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𧥠THE tool you need to nail your onboarding
#15. ...and keep it running smoothly into the future
Jill Felska
October 26, 2023 âą Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
Hello and Happy Thursday!
Did you know that only 12% of U.S. employees believe the company they work for has a satisfactory onboarding process? Itâs true!
I donât know about you, but I find that downright frightening!
Even spookier? Designing people experiences in a vacuum. đ±đ»
Seriously though, there is so much to be said for including perspective, experience, and wisdom from other folks (and other teams) who shape your companyâs workplace experience. For starters, itâs great to have some help.
Even more important, though, is the impact bringing in more voices has on the final product. Including insights and support from others across the organization ensures your new employeeâs onboarding wonât end after their interactions with HR, but instead will extend fully through their first 90-days. Remember, those first 90-days are when an employee decides if they made the right choice in joining the company. So yeah, theyâre crucial.
Today weâre exploring how leveraging collaborative design in your onboarding process sets new hires, the people ops team, hiring managers, and everyone else up for success
.Yours in trick and treat,
Jill
P.S. Everything is hard right now. And you're likely holding space for many emotions and opinions within the workplace. Sending a gentle reminder to prioritize getting the support you need, in whatever form that takes.
Reflect On This
Consider the current state of your new employee onboarding program:
â What individuals or teams largely shaped the design of the experience?
â Are you confident that other team or department leaders understand what performance, communication, cultural, and behavioral expectations are being set in a new employeeâs welcome?
â If you were given full support to make 3 high-impact changes to your onboarding, would you know where to start?
The case for auditing your onboarding design
If you were here for our last newsletter you may remember this excerpt:â...while pulling [a stellar onboarding experience] off is indeed a team effort, you absolutely want one personâŠat the helm. The best onboardings function like an orchestra: lots of different parts, playing together at the direction of a single conductorâŠâ
I want to spend some time on what that means, and why itâs so important. Because while todayâs focus is all about #onboardingoctober, thereâs a central learning here that applies to all your People Ops programming:
When you leverage the right balance of collaboration and ownership, you can create thoughtful, well-oiled programs that are clear, delightful, authentic to your companyâs culture - and are meaningful for any teammate, at any level, on any team to experience.
In a stellar onboarding, your new teammate engages with and explores all of the factors of what their employee experience will ultimately entail. If youâre a People or HR professional, you likely shape, influence, or even facilitate that full-scale employee experience at your company, but you arenât the only proxy for it.
An employeeâs direct manager, their teammates, their work, the tools they use, the skills they hone, their perception of company leadership, their experience of the brand, their total compensation and benefits, their work life balance or integration - all these things and more contribute to how they experience what it is like to work where they work.
No one individual can build an onboarding program that sets fair and accurate expectations of that experience in a vacuum. After all, no one person should be the foremost expert on every People and HR function... and every functionâs operations, and each individualâs goals and development, and leadership and brand reputation, and front-line needs for every department, and the ins and outs of the business itself, and then some.
Iâm exhausted just thinking about it!
Which is why itâs crucial that those who shape your companyâs culture and employee experience also shape your onboarding program! Department heads, IT, your company leadership, benefits and rewards, cultural heavy-hitters, DEIB leaders, Comms and PR, HRBPs, and other new employees can and should help shape what your onboarding delivers, and how (and whether) it sets accurate expectations for the employee experience.
So how do you ensure an authentic onboarding without wrangling half your company every time someone accepts an offer?
When your company is building (or refreshing) your new employee onboarding, have a solid think on who best represents which facets of the employee experience. Whoâs your companyâs foremost expert on global benefits? Whoâs had a front row seat to the evolution of your culture? Who knows the founding story inside and out? Who can navigate your knowledge bases or internal wikis like an expert wayfinder?
Bring each of them in for a peek behind the curtain of your onboarding process, or of proposed changes to it. Solicit feedback on process design, content, cross-team collaboration, training and development design. Let hiring managers weigh in on how past hires have (or havenât) ramped successfully, or share their own perspective on how well they can impact a positive welcome.
Think of employee onboarding as your companyâs Welcome Global Summit. Every ânation,â or aspect of the employee experience, ought to be duly represented. This representation can be experienced in person (like via a synchronous welcome session), by participation (like via a new teammateâs opportunity to engage with a program itself as they would in a benefits enrollment), or by proxy (like via content, delivered by the People team, to help orient a new teammate). But no matter how you ultimately choose to represent each aspect of the experience, make sure you involve the right delegates to shape the welcome itself.
If youâre truly unsure of where to start, I have just the tool for you, whether youâre thrilled with the current state of your onboarding, you know it could use a dust and polish, or youâre dreading the thought of building from the ground up. Keep reading for exactly what you need to audit your current state, determine the right next steps for your company, and design a scalable onboarding that ticks all the boxes.
Your Turn
Weâll cut to the chase here - weâve built you exactly what you need to ensure your onboarding program remains a well-oiled, well-designed, well-evaluated delight, for many many new hires to come.
This two-part resource will allow you to:
1. Easily audit your current onboarding process against outlined best practices ranging from pre-boarding all the way through your employeeâs first 90-days. In the same tab, you can then move into project management mode, outlining who should be involved and what the current status is of each activity.
2. Break down and track the individual onboarding of each new employee. With each step documented (and editable to your process) a simple copy is all you need to assign and track steps each time a new employee joins the company.
Everything you need - including detailed instructions and a loom video tutorial - is in the resource. Go check it out!
Things We're Loving Right Now
Free transparency assessment: If youâre on my newsletter list, you probably already believe in the power of transparency. Our pals at OpenOrg have released a quick, free assessment tool to help you gauge how transparent your org and operations really are.
For a lilâ levity: Sweating your Halloween costume at the 11th hour? Hey, weâve all been there. Check out these 12 HR Halloween costume ideas from BambooHR (and get ready for some beautifully groan-worthy punsâŠ).
2024 Manager Support: There are just a few spots left in my end of year Training for Modern Manager promotion. Grab time with me here, to if you'd like to learn more. Meetings scheduled on the 31st will happen in costume. đ»
