The New Onboarding System shows that innovation need not always require the creation or purchase of a new system.
CE awarding the Undaunted Award to the New Onboarding System team. (Photo: HTX)
Innovative solutions need not always require the creation or purchase of a new system. Sometimes, the best solution comes from something we already have, and innovation comes from finding a new way to use it to solve a problem.
This was exemplified by the New Onboarding System team that won the eXemplary Innovator (Team) Award at the HTX Awards 2023 as well as an Undaunted Award at the HTX Convention’s Pitch Day event.
This team, led by Constance Ngiam, Senior Manager (Policies, Corporate Services), consists of members from three divisions, Corporate & Finance (C&F), Ops System, and Human Resource (HR): Ariel Chua, Senior Manager (Policies, Corporate Services); Tan Sok Teng, Head (Admin Services); Teo Lizhu, Head (Facilities Management); Kenneth Chin, Lead Engineer (Desktop Services); Joanne Leong, Head (HR Business Partnership); Zarel Aw, Manager (HR Business Partnership); Sim Huishan, Manager (HR Business Partnership); and Felicia Leong, Senior Executive (HR Business Partnership).
The New Onboarding System team. (Photo: HTX/Constance Ngiam)
When new hires join HTX, three divisions – C&F, Ops System, and HR – are involved in ensuring that they are properly equipped with their new staff passes, email accounts, laptops, and so on.
Prior to the New Onboarding System, these tasks were coordinated among the three divisions through separate streams of communication. As there was no single dashboard that could be referred to, the officers responsible for each task had to search their emails and notifications to locate the onboarding requests. The officers likewise maintained their own tracking lists of the onboarding status of the new hires.
While the old process worked, collating the separate streams of information was challenging, and it was difficult for the divisions to generate statistics as these separate streams of data were not consolidated.
The New Onboarding System team initially explored purchasing or building a new onboarding system, but they quickly realised that Microsoft 365’s Lists application (MS Lists), an application that is already available to HTX, could be used to streamline the existing onboarding processes.
After refining the system requirements, they were able to merge the previously separate workflows on MS Lists. They also built a custom dashboard which allowed the team to take on new onboarding requests and automatically generate notifications and prompts for the required tasks.
Unlike the previous process which required the onboarding team members to check their separate tracking lists, the onboarding status of the new hires can now be quickly viewed on the MS Lists dashboard.
Using MS Lists to onboard HTX’s new hires remains an ongoing initiative. The team hopes that their success can inspire Xponents to take stock of the tools that they have and consider whether they can be developed into innovative solutions.