Onboarding can seem like a boring, need to go through the motions type task when bringing on new hires, but overlooking one of the first instructive experiences can detract from the goal of creating successful new employees. The lack of creativity in onboarding, particularly for remote teams, isn’t helping any of the participants in feeling more excited. Paper manuals feel distant and easy to skim through, and the lack of role-appropriate tasks and information can make it easy to glaze more. Revamping your onboarding process with a human-centered design approach with creating more opportunities for interaction, for games and creativity, and will take advantage of this new energy on your team to keep progress high. Let’s walk through creative ideas for energizing your program and bring intentionality to the revamping progress.
Human-Centered Design
From doors to phone apps, we’ve all had moments where we think to ourselves, “Who designed this? Why didn’t they think of this?”. Those are examples where user feedback didn’t make it into the final product design. Human-centered design is an approach to problem-solving that integrates the human perspective into all aspects of the design and development process. Onboarding is a great example of a process that should be revisited often, and include feedback from those who have gone through the practice. Use previous feedback to guide brainstorming sessions for revamping processes. Test out new ideas and solicit more feedback. This process can be used to continually improve your onboarding process and meet the needs of new hires. Guidance on these processes, especially in the beginning, is super important for
Pre-Boarding
It’s important to welcome new hires right away and fold them into your culture. In work environments, water cooler and lunch break chatter probably happen differently and introducing them to your team’s culture before onboarding can get them excited and motivated for day one. For remote teams, sending a welcome card or package with branded gear or supplies they need to start strong, can be an additional personal touch that lets them know you’re happy to have them on board and looking forward to working with them.
Gamifying
Everyone loves a good challenge, and games are fun and interactive ways to get people truly engaged. Game learning is the process of taking existing information from a company and creating a narrative-driven game to facilitate greater engagement between the learner and the content. Indusgeeks offers customizable immersive products that takes employees through their new work environment and various scenarios they may encounter. Mlevel is a microlearning gamification company that allows for customization and rapid deployment of information to your employees. They’re heavily driven by analytics and provide insights to help you know where your employees could use additional training and information. Gamification approaches claim to be more efficient, cheaper and have greater information retention among their users due to the natural immersive nature.
The Buddy System
Managers are often thought of as an employee’s first resource and mentor but partnering a new hire with a specific mentor outside of their department can lead to quicker integration. Having someone who isn’t their boss to turn to can be helpful for the new employee to get their footing and ask questions they might feel more comfortable asking otherwise. This person can also be their guide to all-things company culture and include plans for team introductions, company events, and team debriefs to get more familiar with company specifics.
Setting goals
Your company has goals, as do your employees. Often, it’s difficult to fully verbalize our own goals and to dive deeper, beyond the interview answer, into how they relate to the company’s goals. Setting aside time to be intentional on what their mission, values and desired outcomes of their role is an important benchmarking activity during onboarding. It can (and probably should) remain private, but it should be something employees are encouraged to revisit. For more outward-facing businesses, branding games or quizzes can be used to teach new hires about the corporate brand and how their own personal brand fits within that. It’s a great way to make the onboarding process more interactive and get new hires excited about their new role within the company.
Utilizing Digital Tools
Your employees will need to learn a lot during onboarding, but all of their questions aren’t answered, and their learning doesn’t stop once the job starts. Learning management tools and microlearning systems can help organize onboarding information that allows employees to refer back to as needed and can organize future training or ongoing improvement modules to help keep professional development a continuous part of your company’s culture. Learning management tools like Docebo and Talent LMS or microlearning systems like Grovo or HandyTrain all have similar approaches to organizing your learning resources. Docebo focuses on onboarding, and training partners and customers with easy to use coaching features. Talent LMS is comprised of multiple building blocks that allow you to adapt materials to different audiences and use old presentations as templates for new modules. Grovo specializes in single-concept learning requirements within your company to disseminate information quickly and clearly. HandyTrain is best used on a phone so that it’s easy to refer to and can be completed while on the go, which can be a great option for pre-boarding activities or new learning opportunities for existing employees.
Identifying your company’s needs for onboarding, continuing education programs, collaboration with partners or informing new customers will help narrow down which LMS system is best for you. If you’re looking for assistance in reevaluating your onboarding process, and including learning management tools into your company, Achurch Consulting will work with you to streamline the process and make onboarding more effective.