Human Resources (HR) has been busy working on several ways to improve the experience for new employees as they begin their jobs at Illinois State.

Last year, HR staff spent time mapping the “onboarding” process and held focus groups to find out what their customers valued and expected from Human Resources. HR created a plan for change and began implementing those changes earlier this year.

Some of these changes include the Civil Service and Academic Employment areas, for which HR will schedule personal meetings with new hires to complete all necessary paperwork prior to their start dates to ensure employees are fully provisioned on their start date. These personal meetings allow new employees to meet HR staff and provide HR staff an opportunity to provide exceptional customer service to new employees based on Human Resources’ customer service priorities.

HR has also been working with Administrative Technologies to reduce the time it takes to get access to email and IT resources to within 24 hours of new hires being entered to iPeople. The Benefits staff is also contacting new employees after they complete new hire paperwork to answer any benefits-related questions and to prepare them for New Employee Orientation.

HR has once again partnered with Parking Services and Facilities Management so that new employees may obtain their keys and parking permits on or before their first day of work. HR also added training on iPeople self-service tools at orientation, so new hires are aware of what iPeople is and how to report their time.

After New Employee Orientation, the employment consultants are following up with supervisors to solicit feedback regarding the onboarding process and to confirm the new employee was fully provisioned on their first day of work.

HR has worked hard to develop a process that can better serve our internal customers and new employees during their first experience at Illinois State.