Welcome Aboard! Supporting the Process of Integrating New Staff with Onboarding Tools

Rudolph D., Burgholz C., Vogl R.

Zusammenfassung

The onboarding of new employees is a difficult and complex task because a lot of organization-specific information about workflows, contact persons and regulations has to be communicated. Nonetheless, universities often lack structured workflows for the integration of new staff, especially in the faculties. This leads to inefficient work processes, a high number of avoidable support tickets and frustration among the new employees caused by missing or incomplete information. At Münster University, a task force is formed. The project has two different objectives: First, it aims to ensure that new employees receive the most important information directly and in a condensed and motivating form. Secondly, it aims to ensure that new staff and students make some important settings and acknowledge crucial rules. To achieve the objectives, an onboarding portal is planned. The information is presented in form of an interactive drawing showing an office in which each object represents a relevant topic (e.g. a computer represents the university IT). The selection of topics is limited to the essentials, so that the portal remains manageable in terms of content. In this way, new employees know directly what is important and have a much easier start into their daily work at the Münster University than in the past. Some modifications of the portal are thinkable: In order to internalize the information, a classic e-learning approach could be chosen in which information units are activated one after the other (e.g. on a daily basis). This could be combined with gaming aspects in the sense of rewards for completed units. Part of the onboarding portal is a multistep wizard, which addresses legal aspects, security aspects, and selected service information. During the process, users have to agree to the university IT's terms of use, make some important settings and register for special services