Enboarder’s Leadership Insights: Q&A with Hannah Hafenrichter

Posted in Company Updates

At Enboarder, we’ve made it our mission to help our customers create better human connections at every step of the employee journey – from onboarding and learning, to change management and transitions, and more. But have you ever wondered how we “drink our own champagne” and create amazing employee experiences here at Enboarder? 🥂

In this new blog series, we sit down with leaders from our rockstar people team to peel back the curtain and show you how we’re using our product internally. We hope it sparks an idea or two for how you can create more personalized journeys in your organization (with a little help from your friends at Enboarder!).

Our first Q&A is with Hannah Hafenrichter, manager of global talent development and experience at Enboarder. She shares how she used our platform to build the new Aspire Leadership program and what’s on the roadmap for leadership development this year.

1) Tell us a bit about how you got into HR and your journey at Enboarder.

It sounds cliché, but I have always been really interested in people and what makes them tick, so I thought HR would be a good fit. I started my career in a big company which gave me a solid grounding in most facets of HR. I got tired of how slowly things moved in a large business, so I left and joined Enboarder when we had just closed our Series A. I spent two years working in Customer Success, helping our customers to design and build exceptional employee experiences, before moving into the people team at Enboarder.

2) What is the Aspire Leadership program? Why did the people team launch it last year?

The Aspire Leadership program was a three-month program, designed to prepare our aspiring leaders for management positions in the future. We hadn’t run anything like this before, but we knew there was a need for management training.

The program consisted of four modules, each covering a different leadership mindset. It was designed to cater for different learning styles, so we blended self-paced learning, live sessions, and peer learning circles.

3) How did the Enboarder platform help you automate and streamline the program?

My experience of learning programs has traditionally been very classroom-based, where a course runs across a whole day. Or, learners are given access to self-paced learning materials, with very little direction.

With Aspire, we tried to bring together the best parts of these traditional approaches whilst making it more bite-sized and applicable to the remote/hybrid world. The Enboarder workflow pushed out all the necessary information in the lead up to the program, including embedded video content to get participants excited. For example, we included personalized videos from our program facilitator and Brent Pearson, our CEO, where he talks about the importance of the program and leadership development.

Throughout the program, Enboarder nudges also included links to our LMS Articulate, where participants could complete the self-paced learning content. 

The nudges reminded participants when live sessions were taking place and generated feedback forms after each module. It eliminated a lot of manual effort for the people team and created a more seamless learner experience.

4) How did you build in elements of human connection into the program?

A key pillar of the Aspire program was peer learning. By creating small peer groups, learners could ask questions and build skills in a more organic way. This makes learning more of a team activity, which is far more engaging. For each module of the program, learners were paired with a buddy to discuss their learnings from the self-paced content before joining the live sessions. We wanted learners to form connections with people in other regions and in different departments.

Throughout the program, we also took the participants’ managers on the journey. We gave them talking points for 1:1s with their team members so that learning wasn’t happening in isolation.

5) What has the feedback been from participants of the program?

We got some rich feedback through surveys that we generated via Enboarder and through follow-up focus groups. The feedback was really positive and participants found the program to be insightful and well structured. The peer circles were a popular part of the program, but some people had issues scheduling meet-ups across our multiple time zones. We might also experiment with a more condensed program next time and run it over the course of a month.

6) What’s next when it comes to learning and development at Enboarder?

We’re very excited to be building out a mentorship program for our Aspire graduates. We want to continue developing our aspiring leaders so they feel supported and ready to step into management positions. We’re rolling out a series of regional workshops for everyone to attend, focusing on conversation skills to foster stronger relationships in and outside of work. We’re also about to start building out our internal learning hub using Skilljar to host a variety of training resources. Stay tuned!

7) Just for fun: What’s one thing most people don’t know about you? 🙂

My grandfather was nominated for an Oscar, so that’s my claim to fame. You’ll have to ask me which movie!

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