Create Impactful Onboarding Experiences For New Hires

Use experience design to create an effective onboarding strategy.

Create Impactful Onboarding Experiences For New Hires

Employee onboarding plays a critical role in an organization’s ability to source top talent and allow them to contribute to the organization’s mission and vision as soon as possible. Hence, an impactful experience for new hires is a must. TiER1’s Performance Experience Design (PXD) approach focuses on designing experiences that keep the new hire’s needs at the center. It allows leaders to touch new hires’ hearts, minds, and hands—all necessary factors to drive performance.
Over the years, I have seen three major paradigm shifts in design strategy as a result of evolving organizational needs:

  • An event-based design, where new hires attend a class one at a time, has been replaced by an immersive cohort design, where new hires travel together as they complete a series of activities that comprise an experience.
  • A focus on “the know,” where new hires receive a lot of knowledge-based content before they do something, has been replaced by a focus on “doing,” where new hires are encouraged to try something without all knowledge-based content, and then get feedback, learn from it, and try it again.
  • Content that is pushed to new hires regardless of their personal needs has been replaced by content based on each new hire’s moment of need, giving them more control over their learning.

As you examine the recent trends in onboarding strategy design, opportunities for tension are clearly visible. For example, facilitators might be accustomed to delivering a training class face-to-face where they engage with new hires for a defined amount of time. However, in the future state, they may be required to engage new hires for a longer period of time, as well as through different modalities, such as a social platform. New hires themselves might see a shift in performance expectations – while they’re typically accustomed to grasping knowledge before calling a customer, they have to now shift to having enough knowledge to speak with a customer and then reflect and learn from the interaction.
These new performance design elements require substantial mindset changes for everyone in the organization who touches onboarding. It isn’t just the leaders who want to attract top talent, the strategists enamored with a cool design, or the hiring managers who want to prepare their new hires for their jobs; everyone means everyone. This includes the LMS administrators responsible for loading courses and creating learning paths, the schedulers responsible for securing rooms and sending invites to participants, the facilitators responsible for delivering and engaging with a cohort in different ways, and the delivery managers for aligning current skill sets with the requirements of the new design. You get the gist.
Building innovative onboarding experiences is one thing, but ensuring they translate to results is another. Performance experience design to reimagine onboarding IS an organizational change. The level of effort required to understand stakeholders and their impact is complimentary to other change initiatives. Intentional focus is needed to engage all the stakeholder groups to ensure their emotional and rational sides are aligned and heading down the path together. In their book Switch, Chip and Dan Heath describe this as the time to motivate and shape the path for the elephant.
Based on my experience designing new hire onboarding programs, here are a few things to keep in mind as you prepare to activate a new experience design in your onboarding strategy.

Do a Change Impact Analysis

Identify all the people touched by the new design, from senior leaders to administrators, and the degree of the impact. Don’t assume that just because you and your team are excited about the new approach that everyone shares those sentiments. As author and motivational speaker Simon T. Bailey likes to say, “Nobody likes change except a wet baby.”
Think through all of your stakeholder groups, especially the ones who will be responsible for delivering on and operationalizing the new experience. Some of these roles might include facilitators, LMS administrators, and members of the learning team tasked with maintaining the experience. Oftentimes, we find they feel left out of the process and brought in after key decisions have been made when, in fact, they are absolutely critical to success! “Build it and they will come” is not an effective strategy. Those responsible for executing the new experience want to feel like a part of the solution, so that the change is happening with them and not to them. We need facilitators to own the delivery on new employee onboarding experiences, but that won’t happen if they are brought in at the end of the process.
This activity should happen in conjunction with the design phase of the project.

Create a Change Strategy and Activation Plan

Once we know who will be impacted and by what degree, it’s time to create a strategy and activation plan. This plan should outline how all of the stakeholder groups will be informed of, prepared for, and transitioned to the new experience. Doing so ensures that when “go-live” comes everyone takes full ownership of their role. Carefully consider each group and what they might need to perform their role in the future as well. Learn what is important to each stakeholder group and craft a strategy around how best to engage them. This might include:

  • A personalized story that humanizes an emotion or need
  • Facilitated sessions with different audience groups to share personalized messaging and have open, authentic discussion around the change ahead
  • A buddy program to ensure local and immediate support is available (for more ideas on this, read our article on instilling change leaders in your organization)
  • An activation plan to ensure all groups are receiving information in the right format when they need it.

These activities should align with the development timeline.
As you focus on crafting innovative onboarding experiences that align new hires with your organizational mission, it’s important to enable managers and division leaders to own the delivery. This means ensuring there is intentional focus on the impacts of the new experience design, as well as an onboarding plan that outlines the activities that should occur along the development timeline.
A thoughtful onboarding program that leverages experiences can be a powerful tool for communicating your organization’s unique mission and vision to new hires from Day 1. Experiences that are intentionally designed to be meaningful, personal, and engaging will stick with your new employees so that they not only perform well, but feel confident embracing your organization’s values and living them out in their work.
Want to connect with Elise about using Performance Experience Design to design an impactful onboarding program? Give us a call at (859) 415-1000 or drop us a line in the form at the bottom of this page.

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<strong><a href="https://tier1performance.com/author/e-margol/" target="_self">Elise Greene Margol</a></strong>

Elise Greene Margol

Elise Greene Margol is a Principal in the Atlanta office. She is a passionate problem solver with a proven track record of helping organizations optimize and build talent solutions. She specializes in designing holistic solutions that align strategic business needs with talent priorities that create value for the organization, the team, and the employee. Making sense out of the complex and helping people come to their own conclusions. Elise loves using stories and examples to explain concepts in a clear and concise manner that engages and inspires.

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