For an Employer of Record (EOR) company like Omnipresent, onboarding is a crucial part of the daily process. Omnipresent employs people on behalf of other countries and needs to conduct its due diligence to properly employ individuals according to the legal requirements of each country. Onboarding itself is challenging to get right, and it becomes even more difficult when it needs to be dynamic and varies across countries, sometimes states, and user types.For EOR, there are hundreds of combinations of possible onboarding paths that can be taken to effectively onboard an employee in a specific country. In this case study, I will explain how I helped the onboarding team reduce the average onboarding time from 2 weeks to less than 7 days.

We encountered issues with lengthy and inefficient onboarding times as our client employee numbers began to increase. Clients struggled to monitor the progress of an employee's onboarding, and employees themselves often lacked complete information on what to provide, when to provide it, and how to provide it. Our customer success team, payroll team, and benefits team also faced difficulties in keeping track of the onboarding process for all employees, resulting in important onboarding steps being overlooked. This caused significant problems for both clients and employees and even led to financial losses for the company.

We swiftly hypothesized that our company lacked comprehensive information on the various scenarios that onboarding could encompass in different countries.

I worked as the sole product designer in the onboarding team, collaborating with 1 product manager (PM), 4 engineers, 1 quality engineer, and multiple internal stakeholders. These stakeholders included customer success managers, payroll managers, benefits specialists, and legal experts.My responsibilities involved identifying issues in collaboration with the PM, mapping out the current and future state, conducting ideation sessions with stakeholders, and determining the overall design direction of the project.

We promptly gathered initial backend data, which revealed that the average time required to onboard an employee on EOR behalf of a client exceeded two weeks. This time frame encompassed the period from when a client notified us of a new employee to the point when contracts were signed. Realistically, even after the initial onboarding, there were typically additional processes that needed to be completed, such as payroll onboarding and benefits registration. In extreme cases, this could extend the onboarding process to as long as a month.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of the current onboarding process, we brought together all internal stakeholders and conducted several service design sessions. These sessions were facilitated by myself, the PM, and another UX researcher, with the goal of documenting and mapping the stages, steps, touch points, challenges, and policies involved in a country-agnostic onboarding flow. We examined the entire journey, starting from when the client provides employee details to the point where the employee is fully onboarded.The outcomes of these service design mapping sessions were documented using TheyDo.

This was to set a baseline of what onboarding generally look like for all countries. We still needed to dig deeper on a country specific level to fully understand the differences for each country.

Based on the data obtained from the backend, we identified Spain as the country with the highest volume of employee onboardings and challenging onboarding processes. Therefore, we chose to begin our in-depth analysis from that specific country.My PM and I conducted another session involving multiple stakeholders to further enhance the previous journey map. During this session, we focused on gathering more detailed country-specific information pertaining to Spain. Additionally, we diligently documented the pain points experienced at each stage and identified potential opportunities for improvement.

To proceed with the process, I organised and led an ideation workshop involving 4 CSC (Customer Success Managers), 1 engineer, and my PM. The objective of the workshop was to brainstorm and explore ways to leverage the identified opportunities and provide solutions.

The session began by requesting each stakeholder to document the pain points and potential benefits of the current onboarding process on Miro, an online collaborative platform. Each stakeholder was given a few minutes to share their thoughts and insights.

After documenting the pain points raised in the session, I proceeded to cluster them based on common themes. From these clusters, I formulated "How Might Wes" (HMWs), which are statements that frame potential solutions to address the identified pains.Next, I conducted a voting round to prioritize the HMWs. The stakeholders participated in the voting process, and we collectively selected the top two HMWs to focus our ideation efforts on.
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I facilitated the next round, which involved all participants documenting their HMW responses on Miro and discussing them for a few minutes. Once everyone had the opportunity to share their ideas, I proceeded to cluster these ideas into themes.After clustering the ideas, we conducted a vote to determine the top choices. The team reached a consensus on the three ideas that received the highest number of votes, and it was agreed upon that these ideas would be the focus of our collective work.

After the session, my PM, engineer, and I proceeded to categorize each idea on an impact and effort quadrant. This categorization helped us determine which idea to prioritize and work on first.

I began exploring design solutions based on these top ideas and generated some potential solutions. Here are the proposed solutions:
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Detailed employee onboarding tracker for clients - This solution has a medium effort requirement but is expected to have a low impact.

Express onboarding for employees - This solution requires a significant effort but is anticipated to have a high impact.

Help videos on onboarding pages - This solution is considered an easy win.

To encompass these solutions, I consolidated them under an overarching project named "Reimagining Onboarding," which encompasses the complete redesign of the onboarding flow from start to finish.

Some onboarding screen showing the new flow for onboarding in Spain

I developed a prototype for the express onboarding solution and created tasks for usability sessions. I conducted usability sessions with 5 employees in Spain, who were also Omnipresent employees that had previously gone through the onboarding process in Spain. This made it convenient to schedule sessions with them.

One of the prototypes that was used for usability testing

The usability results revealed that, in comparison to the previous experience, it was now easier for employees to understand what information needed to be submitted, when it should be submitted, and how to submit it. The overall feedback received was positive, which prompted me to refine the designs based on the feedback received.

Over the course of 3 months, we dedicated our efforts to ensuring that all the necessary information was stored on the backend system. This was crucial in order to provide a dynamic onboarding experience for both clients and employees.

During the ideation phase, we explored various design concepts and soon recognized the challenge of creating a user interface (UI) that could accommodate dynamic information collection based on multiple parameters such as the country of work.

Rather than having all the information presented in a single lengthy form, we opted for a progressive disclosure form system. This approach involved organizing information thematically across separate pages, such as banking information, personal information, contract information, and so on. By structuring the onboarding process in this way, it became more manageable to customize the content displayed on each page based on the specific requirements of each country.

Thanks to these improvements, the platform played a significant role in streamlining the onboarding process. As a result, the average onboarding time in Spain was reduced from over 2 weeks to just under 7 days.

By displaying all onboarding steps and substeps on the platform and allowing them to be checked off as completed, it became nearly impossible to overlook any steps. Additionally, we successfully transitioned from capturing information through email to directly capturing benefits information on the platform. This not only addressed issues related to information fragmentation but also enhanced the overall onboarding experience.

This project served as a benchmark for our team in terms of service design. It emphasized the significance of comprehensively understanding, documenting, and analyzing the current state of affairs with the active involvement of all stakeholders. This approach facilitates a smoother transition into the desired future state.