“Employees in a well-structured onboarding program are 69% more likely to remain at the company after 3 years.” – Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 2010 Employee Benefits

1 out of 25 employees leave their new job due to substandard onboarding experiences.

In contrast, a good employee onboarding program can boost employee retention by 69% after 3 years.

Process Street is dedicated to helping our users improve their business operations, and employee onboarding is a prime focus area. On this, we’re surprised to learn that some of our customers have been using Excel for employee onboarding.

According to Harvard Business Review, companies – on average – lose 23% of their new hires after one year. A more thoughtful approach to employee onboarding can dramatically improve this statistic for your organization; and for that, we say, get off Excel.

“…a lot of B2B productivity products are competing with Excel sheets and other products that are totally not built for the specific problem they solve.” – Bram Kanstein, Tech Out Loud, The Product Before the Business by Bram Kanstein

In this Process Street article, you’ll learn why Excel sucks for employee onboarding, and why workflow management solutions offer better onboarding solutions.

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Scenario: Onboarding using Excel
• 8 reasons why you need to ditch Excel as your employee onboarding software
• Overcoming Excel onboarding limitations with a workflow management solution

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Gabe Nelson is a content specialist of over 7 years of experience, currently working with bonus.ly. He has a passion and keen understanding when it comes to HR and employee management. He has written hundreds of content pieces in numerous niches. Currently, he lives in Missouri with his wife and kids.

Your employees are the lifeblood of your business. They provide the support and manpower you need to function and grow. The level of success and the results you achieve will directly reflect the performance of your employees.

Satisfied employees are also more productive and efficient. However, a study showed that as much as 85% of employees are happy with their jobs and only 15% of employees are engaged in the workplace. Happy and engaged workers are more likely to feel personally invested in your business, leading them to work harder and smarter; this results in better products and more satisfied customers.

It’s also vital that employees know where they stand. Not receiving a promotion or a much-anticipated raise because of performance shouldn’t be a surprise to them. Conversely, they should also receive positive feedback for a job well done to keep them moving on the right track; this means that evaluating employees’ performance is an essential role of leadership.

So how do you guarantee an employee’s role is as fulfilling as possible? And how do you communicate how well they are doing in their roles?

In his Process Street article, we’ll be covering:

• Evaluating employee performance
• Creating a recognition system that perfectly fits your employees
• Managing and motivating your employees for success

Let’s jump right in!
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Hanson Cheng is the founder of Freedom to Ascend. He empowers online entrepreneurs and business owners to put the systems in place for growth and 10x their business.

Despite being responsible for managing human resources, the HR department is usually one of the most understaffed and overworked departments in many companies. This is because HR involves many manual, repetitive, and monotonous tasks—these range from recruitment to pay and benefits to everything else in-between.

Automating your HR processes will help you:

• Streamline workflows;
• Ensure all your processes are consistent;
• Reduce errors.

Ultimately, HR automation saves you time and money — valuable resources you could better spend on other pressing HR tasks. Research shows that automation can help decrease administrative tasks by 49 percent for HR employers and 30 percent for HR professionals. The same study also revealed that up to 34 percent of HR departments said their organizations were slow in adopting HR automation.

In this Process Street post, we’ll be covering:

• What is HR automation?
• Benefits of HR automation
• 7 key HR processes to automate in 2021
• Why not automating HR processes can set you back In 2021
• HR automation: It’s not an option anymore

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“Our human capital stock is ready to go back to work.” – Kevin Hassett

In May 2020, White House advisor Kevin Hassett drew public ire by referring to the American workforce as “human capital stock.” US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asserted the term was not only outdated but inherently racist.

This raised a very important question for employers: How do you measure the output of your employees without treating them like cattle?

In addition to questions about the potential for dehumanizing employees, contemporary theorists question whether or not human capital theory – a product of the mid-20th century manufacturing economy – still has a place in our 21st-century knowledge economy.

In a knowledge economy, an employee’s output is intellectual rather than physical. Human capital theory originated during what is considered a manufacturing economy. As a result, it’s optimized for measuring physical output.

At a clothespin factory, a worker’s productivity is judged by how many pins they produce a day. There’s an established length of time it should take to make a faultless pin. That pin is an example of physical output. At the end of the day, you can count that worker’s pins and have a fairly good idea of their productivity.

A knowledge worker, however, doesn’t produce physical output; a knowledge worker produces intellectual output. I’ll go into this in more detail further on, but – in terms of human capital theory – the question is: how do you know how many “pins” a knowledge worker makes per day?

Obviously, knowledge workers are still given a wage, generally factored according to their value to the company (experience, education, etc.); in other words, using the principles of human capital theory.

But is this an accurate reflection of that employee’s worth? Are knowledge workers being undervalued because their productivity isn’t linked to the number of hours they work? Should intellectual and physical output still be measured on the same scale? Can they be weighed by the same scale?

More to the point, if human capital theory has outlived its usefulness, what language should we be using to describe an employee’s value? Is it fair to consider employees part of a company’s assets?

In this Process Street post, I aim to investigate these questions and explore ways in which the 21st-century employer can assess employees in terms of company value without objectifying the individual contributions.

• “Our people are our greatest asset.”
• The problem of a knowledge-based economy
• 6 factors to improve knowledge worker productivity

Let’s delve deeper.
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It’s 4 p.m. and you’ve got a welcome call with your newest team member. Ideally, you’d feel full of life, ready to welcome her with enthusiasm and get her excited about the weeks to come.

Problem is, this is your 6th video call of the day and you’re overrun with Zoom fatigue.

You’ve been turned “on” (not in a good way) for the last 7 hours and are severely lacking in enthusiasm, let alone excitement.

The worst thing is, the majority of those meetings were unnecessary, everything covered in them could’ve been communicated asynchronously.

Simply put, asynchronous communication involves communicating remotely without expecting an immediate response. This can be done via iMessage, pre-recorded video/audio, making suggestions to an existing project (think: Google Docs/Sheets, Github, Jira).

The challenge is knowing, when and how to use synchronous vs. asynchronous communication methods. Fortunately, this post is here to teach you just that so you can avoid Zoom fatigue and stop being real-time, all the time. Feel free to skip to a specific section of the post using the links below.

• What is Zoom fatigue?
• Avoid Zoom fatigue by making sure communication is always intentional
• Avoid Zoom fatigue: Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication
• Advantages and disadvantages of synchronous vs. asynchronous communication
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication tools at Process Street
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication: Wrapping up

Let’s get started! 🚀
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Process Street is growing like crazy. Every day I open up Slack, there’s someone new to welcome to the team. It’s like a mini virtual party every day with less cake. 🍰

Starting at a remote start-up can be tough – especially if it’s your first time working remotely, or at a start-up, or at a remote start-up. All those first-day jitters are magnified by the fact that you don’t even have a friendly work-buddy in the next office to walk you through it.

Well, you do have the friendly work-buddy; they’re just not in the next office. Or even the same country.

With this in mind, I thought it’d be fun to interrogate our newest teammates. There’s nothing that’ll make you feel like part of the team like getting interrogated by someone you just met so they can publish your innermost thoughts for all of the internet to see. Right? 😉

In this post, I talk to Process Street’s newbies about their first month with us. Please give a round of applause for my lovely volunteers:

• Mike Schutte, Engineering
• Karolina Lasocki, Content Creation
• Dyra Manangan, Visual Content
• Brian Ralston, Customer Success
• Logan Herzog, Demand Generation

Let’s meet the team!
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It’s 4:55 on a sunny Friday afternoon. You have a whole weekend of relaxing in the backyard planned. Maybe you’ll have friends over for a barbecue, or finally finish that crime thriller you started last year and forgot about. There’s always that super-extended director’s cut of a film from four years ago that just came out.

You’re blissfully contemplating all your stress-free options when your line manager pops their head in and cheerily says, “HR wants to see you first thing Monday morning. Have a great weekend!”

The truth is, the role of HR teams – and even the name – has evolved quite a bit over the years, though its reputation hasn’t been quite so quick to keep up. People Teams, as all the start-ups are calling it these days, still have a vital role to play in the structure and organization of a company, though.

So, when is it time to create a super team-up for your start-up? More importantly, how do you do it?

I sat down with Process Street’s own VP of People, Jay Hanlon, to talk:

• The HR team’s role within an organization
• HR teams: The problem of bad branding
• Key factors in building a healthy HR team
• The final word on HR teams

Come on in and have a seat!
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How many different tabs do you have open on your computer or laptop, right now?

I bet it’s a lot.

Let me guess. You’ve probably got one open for your emails, one for your social media, one for Slack, and another for Process Street?

And, maybe you’ve also got tabs open for your HR management system, your recruitment software, your reporting platform, your payroll service, your employee engagement tool, and…well, the list could go on and on and on.

Am I right?

But, this makes finding the tab you need when you need it virtually impossible, it slows your computer…right…down, and even the simplest HR tasks can end-up taking twice as long.

“Too many tabs, in almost any web browser, will lead to overtaxed computer memory, a reduction in battery life, and, for sure, a cluttered browser workspace.” – Forbes, Too Many Tabs Open: Save Your PC Or Mac From Overheating

What if there was a way to speed up your HR tasks? What if you could get all your task notifications and updates in one, central place instead of several? What if you could improve communication with your team and spend less time waiting or chasing for updates and more time on the things that matter?

Interested?

Allow me to introduce you to our newest feature, built for Slack lovers: The Process Street Slack App. Just click the button below to add it to your Slack!

Read on to discover how the Process Street Slack App can speed up your HR tasks as we whizz through the following:

• How our new Slack App helps you get HR tasks done faster
• How Sue manages her HR tasks with Process Street’s Slack App
• How to get Process Street’s Slack App & start streamlining your HR tasks

Let’s get cracking.🌪️
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This is a guest post by Hazel Bennett, a freelance writer and blogger. She has a degree in communications and lives in Northeastern Ohio. Hazel loves writing about numerous topics and showcasing her expertise with words. Follow Hazel on Twitter.

Those with anxiety know what a struggle it can be to get through each workday. Stress, nervousness, and negative thoughts can wear a person down. As the effects of anxiety begin to take over, workers can lose the focus and motivation necessary to get the job done, leading to productivity and morale problems.

The combination of a high-stress work environment and mental health challenges can result in less-than-satisfactory work performances and unhappy employees. If you’re looking for solutions to keep your company working smoothly and your staff healthy and well, this Process Street post has you covered.

Read on for information about anxiety and how to overcome it with the help of productivity-enhancing technology:

• What causes workplace anxiety?
• Coping with chronic anxiety at work
• How to use tech as a de-stress
• Productivity hacks for workplace anxiety
• Mental health matters

Let’s take a look!
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This is a guest post by Katerina Mery, a marketing specialist at Fond. Fond is a rewards and recognition company dedicated to building places where employees love to work. Mery authors articles about how to leverage recognition programs to drive company success.

Think back to the last time a colleague acknowledged you for a job well done.

How did you feel?

Did the experience have an impact on your behavior moving forward? Did the exchange affect your relationship with the person thanking you? What about your relationship with the company in general?

63% of employees who are acknowledged for the work they do are unlikely to look for a new job. Expressing gratitude at work takes relatively little effort, but it can create an incredibly memorable professional experience. Knowing that you did a good job is one thing, having a colleague call out your great work takes the experience to another level.

Business objectives can sometimes feel at odds with an enjoyable employee experience. Employee acknowledgment, however, is a practice that effortlessly supports both.

From this Process Street article, you’ll learn how employee acknowledgment simultaneously caters to your organization’s business objectives. You’ll also learn how to meet the emotional needs of your employees using fantastic positive feedback loops that generate continual improvements across the board.

We say employee acknowledgment is a smart initiative a company can adopt – but before you take our word for it, allow us to explain why.

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• What is employee acknowledgment?
• Employee acknowledgment and its effects on workplace psychology
• How employee acknowledgment benefits employee wellbeing
• The organizational benefits of employee acknowledgment
• Use Process Street for your employee acknowledgment strategy

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