Audit of Shared Services Canada Personnel Onboarding and Offboarding Processes: At a glance

Overall message

Shared Services Canada (SSC) is committed to delivering reliable and secure technology services to the Government of Canada. Implementing robust onboarding procedures to facilitate seamless employee integration and improve retention are essential. Well-managed offboarding processes are equally important to ensure a smooth transition when employees leave the organization, to reallocate resources, and to maintain a skillful and experienced workforce.

Given the high-demand labour market, ineffective onboarding and offboarding processes could impair SSC’s ability to achieve its Information Technology (IT) initiatives, projects, and program objectives and ultimately, its mission.

Read the full Audit of Shared Services Canada Personnel Onboarding and Offboarding Processes

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Context

What are Onboarding and Offboarding?

Onboarding is a process that integrates new employees into the workplace during the first 6 to 12 months of employment and that helps them be productive and contributing members of the organization. Offboarding is the process of managing an employee’s departure from the organization after the work relationship ends (i.e., contract expiration, retirement, termination, or voluntary departure).

Why are they important?

The implementation of guidance, tools, and procedures to support management throughout the onboarding and offboarding processes is critical to achieving a productive workforce, a strong corporate culture, a desired retention rate, knowledge management, and continuity of operations.

In 2019, SSC’s Chief Information Officer launched the Onboarding and Offboarding Process Improvement Initiative to improve the effectiveness and timeliness of the onboarding and offboarding experience at SSC.

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Audit objective

The objective of this audit was to provide assurance that processes, including roles and responsibilities, guidance, and tools, were in place to effectively onboard and offboard SSC personnel in a timely manner.

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Findings

Onboarding and offboarding roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities for partners and stakeholders were not clearly defined, documented, and were ineffectively communicated.

At the departmental level, there were no controls or policies in place to ensure that SSC's culture, mission, vision, and mandate were conveyed, however, a program exists within the onboarding process to communicate this information.

The IT systems used to support both processes were operating in silos and the controls to support data integrity, accuracy, and consistency, or to ensure alignment with Treasury Board (TB) requirements as part of the offboarding process were insufficient and ineffective.

Some guidance, including procedures and tools, had been developed, but was not well communicated to stakeholders to enable effective implementation of the onboarding and offboarding processes.

Monitoring and reporting activities, including feedback mechanisms, were not in place to measure the effectiveness of onboarding and offboarding processes or to support continuous improvement.

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Highlights of recommendations

Management should ensure that roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities for all partners and stakeholders, including governance and oversight, and monitoring and reporting, for both onboarding and offboarding activities are clearly identified, documented, and communicated in 1 or more departmental-wide policy instrument(s).

IT systems should support the onboarding and offboarding processes and include controls to support data integrity, accuracy, and consistency. Connectivity and communication between the various systems used should be improved.

Management should develop and implement a communication plan to improve awareness of available guidance and procedures to all partners and stakeholders. Management should establish a monitoring and reporting structure with clear standards and key performance indicators to monitor the effectiveness of the processes and track compliance with TB requirements. Management should implement feedback mechanisms to support continuous improvement.