A Conversation With ... Melisa Willis

A Gallup study found only 12% of employees felt that their companies did a good job with onboarding, which is such a critical piece to retention. What makes for a successful onboarding process?
Our company is trying to move most companies to digital onboarding. Previously it was a lot of paperwork that, coming in as an employee on your first day, is very intimidating. There’s a lot of stuff that you’re not quite sure how to fill out if you’re not really in the HR world or in the accounting world. When we switch it to digital, we can usually send that onboarding paperwork out before their first day and so that way the new employee can discuss with their family if they need to. Same with benefit enrollment. With the onboarding process, we can jazz it up as much as they like and just make it personal. We’ll ask the client if they have a letter or an email that they send that welcomes the employee, we’ll build that into our system to where our system auto generates that. That also makes the employee feel a little bit more comfortable. We also offer a preboarding portal to keep the employee engaged from the time that you make the offer to the time they actually come in on their first day. You can put things on there like their first day information, parking information, what items to bring.

How are companies bringing in their culture into that process?
A lot of clients have moved to putting videos in there. The company has come up with a video that has several people they’re going to at least see on their first day welcoming the employee, making it, again, more of that personal experience to let them know they’re not alone. The first day of any job is usually pretty scary, so that will give them a little bit more comfort seeing those people face to face, hearing their voices and knowing when they walk into a building they’ve already seen this person.

How is technology streamlining onboarding and training processes?
We have seen clients put a lot of training videos into our system. We also have just released an LMS system, a learning management system. If the client wants to build out training in that, they can do videos, quizzes, give certifications. They can also purchase pre prepackaged content. When they hire an employee, they can assign a learning profile and then that learning path will assign them all videos or training.

A study from payroll company ADP finds half of small-business owners choose to handle HR in-house and 80% of the folks doing that have no formal training. What’s the impact of that and are there training resources for these small businesses?
We really see that a lot. Most of our smaller clients keep that HR in-house just because they don’t feel they’re staffed enough to hire somebody. With that comes a certain worry with compliance because it is typically somebody who’s not trained in the HR field. We don’t give compliance advice to them because we’re more of the software side of things, but we do have a product called Mineral HR that comes with any service for clients. It’s customized based on the location they’re employed in as well as the amount of employees, because of course that dictates compliance. They can search whatever they’re looking for. It will give them templates on a handbook. If they want to write a policy, there’s templates in there that are legally approved.

How is technology impacting payroll and HR platforms, and are those systems making this process more cost effective or efficient?
We are an all-in-one software, which is really nice because a lot of clients will come to us and they’re paying for several different services. Once you’re adding all of those fees together, it can get rather pricey. To save clients money, there’s a lot of things that we do. Other companies will charge for something called an (electronic data interchange) feed. When the employee goes through and completes their benefit enrollment in the system, there are other steps that need to follow after that – it needs to flow through to payroll so that deductions are added to employee’s paychecks and it also needs to be sent to the carrier because the carrier has to know that employee has enrolled in that plan. We have a programmer on staff and that’s something that we do free of charge. For the HR side, AI can write your job descriptions. That’s a really big deal. You can type in a few choice words and it will write your job description for you. We’re seeing most things go to cell phone instead of an actual laptop or PC. People are moving to their mobile devices.