Creative Ways to Turbo-Charge Employee Experiences
One of the many benefits of working with innovative clients is how we constantly learn how to create more engaging onboarding experiences. We thought we would take the time to share some of the ways you can flex your creative HR-muscles and transform a standard onboarding into something fun and culture focused instead.
Immersive induction with an Amazing Race
Let’s face it, most formal induction programs (if they exist in your company) consist of PowerPoint slides, a technical session from IT – and if you’re lucky, an office tour. Basically, a lot of information in a room with too much, or not enough air conditioning.
Here’s an idea: get your new hires to embark on a memorable Amazing Race through your office. Their mission? Locate key facilities and contacts, while finding important information and clues that will help them find the next department.
This is an example of gamification, where an immersive experience, coupled with a constant sense of progress and achievement enhances the ability of new hires to retain the information they learn during the process. It also helps break the ice between the new hire and the wider team, which will lead to better communications in the coming weeks.
End the race on a great note: have the final clues lead the new hires to the kitchen for some celebratory drinks (or similar). You’re welcome, and cheers!
Boomerang: The Talent Returns (with an alumni program)
Watching good talent walk out the door sucks.
Traditionally, many employers have generally avoided re-engaging with ex-employees, preferring to treat it as a bridge burned.
But Forbes sets out three good reasons for engaging with ex-employees, and potentially re-hiring them.
- Cost-effective: You’re probably going to have to pay boomerang employees more than what they are getting in their current role, but this is more than offset by their faster ramp to productivity. In fact, Glassdoor reckons boomerang employee hiring processes cost 50 percent less than hiring someone new to your business.
- It’s a known quantity: Culture fit is a big risk in today’s recruitment environment. But with boomerang employees, you already know how they are going to work within the team.
- Their gain is your gain: Your ex-employees aren’t just sitting twiddling their thumbs. If they left you to further advance their career, during their time away from you they could have gained new skill sets, more experience, and even insights into how other businesses are handling challenges. Rehiring them brings all this fresh perspective back in house.
So how do you boomerang your ex-employees?
A number of our clients have created alumni programs to keep former employees up to date, excited and connected to their business.
Keep it social, with a Slack channel dedicated to “graduates” from your organization, or closed Facebook/LinkedIn networking groups.
If you want a more human-to-human connection, and you are using employee engagement tools like Enboarder, set up reminders for the manager to contact the ex-employee after a set amount of time. A simple phone call or text to check-in on a person can be a great way to maintain and engage with the ex-employee.
Just make sure you have a way to keep in touch with the ex-employee, by taking the time to get them to join your alumni channel and update their contact details during the offboarding process.
Dump email for special communications
Emails are often the default for organizational communications. But is it the best tool for the job?
The average office worker receives 121 emails per day. And if you are anything like us, most of it sits in the inbox, unopened and unread.
That’s why many companies are choosing to ditch the email inbox altogether, and deliver their important ‘non-work related’ information directly to the employee’s mobile phone.
These can include things like Christmas party invites, award nominations, office relocations or union meetings.
So how does it work?
The employee gets a SMS on their phone. When they tap on the link, their mobile web browser opens up to a page with the main messaging, coupled with a video or fun image.
When you are using a personal medium like mobile, why restrict yourself to a one-way communication, when you can just as easily make employees feel more involved in a two-way conversation?
Get interactive by including open questionaries that collect information, and forms that can trigger responses or feedback in real time.
Want to take things to the next level?
We have clients that have recorded 360-videos to introduce a team, or embedded Google street view to create interactive office tours.
Really, the only limit is your imagination. And as tech continues to evolve, we’re super excited to see what new and innovative ways we can leverage to engage with and excite employees in the years ahead. Long live creativity!
More creative ways to transform your onboarding
If you’re ready to be an onboarding rockstar, we’ve compiled a list of great tips in our FREE Master Guide to Onboarding. Alternatively, fill in your name, email and mobile number below to experience how Enboarder makes it easy to deliver outstanding onboarding experiences.