Easy Ways for Managers to Create a Great Onboarding Experience

Successful experience-driven onboarding depends on a number of factors. At the core of every successful process is personalisation – everyone is different and everyone likes to feel valued for who they are.

We built Enboarder to enable limitless personalisation at scale, and we’ve learnt a lot over the years about how companies can improve employee experience with a focus on personalisation at the core. With that in mind, we’ve developed a set of actions for managers to focus on and to give them ideas about how to make your onboarding process more personal.  

The red pill or the blue pill?

Being able to choose things is empowering and people appreciate that you care enough to give them choices. Even small choices – do they prefer email or text message for communications? -make a difference.

Some types of businesses, for example very large corporations and those in high security industries, will have lengthy pre-start processes that involve regulatory steps, background checks, health checks and/or other necessary tasks that all new hires need to complete before Day 1. There’s no getting around those things, but you can make the experience more engaging and less arduous by giving people choice and flexibility about when and where they complete the tasks.  

Tell me more about your stamp collection…

This is actually the most important one and the easiest to implement – ask people questions about themselves. At the base level, it requires no technology or budget, just the right attitude (although to scale the approach across an organisation, it does need to be facilitated by good technology and that’s the job we do at Enboarder). People may not want to share their whole life story (but hey, some might), but simply asking them what their favourite food is and what their hobbies are will go a long way.

Showing interest in someone, and wanting to know more about who they are as a person in their life outside of work is not just a nice thing to do, it should be the bare minimum.  

All aboard the (Day 1) party bus!

Use the knowledge about the new hire captured in the ‘be interested’ phase to celebrate their arrival in a personal way. Make Day 1 a great experience – make sure everyone else in their team knows that the new person is starting and get them involved in making it a great day. Desk decorations, team lunch, a coffee with their manager, their favourite snack. These things don’t cost a lot of money, and will go a long way to making the new hire feel special and valued – reaffirming their decision to join your business and creating a memorable moment at a time that really matters.

Longer term, mark your calendar and set reminders so you know when people’s birthdays and work anniversaries are – it might not be technically part of onboarding, but it’s great for culture!

Think about personalisation as making putting the person at the centre of the onboarding process – the results will speak for themselves!