Using Microsoft Sharepoint for Acculturation Onboarding

When a new employee shows up for their first day at a new job, they face a mountain of paperwork, a bleak office or a stark and empty cubicle, a bunch of strange faces, a new role to learn, and a new company to learn how to fit into.  You as the employer have a vested interest in helping the new employee overcome the fears and uncertainties that is natural to this situation: the quicker you do this, the quicker the new employee is helping the company.  Some onboarding software vendors try to address this by offering an onboarding system that establishes a portal specifically for new hires.  We call this an acculturation onboarding system, which is different from a transactional onboarding system, which really focuses on that mountain of paperwork.  They tout that their onboarding portal is uniquely qualified to speed your newhire to effectiveness, that their onboarding portal is a best-practices approach to acculturating, or socializing, a new employee.  But it bothers you that you’re being asked to implement another portal, and you’re concerned that putting up another portal that separates new hires from the rest of your workforce might actually slow the socialization process; after all, doesn’t it make more sense to direct new hires to a portal they work in every day?

If you already have an employee portal or intranet, your concerns are valid.  It truly doesn’t make sense to implement yet another portal, particularly if you have as flexible a portal platform as Microsoft’s SharePoint.  If you’re like most organizations, your resources are already tapped out maintaining what you have, even if the proposed onboarding portal is hosted.  If an employee’s first day is point A, and productivity in the company’s current intranet is point B, then having the onboarding portal built on the same platform of point B seems to be the best choice.

At a recent technology trade show, an informal show of hands from the 200 or so audience members indicated about 80% of those present had an operational company portal built with Microsoft SharePoint.  With Microsoft’s viral adoption methods—after all, SharePoint is a free component of Windows Server—this is no surprise.  You might also have an employee self service portal, perhaps provided by your HRMS vendor, and if it’s as flexible as Microsoft SharePoint, then it will make even more sense for you to implement your onboarding portal there, but in this article I’ll explore how you might build an onboarding portal on Microsoft SharePoint.

Let’s begin with establishing goals for the typical onboarding portal.  From there we’ll add some of our own goals, and we’ll discuss how Microsoft SharePoint can be used to achieve those goals.  Typical onboarding portals offer the following functions:

·          Greets new employees with messaging from the President of the company and other relevant managers and executives

·          Gives new employees a place to complete tasks such as newhire paperwork and benefits forms

·          Introduces new employees to their new company and its culture

·          Introduces new employees to their teammates and colleagues

·          Introduces new employees to their new role, projects, and work in progress

·          Offers new employees a library of documents and resources about the company

We’ll take the list of goals a step further by adding the goal of achieving all of the above goals within the company’s existing SharePoint-based company Intranet, which will encourage and facilitate the new employee—as they are ready—to venture outside of the onboarding portal into other areas of the company’s Intranet; we even wish to encourage this.

The easiest of these goals to accomplish are those that are document-centric.  SharePoint, almost since its inception, has been document-enabled, allowing administrators and users to create, share, and collaborate on content.  A letter from the President of the company (and other executives or managers) is simply a document, presumably written by the President, which is made available either through a link, or better yet through a document viewing frame, added to the onboarding portal.  If the President decides to update their greeting letter, it’s no more an effort than updating the letter’s Word document from the President’s personalized page in SharePoint.  The same is true for all documents, such as employee handbook, policy documents, benefits descriptions, and so on: as they are updated, their associated links or frame views on the onboarding portal automatically pick up the document changes.  SharePoint’s natural document collaboration can be applied in many ways to achieve the goals of introducing the new employee to their company, its culture, and their new role and projects.

By contrast, if you implement a standalone onboarding portal, if the President wishes to change their new employee greeting letter, they will likely have to send the new letter to HR to incorporate the changed letter on the onboarding portal.  If the employee handbook is updated, not only must it be updated on the company intranet, it must also be updated on the onboarding portal.  Having a separate onboarding portal typically doubles the points of maintenance for content that is important to new employees.

All new employees have a series of tasks that must be completed, paperwork being the most obvious.  Workflow-based software typically is used to drive this functionality, assigning tasks to the new employee as they are due.  For example, on their first day, they might have a task assigned to them to complete their employee newhire forms package.  SharePoint accomplishes this with the Windows Workflow Foundation, released as part of SharePoint 2007.  Also known as WWF, it is well integrated with SharePoint, so much so that it almost doesn’t make sense to use SharePoint without it.  The tasks that are assigned can be any that are WWF-compatible, and might not only drive completion of paperwork, but perhaps also training and mentoring tasks, post-hire assessments, or benefits enrollment that are delayed, even if several years after the employee’s start date.

Your HRMS application might provide some workflow capability, but check to see if it’s integrated with SharePoint.  A standalone onboarding portal might also provide workflow functionality, but check also to see if it can be integrated with SharePoint: if the vendor provides their own portal, they more than likely won’t have bothered to integrate it with SharePoint.  Yet another possibility is a standalone Business Process Management (BPM) system, which is a much more robust and scalable workflow functionality; practically any BPM-based onboarding system will provide SharePoint integration capabilities.

Having true workflow capabilities such as is available in SharePoint can also support introducing new employees to their new company and their new employees, by actually encouraging them—through assigning tasks—to read and learn about the company or to meet new employees, then actually testing to see whether the employee has followed through on the tasks.  This can be implemented as a gentle nudge to move the new employee through socialization.

Also introduced in SharePoint 2007 is personal profile and networking features, much like is found in sites such as FaceBook and LinkedIn.  Using this feature, coupled with the more official organization structure from your HRMS, your new employee can be introduced to their official colleagues and teammates, and they can be encouraged to explore the more unofficial networks within the company’s social network.  Finding and utilizing mentors in the company’s social network may be a completely unstructured activity, or it may be a much more structured, task-driven activity (as described previously), depending on the company’s philosophy and culture.  SharePoint does a much better job than typical standalone onboarding portals in implementing corporate social networks, but if your organization is embracing corporate social networking on a more strategic level, there are many platforms that provide additional, rich functionality, and more than likely integrate with SharePoint, much more likely than standalone onboarding portals.

It should be obvious by now that you can use SharePoint to achieve your acculturation onboarding goals.  But have we achieved these goals more effectively from within the SharePoint environment that we want the employee to permanently work within?  In other words, have we shortened the “A to B” path to productivity, or at the very least, made it more of an A-to-B rather than an A-to-B-to-C path?  To answer this question, it’s important to understand a fundamental aspect of how SharePoint is structured.  Within a single implementation of SharePoint, you create multiple “sites”.  Each site has its own theme, its own purposes, and its own set of users.  Departments and projects are typical candidates for having their own SharePoint site.  Hence, you might have an HR site, and beneath the HR site you have a Newhire site (our SharePoint-based onboarding portal).  The most important thing to remember is that all of the SharePoint sites comprise the company’s overall SharePoint-based intranet.  Hence, as the new employee works in the onboarding portal, they are working completely within the company’s overall intranet; you can even see this in the SharePoint URL address.  Not only is there no impediment in place for the new employee to jump to other sites in the entire intranet, but by using tasks assigned by workflow, you can also encourage it.  And not only that, with SharePoint, you can measure and evaluate in ways not possible between SharePoint and a third party.

In summary, Microsoft SharePoint is not just a viable platform for building an acculturation onboarding portal, but in many ways, it’s a preferred platform.  Not to mention that there’s likely no additional licensing investment for you to make.  Pick a great transactional onboarding system that automates a mountain of paperwork and integrates well with Microsoft SharePoint, and you’ve deployed an exceptional onboarding system.