Beyond Onboarding: 5 Ways to Keep Engagement High Throughout the Employee Lifecycle

It can be tough to keep your faculty and staff engaged through the entire employee lifecycle.

It’s essential for a new employee to have a seamless onboarding process to ensure they are productive and engaged as quickly as possible while they become part of your institution. With increasing pressure to do more with less, it is just as important for institutions to focus on the entire employee lifecycle from hire to retire to ensure they are maximizing each valuable resource throughout their tenure.

There are six stages of the employee lifecycle; attraction, recruitment, onboarding, development. retention, and separation. Institutions typically focus on the attraction, recruiting, and onboarding portion of their employee lifecycle while the development and retention of faculty and staff are equally vital to maintaining a productive and efficient college or university.

The Importance of the Entire Employee Lifecycle

Maintain Momentum with Easy Onboarding

A new potential hire begins interviewing your institution the moment they receive a phone interview. If their entire experience—from hire to the day they walk on campus—is easy and efficient, they will begin their employee lifecycle with fresh eyes and excitement for their new role. New hires bring energy and perspective to their department and if leaders can tap into their enthusiasm during onboarding and carry it into their development, it will lead to retention. We tend to focus on the importance of onboardingforgetting about the importance of helping our most important aspect of campus–the people–grow.

With efficient, configurable hiring proposals that reduce data entry, your hiring process will easily transfer from candidate to new hire. This makes the onboarding process seamless from the new hire, department, and HR perspective. Single data entry saves you time and money and eliminates paper processes. 

Less Turnover

If your faculty and staff feel confident in their roles on campus, they are more likely to grow and contribute at a greater level, all while having a higher likelihood of a longer tenure. Part of building confidence is dependent on investment in their development and growth and taking an active role in prioritizing continuous learning; this can make a significant difference in maximizing their contributions.

Searching for a new faculty member can be tedious and overwhelming, taking valuable time away from meaningful activities. The more time that can be spent optimizing each staff member’s trajectory, the less time you’ll have to spend recruiting for replacements.  PeopleAdmin’s Employee Records (formerly Onboard and Records) enables higher education institutions to maintain compliance without the added stress of paper processes, freeing hiring managers and HR teams to focus on personalized communications and meaningful development-driven activities. 

Leverage Technology to Connect your Campus 

Advancements in being able to digitize each part of the employee journey allow for efficiencies and enable a cohesive experience from pre-hire to retire. The core problem institutions face is a lack of interoperability and data exchange between disparate higher education software solutions.

These technology silos cause inefficiencies across all areas of campus. This causes students, staff, administrators, and faculty to spend their valuable time trying to sync data between various applications manually. However, if you utilize an integration network, like PACx (PeopleAdmin’s Marketplace of Connectors) – data accuracy will improve, and your HRIS and ERP systems will seamlessly sync. A more connected campus will lead to more engagement with your faculty and staff. 

Career & Role Changes Made Easy Through Data Integration

The length of time people stay in their jobs has a significant effect on the employee lifecycle. If faculty and staff are given room to grow and develop, they will remain at a university longer—while if the potential for growth is minimal, their time on your campus may be cut short. With the entire HigherEd Platform – you can work with faculty along each step of their career – while tracking and maintaining their essential data amongst any other SaaS or on-prem software application. The Marketplace of Connectors is designed to meet the interoperable demands of higher education and connect your campuses, through an app store-model, to various job boards, background verification, skill assessment, video interviews, HRIS/ERP, and unified platform analytics.  

Maximize Resources with Faculty-Focused Professional Development

Consistently engaging and challenging your faculty provides growth opportunities and encourages retention. Faculty who are consistently growing and evolving in their profession will work toward their own goals as well as the institutions. As faculty grow in their career journey, facilitating promotion requests, reviews, and approvals can be a cumbersome process. It requires printing, copying, assembling, hand-delivering, and storing faculty CVs and forms during each promotion cycle. Streamlining and digitizing that process can create efficiencies, ensure data integrity, and reduce incoming status request calls.

With PeopleAdmin’s Faculty Information System (FIS), easily document your faculty’s research and teaching accomplishments with our CV Management tool. Digitally create promotion and tenure applications while creating committees and workflows to review and approve hiring decisions. We understand that faculty achievements are pivotal to driving growth at institutions. This brand-new platform offers data management, activity management, and promotion and tenure management. FIS executes these critical functions to ensure your faculty time to focus on research, teaching, and service.

Digital Solutions that Go Beyond Onboarding

Building an empowered, engaged, and competent workforce starts long before a new hire walks through your institution’s door. Make a great first impression with comprehensive onboarding processes designed to welcome new hires seamlessly then track and engage employees throughout their entire lifecycle.

The HigherEd Cloud is one platform for multiple solutions. Our open platform solutions empower more effective hiring, onboarding, position management, professional development, and retention through interoperability, efficiency, and innovation. Within a platform that speaks to all areas of your institution, our powerful analytics dashboards provide data at your fingertips in real-time. The entire HigherEd Platform provides out-of-the-box single sign-on, mobile access, and multiple portals for employees and administrators.

Watch the On-Demand Employee Records Webinar, How to Create an Integrated Applicant to Employee Lifecycle here.

Want to learn how PeopleAdmin solutions can help improve each employee lifecycle at your institution?

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