Automate Onboarding Federal Contractors: Your Process Checklist 

Nothing says more to new employees about your organization than their initial experience when onboarding federal contractors. Imagine this scenario…

Your new contractor is excited and the possibilities in their new role seem boundless. But then…  the first day is a mess. HR forget to tell you they were coming. There is no orientation. They don’t have a badge, and suddenly they’re put in a corner, waiting for someone to show them the ropes, give them a desk, and issue their IT. How charged up is the new resource now? Indeed, they may be calling their friends or home office and expressing doubts about the organization.

That may sound a bit extreme, but it is certainly not uncommon. I should know: this actually happened to me once.

Make onboarding a holistic process

This kind of poor experience during the initial onboarding of employees and contract staff usually stems from disconnected processes and workflow. HR has their process, Contracting has their process, IT has theirs, Facilities has theirs, security has theirs, and well, you get the idea. The link between these processes is often the receiving supervisor who must help the new staff negotiate the gates before they can be productive.

But rather than the responsibility all falling on the supervisor, these departments need to be connected. Organizations should be thinking of the workflow holistically, from the moment recruitment begins until the staff settles in and starts work. Automating the process through a system that can act as a single source of information and connect all departments involved. This ensures that all steps are followed, saves time, eliminates paper and means the new staff member will be set up for success.

This is even more vital in the federal industry, which is held to a higher standard than regular organizations. The world of government contracting is constantly experiencing changes in compliance and regulations in order to work with the federal government. You need to ensure that you are adhering to employee-related regulations including Executive Order 11246 and Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act.

Your onboarding checklist

Establish all the steps in your onboarding process, then you can digitally map these out into an efficient workflow to ensure compliance and efficiency. These are all tasks that you need to include in your process and assign to the respective departments before new staff even arrive:

• Plan for office space capacity
• Add employee information to the organizational database
• Add employee to the organizational chart
• Acquire and configure new equipment
• Create an IT account and set up new email address
• Issue phone number
• Issue employment forms
• Send a welcome package
• Add employee to payroll
• Print office nameplates and business cards (if applicable)
• Clean and prepare office space
• Allocate, set-up and configure mobile devices and laptop assets
• Notify security and supply key cards
• Schedule new employee orientation
• Plan necessary training – security, cyber awareness, ethics, etc
• Schedule an appointment with IT support to ensure all devices are working properly
• Coordinate the necessary meet and greet appointments with supervisors, staff and team members.

Then when the big day finally arrives, employees and employers are set up for success. But the process doesn’t stop there. Upon arrival, new staff need to be:

• Greeted properly
• Processed with security
• Shown their workspace
• Checked in to new employee orientation
• Guaranteed all IT up and running
• Checked in to whatever training comes next
• Offered an onboarding survey to assess how the onboarding process went

Mapping these tasks within the process on your digital platform will ensure that all departments involved have a holistic view of the process and helps ensure all items arrive at the critical milestones for onboarding. 

Bring Intelligent Automation to onboarding federal contractors

Digitizing this process ensures that all tasks are completed, but you can make onboarding event more efficient for the departments involved by incorporating Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). You can automate triggers in the process so that once one task is complete, it prompts the next person in the chain to complete their tasks.

It’s no secret that onboarding is full of admin-heavy tasks. You can combine Bizagi with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to extract information about new employees and automatically saving it in your central platform. This saves staff the manual tasks of re-keying information, giving them time to focus on more strategic activities, and eliminating the risk of error. Read our blog, Walk Through: Understanding Bizagi RPA Integration, for more details on how you can bring automation to your HR processes.

If you’d like more details on how Bizagi can help with onboarding and other HR use cases, take a look at our blog, 5 HR Process Automation Templates You Can Use Right Now.

Digitization of services has become critical for federal organizations who want to improve the lives of their constituents. If you’d like to find out how to kick start digital transformation in your public sector organization, download our free whitepaper, Navigating the Federal Intelligent Process Revolution.