Improving Employee Onboarding Process Via Lean Six Sigma

A leading call center service provider found that less than 30% of all their new hires had immediate access to the items they needed to begin training or performing their jobs. This was resulting in frequent management complaints and presumed dissatisfaction on the part of new hires in addition to lost revenue due to delayed productivity.

The majority of new hires were without access to the parking facility, the building, the computer and telephone systems, and job related and corporate software applications

The on-boarding project goal was to increase the percentage of new hires that had immediate access to all items they needed to begin training or performing their job on their first day of work to 95%. This would, in turn, decrease the management complaints and increase new hire satisfaction.

The team selected the DMAIC process as their improvement method. A Six Sigma DMAIC project is defined as a project that eliminates a chronic problem that is causing customer dissatisfaction, defects, costs of poor quality, or other deficiencies in performance.

The company decided to implement the following quick fixes during the Define phase of DMAIC:

• They created a new hire “Day One E-mail” which provided instructions for the employee’s first day. This was sent to new hires a few days prior to their start date.
• They instructed candidates to enter their names as they appeared on their social security cards.
• They standardized all start dates as Mondays for all locations.
• They created a “New Hire Spreadsheet” in HR for use on the first day of new hire training.
• They changed the vendor they used to conduct criminal background checks to reduce response time and eliminate delays.

Current Process Capability

The team studied their current process maps and found issues with:

Parking Access

• Often requests were never submitted from the hiring manager.
• Procedures were not understood by parties involved.
• When hiring managers did get the new employee’s parking access, they often did not communicate this with the new hires.

New Hire Information

• Often the information collected on new hires was inaccurate and/or missing data (typos or transposed numbers). This caused added delay and wait times for responses.
• There was a bottleneck in the process when new hire volumes were high.

Emails to HR, IT, and Accounting

• Often the emails were not providing critical information and were inaccurate about transfers and the part-time/full-time status of the jobs.
• If the new hire start date was adjusted, there was no email communication to update departments.
• It was a manual process to email the Accounting department with new hire pay information.

Adding employees to the New Hire Spreadsheet

• This was a manual process and often caused a bottleneck in the system.
• There were many opportunities for error.

Sending Day One E-mails to New Hires

• There was nothing to prompt departments to get this done.
• The e-mail was known to go directly into the new hire’s spam folder.

Confidentiality of Drug Screens

• Drug screen results were being faxed to the corporate fax which violated confidentiality agreements.
• Often the distribution of these faxed results was being delayed or incorrectly routed.
• If there were questionable results, it was taking up to one week for additional screening activities

The team implemented the following quick fixes during the Measure phase of DMAIC:

• They revised the “New Hire Checklist for Hiring Managers” with details for help-desk communication.
• HR took over the entry of each new hire’s birth date, emergency contact, spousal information, gender, race, and personal information instead of passing it onto payroll to complete.
• They created an ETN (employee transaction notice) with a section to capture new hire data on one form vs. three

Vital Few Xs

The team tested a number of theories that they believed were contributing to new hires being without adequate access. They discovered that the Vital Few Xs were:

• The team
• Help Desk prioritization
• Location of new hire

The company implemented the following quick fixes during the Improve phase of DMAIC:

• They asked the hiring managers to confirm names, email addresses, addresses, and phone numbers during the new hire offer.
• They set up desktop fax capabilities for HR staff to receive drug screen results at their desktop.
• They deactivated the parking ramp arm from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Mondays.
• They added the hiring manager’s name to new hire emails and copied the hiring manager.