Establishing Innovative Onboarding

Innovation can come in many forms and be used for many purposes at the workplace. Often though, it may have been missing at the hiring and onboarding stages. Creating an innovative approach to onboarding employees will foster a positive and inclusive environment from the start, and help integrate employees quickly and efficiently.

Goal

Create innovative onboarding techniques and methods that foster employee goodwill and engagement at the time of hiring.

What is Establishing Innovative Onboarding?

Onboarding is simply the process of helping new hires adjust to social and performance aspects of their new jobs quickly and smoothly, and learn the attitudes, knowledge, skills, and behaviours required to function effectively within an organization. Adding innovative methods, whether formal or informal, are tasks taken by HR to ensure employees are receiving the right orientations to their new workplaces. Innovative onboarding uses methods such as “gamification,” localized onboarding that is department-specific along with overall corporate information, and offering a mentor so new hires have a place to turn and ask questions.

How does Establishing Innovative Onboarding improve employee engagement and culture?

Innovative approaches to onboarding engage new hires to the goals and needs of the company and provide feelings of goodwill and welcoming. As a result, employees feel better about the work they do and why they are doing it, adding to their engagement to fellow colleagues and the company as a whole.

Innovative onboarding also breaks barriers that allow employees to feel a part of the team faster, giving them a sense of immediate connectedness.

What are the benefits?

1. Attract and retain top talent

2. Build trust and alignment

3. Reduce training and program costs

4. Improve knowledge retention

5. Help employees feel more engaged and connected

6. Forge connections with employees

How do you Establish Innovative Onboarding in the workplace?

Successful innovative onboarding will engage employees faster and allow them to work with the knowledge that they are already part of the team. Creating an innovative onboarding program takes time to create. There should be input from as many top managers and departments as possible to have a well-rounded picture of what the company’s story is. Also, old methods must make way for more modern forms of onboarding that appeal to a wider variety and age range of employees.

Action

Create Innovative Onboarding

1. Determine what your onboarding program is attempting to achieve: Do you simply want to educate new hires about routine tasks and policy or are you attempting to build a community? You can build out a program once you know what you are trying to communicate.

2. What are the company’s overall goals: Are you are aiding management in attraction and retention or providing a forum for better engagement or both? There is no right answer but aligning HR’s goals with overall company goals should be addressed in the program make-up.

3. Encourage employees to network on Day 1: Many studies show that feeling socially accepted is a deciding facto in a new hire’s success. Encouraging networking and relationship-building will help with engagement, connectedness and possibly a joint sense of purpose going forward.

4. Gamification: Beyond traditional onboarding of videos and lectures, gamification, which can include skits, games and other activities, creates a more relaxed and interactive form of onboarding that people will look forward to (and hopefully tell their friends about).

5. Localized onboarding: There are two types of onboarding. There is the traditional one that is more generic, and provides a “30,000-foot” overview of company goals, needs and expectations. There is also a more “local” one. Offering more specific onboarding tailored (as much as possible) to individuals can help with engagement and provide answers to often asked questions by individuals.

6. Assess: Ensure that agendas, methods and new approaches are assessed after each major onboarding session. This will ensure their freshness and effectiveness. Check in with new hires to see how things are going and possibly hold events that connect new hires with others over the course of the first year.

Reference Material

Six new and creative employee onboarding ideas

Extreme Onboarding: How to WOW Your New Hires Rather Than Numb Them