Why invest in the automatization and faster onboarding process?

As we talked about in our last blog, developer experience (DX) is one of the most important things in today’s IT world and if you care about your developers and want to keep them in your company, you should invest in DX. So, why invest in the automatization and faster onboarding process? Let’s talk about that part of the developer experience.

“Companies with strong onboarding processes have significantly better employees, retention, productivity levels, and overall satisfaction.” [1] That is why the onboarding process should be as automated as much as possible. A quick and high-quality onboarding process facilitates HR to onboard new employees, but also welcome your new employee in the best possible way.  “Automating onboarding tasks results in 18 % greater achievement of the employee’s first performance goals.” [1]

Repeated tasks are tiresome for every developer. When a developer comes to a new company, he is going through the onboarding process like every new employee. “Gallup, global analytics and advice firm, reports that only 12 % of employees feel their company does a good job onboarding new team members, leaving 88 % of workers with lackluster onboarding experiences.” That can be very demotivating for them and make developers feel insecure about their new roles. It can also make them question their decision to come to your company and encourage them to start looking at the other job opportunities. Gallup also reported that employees who have good onboarding experience are almost three times as likely to feel prepared and supported in their new roles. [2]

Everything is new to them, and they will be more relaxed if they can start coding right away because in that way they will contribute to their new team and already feel like a part of the “family”. That should increase the chances for their happiness when they see that they are not blocked in any kind of way.

It would be good for developers to have a safe environment that can make them feel very welcome, even before they start working.

A technical leader and Socio-Technical Architect, Nick Tune wrote about his developer experience, which was as he says, “energizing and motivating”. He said that his CTO advocated pushing code to production on the developer’s first day, which implied having access to all the tools they needed and doing that from their machine [3]. To enable your developer possibility to start working, you must ensure them quick access to certain resources. They can be disappointed in your onboarding process or any process that requires waiting for the access to systems they need.

If you ensure them fast granting of access to necessary resources, that will make them satisfied because as soon as they get all permission to the target system they will use, the sooner they will onboard and meet their projects and tasks, but also start implementing new functionalities. According to Forbes, developers should be empowered through automation and that will free up their time and enable them to focus on the more important and complex tasks they are facing [4].

Automatization of every possible process could be a great advantage for the company and save time. The company could benefit from fast onboarding in a few clicks. Companies that aim to provide the best developer experience will get satisfied developers who are necessary to create exceptional software. If you want improvement for your company and team culture, read more about our team guardian kustodian_.