there you have it! We hope this recap gave you some valuable insights that you can put into practice. Check out the recording for more details! 

 

Make sure to join us at our next webinar on July 27th, where we’ll show you how Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents provide embedded analytics and tools that allow you to uncover additional value your bots may deliver all while functioning within your specific governance and compliance frameworks.