25th May, 2021
3 Min read
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At times when interest rates are close to zero and VC money flows into startups and tech companies, we see a spike in the recruitment pace of talented knowledge workers.
The competition for software engineers, developers, DevOps, SREs, and security engineers is fierce. Therefore, companies put lots of effort into optimizing their employee experience, also known as “employee branding”.
That’s pure HR? Think again.
A major part of it concerns the onboarding experience, which is a joint IT-HR endeavour. Simplifying this critical stage while safeguarding of the company’s sensitive assets adds security to the equation – hence it’s on our spotlight today.
Having 3 different departments involved in a single process makes it complex by design. No wonder that complexity grows exponentially when startups add dozens and hundreds of new employees, sometimes doubling or tripling headcount within months.
An Identity & Access Management (IAM) solution can provide both the security and access management of employees using Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). These well-known features are the basics of security and compliance these days.
However, it’s the newer, more advanced capabilities of some solutions that can completely automate new employee onboarding from an IT perspective, thus making IT and HR lives much easier, even facing headcount hypergrowth.
Injecting automation into repetitive IT tasks needs little advocacy: it saves lots of time, energy and manual labor which eventually translates into IT and HR productivity. We’ve seen cases where it wasn’t needed to add more IT and HR headcounts to support massive onboarding of new employees, with automation in place.
Some examples of automated workflows we’ve implemented for our customers using an IAM solution, which integrated both to the company’s HR system, communication apps and email platforms:
New Employee Equipment
How frustrating is it to start day 1 in a new company and realize they haven’t prepared for your arrival, your laptop isn’t ready, your workstation hasn’t been determined yet and so on?
- With the automated workflows capability the IAM solution syncs with the HR system to account for employees that are going to start in X days.
- An automated email is sent to the HR to verify the employee is indeed going to start in X days.
- Once HR approves, the IAM solution automatically opens a ticket to IT with the proper equipment the employee will need on day 1, based on his / her role, department and location.
- When the employee arrives on day 1, his / her workstation, laptop and application licenses are ready at their disposal!
Personalized Welcome Experience
In addition to the equipment required to properly onboard new employees, it’s important to provide a personalized welcome experience to new employees so they would feel comfortable and welcomed. Again, automation can be part of this experience to avoid human error and mishaps. Here are some examples for a personalized welcome experience:
- X days prior to the employees start date, a personalized email is sent to the employee’s personal and work email addresses with information about day 1, which may include their choice of laptop type and related workstation equipment.
- Once the employee selects their choice of equipment, an automated ticket is opened in the IT ticketing system to order the equipment.
- On day 1, the employee gets another email welcoming them to the company with helpful information about applications they will need, IM (Instant Messaging) channels they should subscribe to based on their role, department and location.
- In the IM application an automated welcome message can be sent announcing the new employee joined and trigger welcoming reactions from peers in the channels.
- Permission provisioning rolls out automatically, according to the employee’s predefined department and role in the HR system. That’s right. And here’s how it actually works.
Conclusion
These are just a few examples of the endless possibilities an IAM solution with automated workflows can be used for. IAM enables a more secured enterprise environment, with limited access based on employees role and function, while providing personalized onboarding experience to new employees without increasing IT and HR headcount as the company continues to grow.
Security solutions shouldn’t slow companies down anymore. When integrated and configured to exhaust their full arc of capabilities, innovative solutions add protection and serve the company’s hyper growth at the same time.
Learn more about IAM for employee experience automation
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