The benefits of automation are well known to modern businesses. For decades, companies have found ways to turn slow, repetitive processes into efficient, self-executing systems. Which lets teams focus on impact, rather than repeating the same low-value tasks. 

Onboarding and offboarding are both high-value processes made up of low-impact touchpoints. Getting team members up to speed quickly really matters. How you create their email account or reset security permissions doesn’t.

Which is why automating these manual steps makes such a big difference. Automated onboarding and offboarding takes low-value work off your plate, and lets you focus on what is important. It also makes both processes faster, easier, and eliminates basic errors. 

In this article, we look at how automation can improve your onboarding and offboarding processes—particularly for IT operations. Then we meet two companies who successfully automated their own IT onboarding, and saw tangible benefits. 

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What are employee onboarding and offboarding processes?

Onboarding and offboarding are the practical, functional, and cultural processes associated with welcoming and farewelling company employees. Onboarding typically includes teaching new hires about the company culture, training in your specific ways of working, and giving them the hardware and software tools they need to execute. 

Offboarding is the change process at the end of an employee’s time with your company. This can include exit interviews, farewell celebrations, and regaining possession of company property like computers, phones, and access cards. 

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Key steps in IT onboarding

The IT onboarding process is often slower than you’d like. It involves numerous distinct steps, which can really add up if handled individually and manually. These include:

• Setting up user profiles and permissions
• Ordering new devices
• Configuring applications, software, and security updates on these devices
• Delivering devices to new employees
• Training employees on compliance, cybersecurity, and optimal use
• Monitoring device performance and troubleshooting issues

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IT is just one aspect of an employee’s onboarding, and can be taken for granted by hiring managers. Your goal is to make all of the above happen smoothly, quickly, and with no extra work for yourself or the new hire. 

For help, see our short checklist for efficient IT onboarding. 

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What IT offboarding involves

While the IT onboarding process may be neglected, offboarding is often overlooked altogether. Retrieving devices from departing employees is essential both for asset management and security. 

Key steps include: 

• Locking devices the moment employees no longer need them
• Wiping personal data or returning devices to factory settings
• Returning physical devices to the office or supplier
• Checking a device’s state for reuse
• Preparing devices to be redeployed

All of this adds up, and is always more complicated with remote or distributed teams. In a traditional office setting, it’s pretty simple to have an employee hand in their devices on their last day. It’s more challenging if that employee is in another city, state, or country. 

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Why automate employee onboarding and offboarding? 

In general, the best processes to automate involve a number of manual steps and little added value from having people handle each one.

Key benefits of automating your IT onboarding and offboarding include: 

• Time saved for IT teams and hiring managers, who no longer need to manually work through each of those steps we saw above. 
• Faster onboarding for new employees, who don’t need to wait for people to set up their profiles or order devices.
• Near-instant offboarding, because devices can be locked or wiped immediately with a simple click.
• Fewer errors, including skipped or forgotten steps, faulty devices, or losing track of devices when an employee leaves. 
• More consistent experiences, as every employee follows the same automated process at the beginning and end of employment. 

Overall, automation creates more streamlined and efficient internal processes. And for something as common and recurring as onboarding and offboarding, efficiency gains can really add up.

How modern SMBs automate onboarding and offboarding — and why it works

To illustrate with tangible examples, let’s take a look at two companies that prioritize automation in the onboarding and offboarding process. 

Like many growing companies, both faced real challenges in scaling IT operations. Even as modern tech companies, they had few resources specifically for IT operations. They needed to create efficient, easily-replicable processes to get new employees up and running, and to smoothly offboard team members at the end of their work. 

Best modern SMBs have understood that a great onboarding experience comes from the collaboration between HR and IT teams — and these two companies made that alignment a core part of their approach. As we’ll see, the secret to success lay in choosing the right tools and partners to take the weight off their very busy leaders.

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Faume: Near-instant IT operations for a distributed workforce 

Founded in 2020, Faume is a technical logistics solution that lets brands create resale services for their products. Faume works with world-famous logos like Hugo Boss, The Kooples, Aigle, and Bash to bring second lives to items and make consumer commerce more sustainable.

Faume’s 30-person team includes remote staff across France. CTO and Co-founder Jocelyn Kerbouc’h needed a simple way to deploy and manage devices for this distributed workforce ahead of scaling post-Series A.

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Before: False starts with IT providers

Faume initially leased computers in the hopes of getting additional support and a streamlined service. But this was far more expensive than the cost of buying—they were asked to pay up to €2,500 for a €1,200 computer. And worse, they still regularly encountered malfunctioning devices and frustrating errors. 

They pivoted to buying from Apple directly, tracking devices manually in a Notion doc. This was certainly more cost effective, but added more administrative effort to the onboarding process. 

As a co-founder wearing multiple hats, Jocelyn couldn’t afford this extra admin. Faume needed a more robust IT operations solution that could deliver devices at the right price, while also tracking their use and ensuring security. 

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Today: Centralized IT onboarding & offboarding

The big switch was finding an IT operations provider that lets Jocelyn order, configure, and deliver employee devices in a few clicks. Using Primo, Jocelyn sets password rules and updates, and pre-configures applications so that computers arrive ready to use. 

“Thanks to Primo, onboarding new employees now takes us half the time it used to,” says Jocelyn.

Faume has essentially automated the onboarding process, and offboarding is just as simple. When an employee leaves, Jocelyn can lock and wipe their computer remotely. Departing employees receive a shipping box and can easily return computers from anywhere. 

The result is a more efficient, secure IT environment for Faume. And Jocelyn can put all his energy into building and leading his business.

Read the full Faume story here.

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Dalma: Efficient operations with no IT team

Dalma is France’s fastest-growing pet health insurance company. Its tech-enabled platform already insures more than 40,000 European cats and dogs, with no signs of slowing down. 

Founded in 2021, the 70-strong team has grown quickly to deliver this popular and worthwhile service. While that’s good for business (and for our pets), it put pressure on former Head of People Claire Maarek. 

With IT onboarding just a small portion of her role, Claire didn’t have the time or technical expertise to build a comprehensive program from scratch.

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Before: Poor leasing experience

Like Faume, Dalma also tried leasing as a (theoretically) efficient way to manage IT operations. But Claire explains that the downsides were obvious right away. “Our leasing experience was disappointing, offering minimal service and reliability with poor customer support.”

It was a maddening mix of high prices and low-quality service. For an HR leader like Claire—not an IT pro by trade—this wasn’t a tenable situation. 

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Today: IT onboarding in seconds

Since switching to Primo, the results are night and day. IT onboarding takes mere seconds, and Dalma can secure hardware at competitive prices, configured and delivered for when the person arrives. All of this with no deep IT procurement knowledge or dedicated technical experts. 

Most importantly for HR professionals, Primo integrates with Payfit (alongside other HR platforms). Dalma adds a new employee in Payfit, and most of the process is automated from there. Devices arrive on time, whether new hires are in France or Germany. 

When an employee leaves, Primo makes it easy to retrieve or reassign devices elsewhere, or simply resell them. Which makes both onboarding and offboarding as easy as can be. 

Read the full Dalma story here.

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Make IT onboarding and offboarding a breeze

Both IT onboarding and offboarding are relatively simple processes, made difficult by manual steps and a need for technical expertise. Particularly for growing companies without IT teams or paid external consultants, key steps can fall through the cracks. 

That’s how you end up with security risks, sluggish processes, and frustrated team members — right when first impressions matter most.

The best way to streamline IT onboarding and offboarding is with one central solution. And as both Faume and Dalma showed, it’s even better when that solution integrates with your HR systems and company tools. This lets HR leaders and hiring managers—often “accidental IT managers”—keep control and ensure each step is completed efficiently. 

Primo provides exactly that: an all-in-one IT management system for faster onboarding and offboarding. You can easily automate virtually all of your IT operations, without paying huge fees to managed providers. 

‍See how Primo can improve your IT operations today.