What is onboarding?
Onboarding or onboarding is the process of getting to know a company, learning approaches to solving problems, as well as building processes for interaction with a team. In general, in a nutshell, onboarding is the acceptance of a new person into the company and accompanying him until the end of the probationary period or other period established by the company.
The main goal of the employer is for the new employee to “reach” the maximum level of efficiency as soon as possible, to integrate into the corporate culture. That is why in many organizations so much attention is paid to this process and the automation of at least part, and ideally the whole process is a very important aspect. This process begins with the employment of a new person in the organization or with internal movements from one position to another.
What tasks does the process of "boarding" a newcomer on board solve?
- Comfortable start of work - it is very important for a new person to feel at ease right away, from the first day of work in the company.
- Acquaintance with the products and the structure of the company - a new employee needs to understand what products he will have to work on, what they are.
- Getting to know the team and establishing communications - often new employees are not familiar with the team in which they will work, so one of the important tasks is to introduce the team to the new employee and establish certain communications between them, so that everyone understands who is responsible for what.
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What are some of the key points for successful adaptation?
- The first is regular contact with the line manager and providing feedback. During a probationary period or other period established by the company, it is important to always be in contact with the person and receive regular feedback from him.
- It is also important to promptly receive and provide information, as well as resolve various organizational issues.
- Good quality employee training is also the key to successful adaptation.
- Responding to signals from an employee is also an important component of adaptation.
- Well, one more of the important parameters is involvement in the social life of the company, various events, meetings, teambuildings, and so on.
In all these stages, one way or another, a certain person takes part under the code name "Buddy" or "Partner". "Buddy" is the person who accompanies the newbie, helps him get comfortable in the work, answers questions, navigates and redirects to the right people, if the question asked by the newbie needs to be passed on to someone else. In many companies, in each division, there are a number of such Buddies who are involved in helping newcomers adapt. A certain number of newbies are assigned to Buddy (usually no more than 3).
So how can Microsoft Power Platform work with Microsoft 365 to automate various onboarding processes?
A huge plus is that the Power Platform is a set of software products for creating applications, organizing business logic and generating reports without programming, which allows you to configure many processes on the fly and making changes to applications and logic takes much less time than if it were was programmed from scratch. With Power Apps, you can easily create forms and applications, easily connecting to various data sources (for example, Microsoft SharePoint).
Power BI as a comprehensive business intelligence (BI) software will allow you to build reports on your data.
Power Virtual Agents is a service for creating virtual assistants or, more simply, chat bots, which will help to customize the logic of user interaction with bots, allowing you to carry out various operations to inform or provide various services quickly and efficiently.
Well, Power Automate is like glue, it will allow you to connect and unite data and processes in a single Microsoft ecosystem.
How did we implement some of the onboarding scenarios?
The screenshot below shows some fragments of the system. SharePoint Online is used as the data source, and PowerApps is used to customize applications and forms.
Using the navigation menu, the user enters the main list of onboarding applications, where he can open the application card. On the form of each application there is a button for going to actions on the application, where, depending on the user's rights, certain buttons are displayed. For example, the "Assign Buddy" button, which assigns Buddy to a newbie (or a newbie to a buddy), is available only to users with a specific role in the system. These are the so-called onboarding administrators.
At the same time, if the person who opens the card is not included in this role of administrators, but is Buddy in his department, then he will be able to click on the "Take a ward" button, but in this case, assigning a newcomer to a buddy must go through the approval stage with the hiring manager ... And the manager can either confirm this link, or reject and appoint a buddy for the beginner on his own.
That is, it turns out that in the first case, “Appoint a buddy” is possible without approval, but it is necessary to take the ward through the approval process. Moreover, if during a certain period a buddy was not assigned to the ward, then a free Buddy within the department is automatically selected and assigned to him. Buddy's handbook automatically keeps statistics on who has how many wards now.
In addition, from the actions, you can change the exit date (in case the employee or another person has moved the exit date to another date), confirmation of the exit, delegation of the application to another hiring manager, as well as cancellation of the application, which is equivalent to canceling the employee's exit. Of course, all actions are available to different user roles, for example, only the current hiring application manager or onboarding administrator can delegate a request to another hiring manager.
But. What happens when the user clicks on the button? If you look at the screenshot, you can see that a dialog box is called up, in which you need to specify something and confirm the action. And what happens with us in this case? In theory, some Power Automate flow should be launched that would change something, send letters and other notifications. But the following situation arose during implementation.
Based on the requirements, we needed to send HTTP requests within the processes and use other actions from the Premium category. But the customer did not purchase licenses from the Premium category for all users and it was necessary to somehow get out of this situation.
And instead of Power Automate, we chose Logic Apps, since the customer had an Azure subscription.
Power Automate and Logic Apps are practically twin brothers, but they certainly have their own major differences from each other. The most important thing we liked about Logic Apps was that all Premium Connectors are available in Logic Apps without additional licenses.
However, there is one caveat. It is not possible to directly launch Logic Apps stream by button from PowerApps. And so my colleagues and I came up with a solution with a separate SharePoint list for actions.
The essence of the list is that when the user clicks on the button, then an item is created in this list with certain attribute values, which we define in the PowerApps application itself. For example, as you can see in this screenshot, this list of actions has an ActionType field, a Request field, ApprovalResult, Comment, and so on.
In ActionType, we write the name of the action that is currently being performed, for example, agreeing a buddy, changing a deadline, canceling an application. We write additional information in the remaining fields.
And already when creating an item in this list, we launch the Logic Apps flow, which starts not by a button, but by a simple trigger. Next, the thread picks up the field values and does its work based on the field values.
What are the advantages of this approach with a systematic list of actions? Well, besides the fact that without it, the Logic Apps stream cannot be started normally?
- Asynchronous execution of actions. This means you don't have to wait for a thread to start or an action to take place before leaving the form. You clicked the button and went about your business, at this time an item in the system list is created in the background and the thread is started.
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The screenshot below shows a small fragment of the same thread that is launched when an item is created in the system list.
As you can see, during the execution of the flow, the ActionType field is parsed - the type of the action. And depending on the type of action, that is, on the type of button that was clicked, the flow goes along one branch or another, for example, it determines the participants, forms a list of Email addresses to which letters and messages should be sent to the chat bots. Some of the variables and data can be moved into a separate block at the very top of the stream, so as not to define them in each branch a heap of times.
Chat bots
By the way, about chat bots. Here, this screenshot shows a small example of messages that arrive in the Microsoft Teams chatbot when various events are called.
There are separate cards for agreeing on the passage of the probationary period for a certain period. In our case, there are three points, this is one month from the release date, after 2 months and after 3 months. At each of these time points, a special thread is launched that sends the hiring manager such a card in Teams for the manager to either confirm or reject the successful completion of this trial period. With the indication of comments.
There are also cards with various information about the buddy, for example, that participation in the role of a buddy is rejected or if a buddy is not assigned to the beginner. In addition, notifications are sent to different time points that it is necessary to take a survey. In our case, the screenshot shows a card with a proposal to take a survey for the beginner himself.
Polls
If we talk about polls, then they are implemented on the basis of Microsoft Forms. In general, Microsoft Forms is an incredibly convenient service for creating surveys in just a matter of minutes.
And as an example of polls - in the screenshot.
These surveys are sent to the newbie after a certain period, for example, after the first week, after the first month of work. During the survey, you can clarify with the employee whether there was a tour of the office, how staffed the workplace, how things are with the tasks and how aware the person is about what tasks he has for the trial period.
All this can be asked from a beginner using Microsoft Forms surveys. It is important to receive feedback from the employee and respond in a timely manner if something suddenly went wrong. Of course, such surveys are sent to both the manager and the buddy as regards the beginner himself, since it is necessary to understand the whole picture about the employee.
Checklists
By the way, when discussing polls, one cannot but touch upon such an important component as checklists. Since the onboarding process is still a process, the verification of the passage of certain stages of onboarding can be issued in the form of checklists, which may exist for a beginner, a buddy, and a manager. In our case, the checklists are made in the form of a PowerApps application, where each participant can go in and check the boxes that he passed at a certain time stage. As an example, in the screenshot, there is now a small fragment of the checklist for a beginner, where at each time interval (now in the first week), you need to tick off which tasks from the main list have been completed. Alternatively, here, it is noted that the person has started to perform work tasks and attended some kind of introductory event.
And this screenshot shows a fragment of the checklist for buddy. Since buddy is first and foremost a comrade, his tasks are comradely. Chat outside the office, discuss your impressions, congratulate you on the passage and indicate any additional comments.
By the way, I forgot to say that for completing the checklist, certain points are awarded, which will then play a role.
Reports
Of course, it is necessary to collect and display certain statistics on the basis of checklists. For this, the Microsoft Power BI business analytics tool is used, with the help of which reports are built on which checklist items have been completed and which have not. There is a filter by employee so that you can immediately, in the context of each, in this case, buddy find out who did what.
Bonus points for Buddy
And returning to the topic of checklists and their filling, I would like to note that for completing tasks within the checklists, employees who are Buddy are awarded bonus points. There are standard points that are awarded for completing tasks within checklists, and there are bonus points that are awarded for individual tasks that are set outside the system. These points form the final Buddy rating in the context of the department and in the context of the entire company. The best friend can be identified. For this, special Logic Apps streams are used, which, running on a schedule, calculate the rating based on data from the check lists.
Chatbots again
As you know, within the Microsoft Power Platform, there is such a product as Power Virtual Agents, with which you can easily customize the logic of the chatbot and further develop separate dialogs for various operations. As an example, in the screenshot you can see the logic of the bot dialog when prompted for help 2ndfl. This request can be called by any user in the organization through a chat bot. It is enough to write a key trigger phrase to start a dialog and then the bot will ask the questions embedded in it, save the answers to variables and then transmit the answers to Power Automate by a flow that can create an item, send a letter and perform a million more different operations.
In general, using a chatbot, you can combine many different operations in one Microsoft Teams window and not force a new user to try to figure out where a particular service is located in an organization. It is enough to open the tab with the bot and write him a message that you want to do.
Alternatively, the screenshot below shows a request for information on the registration of dms. This information can be stitched into the corporate knowledge base and pulled out by the bot on the go.
In addition, using the bot, you can create requests for the provision of, for example, various certificates and statements, create requests for office services and the provision of stationery. And after the request is confirmed, a Power Automate or Logic Apps process starts under the hood, which will create a request to fulfill the user's request. Well, the requests themselves can be created already on a separate portal of business processes SharePoint Online.
In the next articles, we'll look at even more scenarios that can be automated using the Microsoft Power Platform. Have a nice day everyone!