Who Said Onboarding has to be On-boring?

You did it! You just signed an offer letter for a new job and you start in a week. You can’t wait to get started, meet your new team members, and dive into your new role. You’ve got those new job jitters!

Along with the offer letter is a short blurb alerting you to keep an eye out for an email from HR with some new hire materials to review before you get started. Ooh, new hire materials, what could those be?

The next day, you see a new email and open it from your company. This must be the email from HR.

You click a link and it takes you to some sort of web application with a list of other links you’re supposed to watch. Well, I’m sure this will be fun.

You start watching these videos and the feeling of excitement you had just yesterday quickly turns into boredom, frustration, and isolation as you go through the same modules you’ve seen before…

Fast forward one or two weeks: modules complete, and you finally made it…Now it’s finally time for day one. Time to get after it.

You’re ushered into a room and are excited to get an introduction out of the way and start meeting your team. The first line from the onboarding facilitator is, “welcome new hires! I couldn’t be more excited to guide you through your onboarding for the next five days. We’ll meet in this room for eight hours each day. Now, open your 50-page new hire packet to page one, and let’s get started.”

All you can think to yourself is, “I thought this time it would be different.”

As many know, this picture isn’t that unfamiliar. Too many companies today follow the same script that they’ve been following for years—even though technology has changed, how we work has changed, and the dynamic of our workforce has changed. 

The excitement new hires feel when they sign an offer letter rarely withstands after days of tedious onboarding and mind-numbing lectures. And let’s be honest, your new hire is sitting in these sessions fully aware that they’re going to forget most of what they’re ‘learning.’

But don’t worry, there’s hope! We work with customers across every vertical that understand these changes and have adapted their onboarding strategy to meet the needs of today’s workforce.

So here are the top 5 things I’m seeing from our customers who nail onboarding:

1. Keep excitement high!

Just like a customer’s emotional peak is right when they buy, a new employee’s emotional peak is when they sign the offer letter. It is the first touchpoint in their employee experience.

Have you truly thought out what comes next?

We see leading companies being intentional about pre-learning and ensuring they provide an incredible experience before that team member walks through the door on day one.

After a new employee signs, they’re eager to learn more about who they’re going to be working with; so don’t hesitate to introduce them to their new team members virtually or digitally so they can get to know them before they delve into their new role. This will be their new community!

This is also an ample opportunity for them to start learning about the company and their role within it. Instead of the traditional video modules and outdated training manuals, what if you got creative and communicated the information your workers need to know in a way that engages them, that encourages them to struggle, and that allows them to actually retain everything they learn.

In addition to company history, let’s teach them about the leadership team (not just titles, but hobbies, fun facts, etc), the office (or virtual office environment), and your company’s core values.

2. Build Community.

I mentioned the importance of community-building above and I can’t emphasize this enough…but I’ll try anyway. 

Whether you’re working virtually or not, joining a new company can feel lonely; it’s like the first day of school. You know you’re going to make new friends, but you don’t know who or how or when. You’re still getting your bearings and figuring out the flow.

Connecting with fellow new hires and current team members leads to a feeling of belonging and togetherness.

A few weeks ago, I heard one of my colleagues (our awesome blogger Devin) talk about her onboarding experience in the middle of the pandemic and using 1Huddle. She talked about how powerful it was to learn personal information about her new teammates and company history before and while she started by playing games. She got to know people’s faces, hometowns, and hobbies before her day one, This led to instant connections with team members who had similar interests and backgrounds, and it helped Devin feel like part of the team right away.

I’ve also heard customers talk about implementing a rotation of department and organization leaders to speak with new hires to introduce their role or department. If this is done in an authentic way, it can serve as a powerful community-building strategy.

3. Do you remember?

The majority of conversations I have about onboarding with customers, partners, or anyone else, usually go something like this: “Our people have sooooo much to learn in their first couple of weeks. So much is thrown at them, I almost feed bad.”

Well, you should feel bad—and no, not about how much they have to learn; but about how it’s being delivered.

Most companies today throw online modules, employee handbooks, PowerPoint presentations, and codes of conduct in their people’s faces on day one and ask that they “complete” a review of all the information. But our brains just don’t work that way. Input, input, input, input without any form of retrieval or practice is a waste of time and energy. Employers don’t even expect that their new hires will remember it long-term because, “who could possibly remember that amount of information?”

Well, that’s the wrong question to ask. Instead, ask yourself: “if a new team member feels overwhelmed with information in their first couple of weeks on the job and feels like they’re getting assigned homework to cram for a test, what kind of employee turnover are we setting ourselves up to have here?”

If you ask yourself this type of question, you can then shift your focus to creating a new hire environment in which long-term comprehension is a major goal. Imagine: your new team members get embedded into your culture and company, and retaining all of the information thrown their way in the first couple weeks. 

It can happen.

4. What’s Next?

This might be the most important one on this list…and it doesn’t even have to do with onboarding.

When 38.6% of new employees who turnover do so in their first year, we know we have a problem with not only onboarding new team members, but engaging with and developing them continuously over time.

Too many organizations spend significant time perfecting their 90 day onboarding process, only to fail the employee on day 91 when development and engagement end, and that employee is expected to remember everything they learned, be trained up for long-term success, and self-motivate from there on out.

What happens then? Well, you can probably guess. They either burn out right after onboarding or they give it some time and realize a few months later the lack of advancement and development opportunities and fizzle out from there.

Creating a 52-week employee development plan and committing to ongoing employee engagement—and not just new hire engagement—will help set you and your new team members up for long-lasting success.

5. The 5th key to a rockstar onboarding is…

To truly round out your onboarding strategy, you’re going to have to work for it. So if you want to unlock 1Huddle’s fifth key for rockstar onboarding, you’re going to have to earn it by correctly answering a question from the 1Huddle game The Four Paths.

Here’s your question:

Today, workers find themselves on 1 of 4 pathways as they develop at work. These pathways all start the same, but after reaching a ____________ they take vastly different turns based on the strategy, culture, infrastructure, and leadership within an organization.

1. Tipping Point
2. Career Inflection Point
3. Turnover Point 
4. Development Point

Think you know the answer? 

Email your guess to jared@1huddle.co with ‘Onboarding’ as the subject line, and we will send you our fifth tip for successful onboarding plus an exclusive copy of 1Huddle’s eBook that illustrates the problem of employee turnover and how to fix it.