The simpler way to manage Remote Employee Onboarding

When onboarding new employees, it’s important to keep the process as simple as possible. When all new user activity occurs in a single system, onboarding, especially remote onboarding, becomes seamless and effortless.

If your onboarding system is integrated with Akku, or if you use Akku itself as the onboarding system, this system becomes the first point of engagement for the user with the organization. Every step of the onboarding process is guided by this tool. Since it collects all the user data requested at the very beginning of the interaction with the new employee, Akku becomes the single source of truth for the entire career journey of the employee.

The onboarding process

Once the employee has been recruited, they are instructed to create an Akku account using their personal email address. A website link is then sent to the employee’s personal email id. Upon clicking on this link, the employee is led to a portal where they can begin onboarding by requesting their new corporate credentials.

Once they receive their new credentials, users log on to the same system using their corporate email address and password. On the same landing page, they see the list of guidelines to be followed, documents to be submitted with deadlines, date and location of reporting, how and what to do upon joining the organization, and more. All details are shared in a single window, often including a downloadable offer letter.

A single source of truth

Since the onboarding process for all employees is undertaken through a common digitized system, Akku becomes a ‘single source of truth’ for all information related to each employee. 

This makes onboarding seamless from the documentation perspective, as the new employee has to upload documents to a single location, and all departments involved can access them directly, as and when needed.

Similarly, since provisioning happens through Akku, access to all relevant software and other digital assets is also granted effortlessly through a single application. Not only is provisioning seamless, but authorized managers across departments can also view details pertaining to the new employee via Akku’s dashboards, as it is the single source of information about the new team member.

Remote onboarding 

This kind of single-window onboarding is extremely valuable to employees working remote or hybrid, as most of their interaction with the organization will be virtual. An efficient onboarding process makes a great first impression. It shows that as an employer, you consider employee support to be a tech priority.

Much of the Know Your Employee (KYE) documentation can (or sometimes, should) be completed before the employee actually joins the organization. Since the portal is open at any time and can be accessed from anywhere, remote document collection (in the form of soft copies) is seamless. This is especially important and useful for employees working remotely, as they may not be located in the same area as your office and could need to travel to visit the office to submit hard copies.

Similarly, since employees are also offered virtual orientation, knowledge transfer and access provisioning, remote onboarding becomes easier.

Benefits to remote employees

  1. Seamless documentation: As discussed earlier, since Akku is a single source of truth, all documentation takes place virtually through the portal itself.
  2. Seamless provisioning: As an Akku-based onboarding system of this kind is a single source of truth in the organization, employees do not have to go outside the system to upload data and documentation about themselves, nor to access relevant information, knowledge, or relevant assets.
  3. Seamless knowledge transfer and training: Akku is integrated with a communication system to push messages and communiques to users. Using this tool, orientation, knowledge transfer and initial training can take place through the system itself.
  4. Seamless reporting: The same tool provides user activity monitoring as well, for the duration of onboarding and orientation, since it tracks the progress of the new employee through the predefined process. Akku can directly intimate HR, reporting manager and head of department regarding the progress of the employee through the KYE process via the system dashboards.
  5. Seamless identity management: Since Akku is a full-fledged IAM, the new employee can directly be provisioned with access to all required software and other assets through Akku itself. At the same time, account credentials for single sign-on (SSO) can also be directly generated.

Automated, single-window onboarding for remote employees makes the process significantly more efficient, especially for large enterprises with a huge number of employees joining per day. Single-window reporting is also a feature that smaller businesses find extremely useful, as it makes user management much more efficient for small HR teams. 

Wondering how to make your onboarding process more efficient? Take it digital with Akku. Contact our team today to discuss how to get started.

Is dependence on AD holding back your provisioning & deprovisioning?

Active Directory is quite simply the most popular identity management solution for enterprises in the world. An incredible ~90% of the Global Fortune 1000 companies use Active Directory as their primary method of authentication! 

Does your organization, like so many others, manage user identity with Active Directory (AD) too? If so, we’re guessing you have probably run into trouble with provisioning and deprovisioning for users across your environment. AD is great for identity management, but it was never built to act as a single sign-on (SSO) platform.

Challenges with AD for Provisioning & Deprovisioning

What this means is that either provisioning and deprovisioning would need to be performed for each application and user individually, or else, for Active Directory to be used to control access and permissions, each application would need to be integrated with AD separately. 

With the average enterprise running 1295 cloud-based applications, both these options seem like pretty poor choices. The former option is a tremendous drain on productivity for both admins and users, while the latter presents a host of complexities and costs to integrate AD with each of your apps.

IAM to the rescue!

So how do you get over these challenges? The answer lies in deploying an Identity & Access Management (IAM) solution that includes single sign-on (SSO) functionality.

Essentially, the IAM would act as an intermediate layer between your AD and your applications. So the IAM solution would need to integrate with Active Directory on the one side, and with all of your organization’s applications on the other. 

Through integration with your applications, the IAM can bring them all onto a single common platform and act as the Identity Provider (IdP) across your environment. Since most modern IAM solutions use SAML-based integrations with applications, these integrations are far less complex and expensive to implement than directly integrating AD to each application.

And secondly, integrating the IAM with AD would allow you to continue to manage identity – and now access permissions too – on AD itself.

Benefits of an IAM integrated with AD

At the end of this process, you would be able to control identity and access across your environment on Active Directory, giving you a familiar interface and process with enhanced functionality. 

Single-point control for your admins, and single-point access for your users, mean simple, fast provisioning and deprovisioning for IT and HR teams, saving them a tremendous amount of time and effort. 

Not to mention easy access to all permitted applications for users, helping to make them more productive too.

Akku is a powerful Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution by CloudNow that is built to play well with Active Directory, and also to integrate seamlessly with virtually any of your business applications. Call us today to see how Akku could enhance productivity and security at your organization!