Using SharePoint, InfoPath Forms and Workflow to Automate Your Employee Onboarding Process

January, 2007

An Employee Onboarding System that makes use of SharePoint, InfoPath forms and workflow allows a company to fully automate this process, and in so doing, capture all the relevant information in a structured manner. This system, described in the paragraphs that follow, is based on a hypothetical company but can be 100% customized to meet the unique information and process needs of the company in question.

• The Hiring Manager accesses the Employee Onboarding System site on the SharePoint intranet and opens up the Employee Change Request Form. (see Figure 1) (This form could be used for new employees, existing employee changes, or termination.)

Figure 1 - Employee Change Request Form

• The Hiring Manager enters information on multiple tabs as follows:
• General employee information is entered on the first tab (employee name, title, department, supervisor, etc.).
• Facilities needs are entered on the next tab (building name/floor/area, office/cube, phone, computer specifications, etc.)
• System access requirements are entered on another tab (ID requirements for network login, email, vpn, intranet, CRM system, ERP system, etc.)
• Information that HR requires to set the employee up is captured on yet another tab on the form (Pay rate, start date, etc.)
• The form is then submitted for processing.
• The system has been preset with the names of the people in the company responsible for acting on the information captured in the form. For this example, the actors are as follows:
• Department VP (responsible for approving this instance of the new hire process and information contained in the form.
• Facilities Manager (responsible for the items on the facilities tab)
• IT Manager (responsible for the system access requirements)
• HR Manager (responsible for HR items)
• When the Hiring Manager submits the form, the system presents him with the default names for each of the actors referenced above (i.e., the Department VP, Facilities, Manager, etc.) (see Figure 2) The system allows the Hiring Manager to overwrite these people by selecting appropriate alternatives (i.e., if the HR Manager is on vacation, a substitute can be selected.)

Figure 2 - Workflow Actor/Approver Update Form

• Once the form is submitted and the actors identified, the Employee Onboarding System workflow is initiated.
• A task is created and assigned to the Department VP who receives an email notifying her of the task. The task itself contains the general employee information captured from the first form tab. The Department VP can either approve the task or reject it with comments.
• If the task is approved, the workflow spawns three new tasks in parallel. The Facilities Manager task contains the information needed for the Facilities Department to fulfill their responsibilities. When complete, the Facilities Manager marks the task as such.
• Similarly the IT Manager and HR Manager receive their tasks with embedded information. (see Figure 3)

Figure 3 - IT Manager Task for New Hire Setup

All three of these tasks are acted on in parallel. Only when all three tasks are marked as complete is the workflow itself completed and the company is now ready for the new hire to show up for work.

SharePoint, InfoPath forms and workflow can be combined in elegant ways to create valuable automation both for internal processes as well as customer facing processes. The example described above presents a basic employee onboarding process and can be extended to address many conceptually similar processes familiar to most companies.