Building a Culture of Care at Cisco Meraki: 5 Onboarding Tips From Darren Gant

Onboarding tips from a human connection veteran

From his early days waiting tables to working in the start-up world, to making his way to academia and now tech, Darren Gant, leader, global onboarding and learning design (GOLD) at Cisco Meraki, has always remained passionate about one thing throughout his career: human connection. And he’s learned a few helpful onboarding tips along the way.

“With onboarding, you really have to start tapping into the emotional part for that new employee. How can we connect with them? How can we start nurturing that relationship early on? Looking at that component is very new for a lot of people,” said Darren at The Conference Board‘s recent People 2023 conference in New York City.

Darren sat down with Corey Walker, Enboarder’s senior strategic, enterprise customer success manager to share his tips for building more human connection into employee onboarding.

Here are some key highlights from their conversation.

Tip #1: Help new hires connect to your culture before day one.

This should be your top priority when it comes to building an effective onboarding program. If you have a well thought out recruiting and preboarding process, new hires should “understand culture by the time they walk in the door,” explained Darren.

When he first started working with Enboarder, his top priority was getting preboarding right. Some of Cisco Meraki’s preboarding messages start several weeks before a new hire’s start date: “It’s all about building those communications and igniting that spark, getting that emotional connection going … So day one hits and they’re like ‘Wow, this really does line up.'”

So preboarding became stage one of Cisco Meraki’s employee onboarding journey. Stage two is day one orientation, which Darren reimagined to focus more on building relationships and completing the essentials, than sitting in front of a laptop screen (not very engaging!). Stage three lasts about two weeks and consists of role-specific learning paths. And the fourth stage is setting up weekly check-ins with new hires.

Tip #2: Set up a buddy program (and let technology help you).

“New employees love their buddies because that buddy is the person who’s going to be able to talk to them on the level they want to be talked to,” said Darren. A buddy is your new hire’s built-in first friend at work.

Using Enboarder, Cisco Meraki is able to automate nudges to hiring managers reminding them to assign a buddy 21 days before a new hire’s start date, and nudges reminding buddies to send a welcome note to new hires 12 days before they start. “Preboarding is all about light, easy, emotional excitement – nothing heavy,” advised Darren.

Tip #3: Serve up self-service learning.

Onboarding doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all, and Cisco Meraki has a great example of how you can personalize the onboarding experience for every new employee. Darren and his team created 28 learning modules (and they keep building more!) that new hires can watch on demand after their day one orientation. “If you want to know about a product line, about anything in the business, you get to personalize and choose how you’d like to be onboarded,” said Darren.
Don’t be afraid of preboarding.

One of the challenges Darren was looking to solve at Cisco Meraki was no shows, where a person would sign an offer letter, but then not show up on day one. “Enboarder basically eliminated that for us because once a new hire accepted their offer, there was this long ongoing engagement between the hiring manager and the new employee … If they don’t receive these things, so many employees are like, ‘Do they even care or want me?'”

Tip #4: Don’t be afraid of preboarding.

Tip #5: Gather feedback at every stage.

At Cisco Meraki, Darren and his team send out pulse surveys at various points during the onboarding process. Here are some of the questions they ask:

How was your preboarding?
Did you feel prepared for day one?
Did day one provide the essential resources and tools for your success?
How can we improve?
Did you make the right decision to join Cisco Meraki?

His final onboarding tip: “Onboarding new employees shouldn’t be complicated or confusing with several layers of decision-making. Simply hire passionate onboarding professionals to lead this important journey, and get out of their way.”

Want to learn more about Cisco Meraki’s onboarding journey? Check out the full story here.