Instead of an alphabetic writing system, the Incan Empire used a series of knotted and colored strings called quipu.

Quipu are still used in South America today, primarily by herders recording livestock numbers, but experts still only have theories about how the actual Incans used their quipu way back. Some believe quipu were simple memory aids, while others point to purely numerical record-keeping. The latest trend is the theory that quipu were on their way to becoming viable alternatives to written language.

Looking at that image, I know what you’re thinking: How could a series of knots ever represent a narrative about anything?

To be fair, though, the ancient world had a lot of weird record-keeping methods. You’ve probably encountered the Celts’ Ogham alphabet, Viking runes, and the Egyptians’ hieroglyphs – because scholars have been able to figure out what those symbols mean – but there are still many – like the quipu – we don’t quite understand.

For the most part (we think), these cultures followed a predominantly oral tradition, which is why we don’t have any documents explaining their languages. Even the Romans – who loved to write things down – left us a language (Latin) we don’t actually know how to pronounce. All because no one thought about documenting their systems in a universally understandable way that would stand the test of time.

Now, hopefully, your internal onboarding processes aren’t at risk due to your CEO’s sibling overthrowing their rule or violent colonization by an invading force, but if your organization’s employee onboarding isn’t a documented process anyone could use, it’s about as useful to your company as an Incan quipu is to a 21st-century New Yorker.

HR has gone through so many changes in the past few years that it’s not even called HR anymore. The same old systems that have worked just fine up to now just aren’t going to cut it anymore. People managers need dynamic, interactive processes that are flexible enough to meet the ever-changing needs of both their future new hires and their current workforce.

In this Process Street post, I’m going to show you how to easily level up your employee onboarding so it doesn’t become yet another antiquated system no one remembers how to use.

• Old-school employee onboarding mistakes
• Welcome to the HR People Management revolution
• Next-generation employee onboarding automation

Let’s get started!
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Every company needs HR, but not every company needs an HR department.

For those who aren’t looking to set up the traditional HR team, Payroll Processors has the solution: an entire HR department stuffed into a single platform so you can streamline all your payroll and employee management needs in one place.

Much like us here at Process Street, the folks at Payroll Processors believe: let us take care of things so you can focus on your business.

It’s no surprise, then, that when Payroll Processors wanted to focus on its business, it came to us, and so began a beautiful relationship.
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“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

Let’s jump to it!
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Guest post by Romi Catauta at Toptal.

Developer onboarding is the structured process of giving a new software engineer the access, environment, technical context, relationships, and feedback they need to make a safe first contribution and grow into the role.

Lawyers are busy people.

They’re at the frontline of all legal matters, providing advice on tricky issues, resolving disputes, and representing clients in court if needs be. All. Year. Round.

Ergo: There’s a lot on any given lawyer’s plate.

With the huge amount of recurring tasks that need to be completed, on top of looming deadlines and constant work-related pressures, it’s easy for quality to slip. Especially when it comes to one of the most important processes of all – the intake process.

It’s why 61% of law firms forget to ask for the client’s name during their initial conversation, why 35% of calls from clients go unanswered, and why it takes 3 or more days for 42% of law firms to respond to prospective clients.

For a law firm to keep its prestigious reputation – and to continue working with great clients – the intake process needs to effective, efficient, and done properly.

That’s why this blog post exists.

In this post, I’ll discuss what an intake process is, its benefits, why it’s important, and how Process Street can help law firms streamline the entire process.

Read through the sections below to get clued up:

• What is the intake process definition?
• The benefits of a solid client intake process
• How to use Process Street’s intake process template (for law firms)
• Use Process Street for all your law-related process needs!

Let’s begin; the court is in session! ⚖️
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LA Creative Technologies uses Process Street to streamline operations, with particular focus on (but not limited to) client onboarding, offboarding, and project management procedures.

With process automation and cloud process documentation solutions, Process Street has allowed LA Creative Technologies to productively, effectively and efficiently manage their remote team, and complex procedures.

We spoke with LA Creative’s Founder and CIO Josh Weiss to find out how they are using Process Street for client onboarding, offboarding and project management. We then opened the floor, accepting questions brought forth by our webinar listeners. Here’s what we found out.

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to find out all Process Street and LA Creative Technologies have to say.

• The LA Creative Technologies story: LA Creative Technologies as a management service provider
• The challenge: Client onboarding and offboarding
• The challenge: Project management
• The results: Client onboarding and offboarding
• The results: Project management
• Question time with LA Creative Technologies

Let’s get started.
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This is a guest post by Ivan Boychuk. Ivan is a freelance writer who specializes in creating quality SEO content that ranks high in search engines like Google.

“Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.” – Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker, who was a legendary thought leader in the area of marketing, understood that outsourcing work to freelancers can be an effective strategy to increase overall business productivity.

Why?

Because hiring a freelancer can save you time, money, needless headaches, and it can bring fantastic outside talent onboard. But with so many people chasing after the freelance lifestyle, it can be a daunting task to sift through countless candidates and hire a quality freelancer for your business.

Don’t worry, though.

In this guest post for Process Street, I’ll explain what a freelancer is, what to look for when hiring a freelancer, and show you 9 great websites for hiring freelancers! Just read through the following sections:

• What is a freelancer?
• What to look for when hiring freelancers
• How to hire freelancers: The best hiring websites around!
• Use Process Street to help hire freelancers & keep them on track

Let’s get started.

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Knowledge is power, but you need a system in place to harness that power effectively.

Everything that happens in your business depends on some kind of specialized knowledge, whether it’s new employee onboarding, dealing with customer requests, compliance issues, or marketing a new feature launch.

Your knowledge management system is the firm foundation upon which you build your business.

Despite this, statistics show that as many as 40% of employees do not utilize proper knowledge management solutions, and between 7-20% of their time is spent figuring out a problem from scratch when the solution already exists somewhere in the company.

These bad business practices cost Fortune 500 companies $31.5 billion each year.

How much money are you losing, and how much time are you wasting without a proper knowledge management system in place?

Knowledge management shares many fundamental principles with the idea of business process management (BPM), and as such it’s possible to use BPM software like Process Street to implement a powerful knowledge management system.

In this article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is a knowledge management system?
• Knowledge management system benefits
• How to build a knowledge management system
• Knowledge management software
• Using Process Street as a knowledge management system

Let’s start by understanding some basic principles of a knowledge management system.
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This is a guest post by Daniel Ndukwu. Daniel has extensive experience in digital marketing and is the Founder of KyLeads. There he helps business owners and publishers increase their leads and audience engagement with smart popups, interactive quizzes, and surveys.

In 2017, I had a brilliant idea.

Many of the tools for conversion rate optimization are point solutions. They make popups, landing pages, quizzes, surveys. Very few of them – if any – combine those functions into one.

I decided I would tackle the challenge by building a tool (now called KyLeads). It would allow people to create surveys, popups, and quizzes for lead generation and customer research.

After going through two development teams, rebuilding our user interface, and learning first-hand how hard it is to make software, we launched.

There was little fanfare and only a few customers when we started. But my team and I kept going. We knew it would be a long journey to success – and it’s paying off.

This article shares the best practices, tactics, and processes we used (and are still using) to improve our SaaS onboarding and grow our business into something spectacular.

Want to turbocharge your business’ onboarding successes and conversion rates in half the time?

Just read through the sections below to uncover these insider tips and tricks yourself:

• What is SaaS onboarding?
• What’s the importance of SaaS onboarding?
• Our top 5 SaaS onboarding best practices
• Use Process Street for SaaS onboarding!

Now, let’s get stuck in.

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This is a guest post from Kyriaki Raouna, a Content Writer at LearnWorlds writing about marketing and elearning. She is an experienced career consultant and a content writer for SaaS.

User onboarding is one of the hottest topics of discussion amongst SaaS companies. You start thinking about it on day zero of your launch and continuously improving onboarding as your business grows.

Welcoming and educating users on the use of your product is a priority for software businesses, and while you scale, you will want to automate the onboarding process.

In fact, the quicker you do so, the better. Customer onboarding is a huge opportunity for every SaaS. Especially if you are working to increase sales and reduce churn rates.

When onboarding is combined with customer education, it becomes the ALPHA and OMEGA of activating users and ending up with loyal customers who are experts in your product and advocate for you.

Indeed, the biggest software companies with a highly valued brands use education as marketing and for user onboarding, but more on this later…

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