How to automate & streamline onboarding email signatures for new employees
12 September 2024
Attracting and acquiring the best talent is hard in a competitive jobs market. Organizations must also get the best out of their hires, helping them develop new skills and retaining them long term.
As a consequence, a lot of focus is now placed on the employee onboarding process, a critical part of any HR and talent management strategy. In this post, we’ll explore the role of IT in employee onboarding and how email signature software can support this process.
Why new employee onboarding can be challenging for IT
Even though employee onboarding processes are highly repeatable and predictable, they add significant workload onto already overstretched IT departments.
Ultimately, IT professionals need employee onboarding to be as automated as possible to alleviate this pressure .
The 80/20 rule of IT operations vs. IT innovations
A good framework for the impact of employee onboarding on IT departments is a variation of the Pareto principle (or ‘80/20 rule’). Most IT departments consume 75-80% of their resources on operational duties that ensure users are supported and IT systems function as expected. This leaves less than 20-25% to be spent on unlocking new IT innovations to boost business efficiencies and automate manual workflows.
Why email signatures are important to the onboarding process
A key part of the employee onboarding process is when new starters are given an employee identity. The IT department plays a leading role in making this happen, creating a new email account to use as their ID for access to applications and services, and to communicate both internally and externally with stakeholders.
Employee onboarding email signatures matter because they extend this identity beyond the domain and IP address of the individual.
At a basic level, email signatures communicate accurate personal information in the form of:
Full name
Job title and team
Contact information, e.g. phone number, email address
But these are the basics. Email signatures can go far beyond personal information to include:
Company branding, colors, and logos
Marketing banners and calls-to-action
Social media and feedback icons
Appointment scheduling links
Assigning email signatures to each new starter is an important technical process that IT must undertake as part of a standard onboarding process.
Managing new employee onboarding email signatures
Personal information is unique to each employee, and when it’s put on an email signature, it shapes how that person is perceived. Getting this right in the onboarding process is important, but so is ensuring consistency in how employees appear over email. Chaotic and inconsistent email signatures can reflect an organization as such.
And missing out certain elements means missed opportunities to share information, engage audiences, reinforce the brand, and promote marketing messages.
Here are six points to consider when managing email signatures for new employees:
1. Data accuracy
Email signatures need to have accurate information. Contact details should exactly match the records in HR systems and user directories like Active Directory and Google Directory.
2. Format and design
There are several ways to design email signatures. You can choose a simple plain text template or go for a more advanced design using HTML images. Don't forget to also include a suitable legal disclaimer.
3. Ownership
Email signatures are usually managed by the IT team during onboarding. However, the marketing department should also be involved since email signatures enhance the brand experience and can include key marketing messages. It's essential to plan this ahead, particularly if updates to email signatures are needed.
4. Various templates
Using one template for all employees restricts email signature options. Introducing various email signature templates across the organization can create new opportunities for different departments.
5. User involvement
Letting users handle their own email signatures is risky, especially for new employees unfamiliar with your company brand. It's important to ensure the correct contact data is used and can be updated as needed.
Some companies provide employees with a signature template and instructions. But what if they forget to include a crucial legal disclaimer or mess up the design, making it look inconsistent and unprofessional?
6. Time and effort
The deeper you get into email signature management, the more it strains IT resources. IT staff might have to set up email signatures manually on each employee's device. They could write HTML code to update all signatures at once, but managing numerous changes is challenging.
These points are all important when setting up email signatures for any employee, but particularly new ones being onboarded. This is because onboarding needs to happen within a defined period, putting pressure on IT to get the work done quickly and accurately.
Therefore, it makes sense to make email signature management an easily repeatable process that works as part of new employee onboarding.
Using email signature software to automate part of the onboarding process
Managing email signatures as part of new employee onboarding can be frustrating and time-consuming. Scale that up across tens or hundreds of new starters per year and it’s a recipe for IT workplace stress, inefficiency, and a poor use of resources.
Exclaimer's email signature management solution simplifies digital onboarding, making it faster and more efficient. Here's how it helps:
Automated deployment: Easily launch email signatures to all employees with centralized management. No more manual configurations or coding.
Consistent branding: Ensure all email signatures follow your company's branding guidelines, including logos, colors, and marketing messages.
Accurate user information: Email signature details are pulled directly from HR systems and user directories to guarantee accuracy.
Customizable templates: Choose from a variety of templates for different departments to meet their unique needs.
User-friendly implementation: Employees can easily apply email signature templates themselves, reducing the burden on IT resources.
Streamlined process: Simplify and repeat the email signature management process with ease during each new employee onboarding period.
Simplified design: Drag and drop colors, images, and data elements with instant resizing and previewing.
Consistency across devices: Ensure all messages, even those from mobile devices, have uniform signatures.
Smart grouping: Automatically group employees by department and fill in contact details using your user directory.
The final word
IT is always involved when it comes to employee onboarding. This is primarily because each new employee becomes a new IT user with their own set of associated software and hardware requirements. And a key part of this process is assigning them a company email signature.
However, email signature management at the best of times is time-consuming and prone to error. With email signature software from Exclaimer, this task can be automated and managed in a much smoother way. This reduces the strain on IT teams, speeding up the process of securely onboarding new employees.
Get yourself a free trial or online demo to get complete control of your email signature management today.
