Onboarding your staff with automation and confidence in 2024

Onboarding plays a pivotal role in shaping employees’ initial experiences of your organisation, fostering engagement, and setting the stage for long-term success. It extends beyond mere orientation to the transition and integration into your company’s culture and workflows.

In Australia and New Zealand, the most common times to hire new staff are in the January/February and September/October periods. This can create a significant efficiency bottleneck for your administration teams if you do not prepare for the year ahead. At this time, they need to not only manage leave requests and approvals around the adjacent end-of-year and school holiday periods but also a heavier onboarding burden along with the regular payroll obligations. Manual processes place an increasing strain on these teams, where using a powerful automated software solution can alleviate these burdens instead.

Why is it important to get onboarding right in 2024?

Onboarding processes are one of the challenges of recruiting in a growing business, but it is a necessary evil. It can involve multiple teams and documents – but it starts your new team member off on the right foot and has a significant impact on your payroll process.

Create a great first impression.

Onboarding is likely to be a new hire’s first interaction with how your company operates. Creating a digital-first experience with automated, online onboarding sends the message that your organisation is future-focused and that their time at your organisation will be supported with clever technology. Your goal should be for a new team member to finish the process feeling inspired and encouraged. Taking this sort of initial action can set the tone for their entire career at your company.

Improve productivity and your employees’ job satisfaction.

Onboarding directly impacts employee retention, productivity, and job satisfaction. A well-structured onboarding program not only introduces new hires to their roles and responsibilities but also establishes clear communication channels, facilitates relationship-building, and aligns employees with the company’s mission and values. The faster a new hire can be fully onboarded, the more easily they can start being productive for your organisation.

Improve new hires’ onboarding and avoid delays.

In contrast, an unprepared company may disorient new hires, fail to clearly communicate job expectations, and delay productivity. This can also lead to increased turnover rates, decreased morale, and challenges in retaining top talent, ultimately hindering organisational growth and success. A manual onboarding process can also create more headaches for your established team. Payroll and administration staff waste time chasing documents that may or may not have been completed correctly and then manually enter data into the payroll system. The worst first impression you could make is being late with your new hire’s first pay. A suboptimal onboarding experience compounds this risk factor.

Technology solutions to support automated onboarding

Give your new starters a smooth transition into your organisation and remove the headaches from the onboarding process with automation. The MYOB Enterprise suite is built to improve and automate your onboarding workflows. Both MYOB Advanced Payroll and MYOB Advanced Workforce Management have specific functionality to support your onboarding workflows.

Collect information in the cloud with direct integration into the payroll solution. The MYOB Onboarding will allow your new team members to enter information directly into the system, such as:

• personal information,
• supporting documents,
• Tax File Number (TFN) and Medicare Levy declarations,
• payment and superannuation details.

The payroll team only needs to confirm everything has been entered, and they can import the new hire seamlessly into the next pay run. This creates a digital-first experience for your new hire and a strong first impression of your organisation.

MYOB Advanced Payroll and MYOB Advanced Workforce Management are slightly different solutions with unique functionality.

MYOB Advanced Payroll

MYOB Advanced Payroll is a powerful cloud-based payroll solution that forms part of the MYOB Advanced (Acumatica) platform. It can be operated as a standalone system. MYOB Advanced Payroll’s Employee Onboarding functionality is included as part of its Employee Self-Service (ESS) module. ESS is a solution that streamlines employee information and leaves management. Employee Onboarding is a new, dedicated onboarding solution built as part of the continued improvements for MYOB Advanced Payroll. All information is collected from the new starter directly into MYOB Advanced Payroll. The Employee Onboarding functionality prevents employers from defaulting new starters into the employer super fund. It is mandatory for new employees to choose a new fund or select their existing fund. Once onboarded, Employee Self-Service (ESS) relieves the burden on administration teams to chase team members for leave requests and managers for approvals.

MYOB Advanced Workforce Management

MYOB Advanced Workforce Management is an additional module that extends the functionality of MYOB Advanced Payroll. The two systems are integrated and form one powerful solution that you can use to manage your entire team. MYOB Advanced Workforce Management has additional features to support:

• Dedicated and customisable onboarding workflows,
• Automated rostering based on availabilities, qualifications, and award restrictions,
• Shift swapping between employees,
• Leave management and approval, with projected leave balances visible for both the employee and approver,
• Clock-in and clock-out functionality with integration to timesheets and payroll,
• Dashboard reporting for improved visibility and decision-making.

If you use both MYOB Advanced Workforce Management and MYOB Advanced Payroll, then you only need the onboarding functionality from one of these systems. Employee Onboarding is available as part of the Employee Self-Service module in MYOB Advanced Payroll for organisations that do not require MYOB Advanced Workforce Management.

Other benefits of powerful cloud payroll solutions

MYOB Advanced Payroll has all the powerful payroll functionality you would expect in an Enterprise-level system. It is built to support the payroll needs of larger, more complex organisations. MYOB Advanced Payroll has an online tax engine, so you will always have the correct tax thresholds and rates updated in your system. This is the power of a cloud-based application – the updates happen in the background. Every pay is always using the correct information – no more manual compliance updates.

MYOB Advanced Payroll functionality is designed to remove the stress from your pay run. It automatically collects as much information as possible and gives you the power to find and correct mistakes before generating banking files. Other important features are:

• Allowing for multiple employee pay groups across several pay frequencies,
• Powerful configuration options that cater to many different employee scenarios,
• Single Touch Payroll is enabled to automatically update the ATO,
• Advanced payroll software reporting, transaction history and audit tracking, and
• End of Year Payroll functions to streamline your end-of-year processes.

MYOB Advanced Workforce Management also automates rostering and timesheets and has clock-in and clock-out functionality with a dedicated MYOB Advanced Workforce Management application to give your team the ability to manage everything from any location. It automatically updates group awards to maintain compliance and ensure your staff are paid correctly.

Take the next steps to the cloud.

On-premise payroll systems like MYOB Exo Employer Services are being quickly outpaced by the functionality and usability of cloud-based systems. MYOB Exo Employer Services has now been replaced with the new generation cloud solution: MYOB Advanced Payroll. Now more than ever, it is the right time to move your payroll to the cloud.

The Kilimanjaro Consulting team are experts in configuring MYOB Advanced Payroll and MYOB Advanced Workforce Management to meet your complex requirements. We have the largest, most experienced team of MYOB Advanced consultants across Australia and New Zealand, with a history of successful MYOB Advanced Payroll and MYOB Advanced Workforce Management implementations. We can guide you through the MYOB Exo Employer Services End-of-Life process and ensure a smooth transition to your next payroll system.

To explore MYOB Advanced Payroll or MYOB Advanced Workforce Management and decide if it is right for your organisation, contact an expert. Email sales@kilimanjaro-consulting.com or call 1300 857 464 (AU) or 0800 436 774 (NZ).