How Automation Streamlines Employee Onboarding And Offboarding

By Willie Cash, Voleer Americas at BitTitan

When employees start working at a new company, the process of onboarding is a rite of passage. New workers are given various permissions, the keys to the kingdom they need to do their jobs. But this can be a tedious process. What happens when workers grow into new roles that require new permissions or decide to leave the company? This is when challenges and inefficiencies in employee life cycle management often occur.

Permission Hurdles

Most organizations have a standard operating procedure during onboarding when, at the time of hire, new employees are provided access to software and the respective licenses they’ll use. However, while employees’ needs change as their role evolves, organizations don’t operate that way. Employees can accumulate too many permissions over time, regardless of whether these permissions are necessary or should change.

Additionally, granting permissions is often a monotonous, manually fulfilled task. When introducing new policies around security, licensing, or granting functionality to employees, manually granting access is time-consuming and an IT help desk nightmare. New or recent employees don’t always get the access they need when they need it, which interferes with productivity because they must wait for permission to do their job.

An employee’s career progresses and evolves. So should their access to the software they need. But while permissions are available during the time of hire, that's usually a one-time operation. After that, permissions are often granted by on-demand requests.

Introducing Automation

Automating employee onboarding and offboarding can ensure that employees get the correct permissions, licensing, and software features and functionality when they need it. Automation can grant these permissions throughout their tenure with the organization, not just when they're hired, but also as their role evolves.

For example, if everyone in the sales department should have access to Salesforce, automated policies – which are informed by employee data in Azure Active Directory – can automatically determine who should have certain levels of Salesforce access and who should not have access at all. The first time this policy runs, it will recognize that the new hire is a part of the sales department and automatically assigns the permissions they need. Similarly, if a sales team member moves into another role with a different department, the policy will recognize they’re no longer in sales and remove this access. IT also can make exceptions to the rule, should they need an exception to a standard policy rule for certain employees, such as C-suite executives who oversee multiple departments.

The Benefits And ROI

Automation brings a host of benefits and reduces the number of onboarding and offboarding steps that IT must manage. Automated policies rely on employee data that organizations store in Azure Active Directory to automatically provide the correct permissions, offering backend automation that IT configures and runs in the background on your systems. Organizations determine how they want to configure and synchronize their HR system with Azure Active Directory in which these policies will get picked up automatically by the correct objects. The benefit is you don't need to pass information between people or departments or wait on the action from the IT team. It's fully automated and protects the sensitivity of that data. With automation, you no longer have employee information floating around loosely in emails or tickets.

Additionally, automated onboarding can help with:

• Distribution lists: In email communications, the sales department is part of the sales distribution list. Employees can easily be added or removed from these lists.
• Interoperability: Automated solutions, like the offerings from BitTitan Voleer, naturally integrate with the systems and software that your company buys. Voleer can interoperate with virtually any software.
• Setting straightforward policies: All these policies are driven off employee data stored in Azure Active Directory. It’s a straightforward process in which you simply pick the policies you want and deploy those policies as you see fit.

Automation can deliver quick ROI on time savings and user productivity, but the most significant benefit is your IT environment will be more secure. Automation limits employee access to only the things they require for their job.

For managed service providers doing onboarding and offboarding for their customers, much of the work is manual, requires a significant amount of time, and is prone to error. If you're managing a hundred customers, all of them may have a different variation of a standard operating procedure for onboarding or offboarding an employee. Automation eliminates these challenges and bottlenecks, saving MSPs valuable time. The more you can automate the system, the more MSPs can accomplish.

Automated permissions also can help with managing costs. Everyone shouldn’t have the same licenses because they don’t need access to the same systems. Automation minimizes redundancy and helps eliminate costs for unnecessary licenses. As people change jobs, employees are only granted access to the software they need for that role.

Employee needs around permissions and software access are evolving. Leveraging automation can result in a better employee experience and create a more productive environment by streamlining access to permissions and eliminating wait times. By introducing automation into the onboarding and offboarding processes, you will improve how your organization operates and the experience your employees have as their career evolves with your company.

About The Author 

Willie Cash is the general manager of Voleer Americas at BitTitan, where he works with SMB and enterprise partner companies to identify and implement effective ways to drive solutions, grow revenue, and increase profits in their day-to-day businesses. Learn more about Voleer here.