HRIS: How to Better Manage Onboarding and Offboarding in 2025?

1. Onboarding: A Lever for Engagement and Performance

“How can we better manage onboarding and offboarding?” This question is crucial for all HRIS leaders, as a successful onboarding process directly impacts employee engagement and performance. A structured and digital approach to onboarding not only reduces the adaptation period for new hires but also improves retention.
A successful onboarding process relies on:

• Advance preparation: Identifying key stakeholders within the company to effectively distribute tasks and responsibilities, anticipating the employee’s arrival with the right tools and a clear plan.
• A combination of human and digital support: Balancing human interactions with technology to ensure a seamless experience.
• Stakeholder accountability: Training employees on tools to ensure quick adoption and encourage active participation in the onboarding journey.
• Rigorous post-integration follow-up: Conducting feedback interviews to detect disengagement signals and adjust actions accordingly.

2. Offboarding : A Strategic Phase for Employer Branding

While onboarding is well-structured in many companies, offboarding is often overlooked. However, a well-managed departure not only enhances the company’s reputation but also ensures operational continuity and maintains employee motivation.

Best practices for offboarding include:

• A clear and structured process to anticipate an employee’s departure and prevent abrupt transitions.
• Optimized administrative management: Automating exit procedures, retrieving company assets, and securely deactivating access.
• A smooth knowledge transfer to maintain continuity and avoid the loss of critical information.
• A positive employee experience until the end: Conducting exit interviews to gather feedback and improve future processes.

3. Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Many companies make mistakes in managing onboarding and offboarding, directly impacting their HR performance. The most common errors include:

• Lack of preparation: Welcoming an employee without providing the necessary access or a clear integration plan.
• Neglecting the human aspect: Automation is useful but should not replace essential human interaction needed to reassure and motivate employees.
• Failing to involve managers: Effective onboarding requires close collaboration between HR and managers.
• Ignoring employee feedback: Understanding pain points helps improve the experience for future hires and departures.

4. Why Adopt a Digital Tool for Onboarding & Offboarding?

One key takeaway from this masterclass was the need to streamline processes to reduce the HR team's workload while ensuring an optimal experience. Here’s why adopting a digital onboarding and offboarding tool is essential:

• To streamline processes & improve operational efficiency while reducing HR's administrative burden.
• To offer an optimal employee experience for both new hires (onboarding) and departing employees (offboarding).
• To empower various stakeholders (managers, IT, legal, mentors).
• To track and analyze journey effectiveness and improve HR practices

How to Structure These Processes Effectively?

• Digitize administrative tasks: Identify which tasks can be automated and which should remain human-driven.
• Centralize information: Ensure quick access to essential documents and data for every stage of the employee journey..
• Create alerts and notifications among stakeholders to ensure thorough follow-up.
• Hold managers and employees accountable by providing intuitive tools and better visibility into their roles.
• Encourage adoption of digital tools by focusing on usability and alignment with user needs.

5. How to Implement a Tool for Better Boarding Management?

Here is a five-step method to effectively deploy a boarding management tool:

• Convince your HR Director/Executive Committee: Demonstrate the tool's impact on HR productivity and the employee experience.
• Build your project team: Identify key stakeholders (HR, IT, managers) to align needs.
• Define your objectives: Clarify expectations regarding efficiency, user experience, and automation.
• Set selection criteria: Compare solutions based on their compatibility with existing processes.
• Deploy and measure success: Support teams, track KPIs, and adjust processes as needed.

The Equans Case

Equans France, a leader in multi-technical services, supports energy, digital, and industrial transitions with innovative solutions.
With 34,000 employees and approximately 6,000 hires per year, Equans needed to streamline and automate its onboarding and offboarding processes. Following Equans' acquisition by Bouygues, the company had to harmonize its HR practices and ensure a smooth employee experience.

"In this acquisition context, the goal was to bring teams together."
“We needed to align our practices and processes, particularly in onboarding.” - Valéry Fournel, Deputy HR Director for HRIS & Innovation, Equans.

Workelo enabled Equans to structure its processes with centralized tracking, automated reminders, and a personalized experience for each employee.

A Structured and Automated Onboarding Process

Workelo allowed Equans to optimize its onboarding with centralized tracking, automated reminders, and personalized experiences. Key features:

• Synchronization with ATS and existing interfaces
• Automatic collection of administrative information with integrated reminders
• Task automation to reduce cognitive load (150 tasks per onboarding on average)

Thus, each employee is supported from contract signing to the end of their probation period, with a digital welcome guide, regular communications, and an interactive training path.

Manager Involvement: A Key Lever

To ensure manager engagement, Workelo provides visibility into onboarding progress and structures their role at each stage. Manager involvement is reinforced from the project phase, working in tandem with HR.
With this approach, Equans improved onboarding efficiency and standardization while simplifying HR and managerial tasks.

6. Essential KPIs to Measure Onboarding and Offboarding Impact

It is important to note that these KPIs are not exhaustive. Companies can leverage and analyze various indicators to refine their onboarding and offboarding strategy based on their specific goals.
Effective process management relies on tracking key indicators. Here are the KPIs identified during the masterclass:

• New employee retention rate: Measures onboarding effectiveness and its impact on average tenure.
• Time to proficiency: Assesses how long it takes for new hires to become fully operational.
• Productivity and engagement: Analyzes employee involvement through feedback and satisfaction surveys.
• Equipment and access provisioning time: Measures the efficiency of IT and administrative processes.
• Departing employee satisfaction rate: Evaluates offboarding quality and its impact on employer branding.

Conclusion

Onboarding and offboarding are two sides of the same challenge: providing employees with a seamless and engaging experience from entry to exit. HRIS leaders play a crucial role in structuring these processes by leveraging best practices and the right tools. By adopting a more proactive and digitalized approach, companies can enhance employer branding, optimize retention rates, and ensure better organizational efficiency.
To explore more, check out this article from "La Super Agence"
This masterclass highlighted the importance of structured processes, stakeholder accountability, and KPI tracking for a modern and effective HR management strategy in 2025.