Does Your Onboarding Experience Still Work, Post-Covid?

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How are You Onboarding (or Re-boarding) Post-Covid?

One of the challenges of having so many people working virtually is creating and keeping a vibrant culture that helps everyone feel connected and driven by a shared purpose.

Among the earliest experiences our people have with the culture is during on-boarding.  Working in the COVD and post-COVID environment, onboarding needs to be different.  By assessing what works and what doesn’t in your onboarding, you can design an experience that’s adapted to a virtual environment and reinforces culture and connections.

Late last year – pre-pandemic – we helped a client design an onboarding process.  The design focused on making the process a more powerful tool for creating culture in a dispersed team that had grown 200% in the previous 18 months. While few companies are experiencing that kind of growth now, the lessons are relevant in today’s environment, too.

This biotech’s culture was a key differentiator for them in terms of how they achieved results and how they attracted high-caliber talent in the market.  Facing a period of unprecedented growth with geographically dispersed offices and remote employees, they were seeing a higher attrition rate, especially among employees who had been with the company for a short period of time.  They were concerned that they were not creating an effective new-hire experience. After creating a highly experiential new-hire orientation program, our client believed there was still something missing for their recently added team members — the onboarding experience onto the new hire’s team.

The first phase of our work together was to assess:
  • how onboarding was approached across the various functions/departments within the company
  • the perception of how effective onboarding was
  • how well it aligned with their corporate onboarding and overall talent strategy.
We conducted interviews with functional leaders and focus groups with recently hired team members. Our findings indicated:
  • A much more consistent and robust functional onboarding experience was needed
  • The process needed to be scalable and adaptable
  • We needed to develop resources that could be accessed by a dispersed workforce during onboarding and beyond.

During phase two, the client wanted to introduce gamification technology to deliver onboarding, manager support, and other HR practices. Our challenge was to create a functional onboarding design that worked within this platform. We knew this approach had to be highly interactive, feel personal, and provide information in bite-sized chunks across multiple formats.

The design of the functional onboarding included:

  • Video welcomes received prior to start dates
  • Visual tours of departments and office spaces
  • Videos describing each department’s purpose and responsibilities
  • A manager toolkit to lead conversations with new team member within 2-3 days of start and at Day 14.
  • Day 14 online check-in for the team member to complete
  • Gamified introduction to the company culture and how it looks in our department
Through this process, we were able to design a solution that would: 
  • Create a unique and engaging new-hire experience that more effectively integrates new hires into the culture and their specific teams.
  • Utilize technology to enhance the onboarding experience for all team members – HQ-based, field-based and remote
  • Allow for adaptability and scalability as changes impact the organization
Covid19 has changed the business reality of virtually every organization.  A winning culture attracts and integrates top talent and, post-Covid, that requires a new onboarding process that leverages technology while creating a highly personalized connection to the organization.

 

Top HR and Talent organizations, not only recognize the need for a vibrant new onboarding process, they are spending the time to assess and design a powerful experience for all internal clients.