How to Improve Employee Onboarding Experience Through Design Thinking

The impact of a poor onboarding experience cannot be overstated. Those first few days and weeks on the job have a direct impact on a new hire’s long-term productivity and engagement. That’s why learning how to improve your employee onboarding experience is critical.

In our recent survey of 1,000 HR leaders, nearly half (49.4%) admitted that the handoff process between recruiting, HR, and hiring managers for onboarding is just adequate and that there are occasional gaps. That might explain why 60.8% say they’ve seen 90-day turnover increase either slightly or significantly over the past 12 months.

In this article, we’ll walk through how you can use design thinking to understand the gaps in your existing onboarding program and outline your next steps on the road to onboarding process improvement.

Why the Transition From Preboarding Matters to Onboarding Process Improvement

Traditional recruitment processes tend to neglect the onboarding stage. If communication stops after contract signing, new hire engagement tends to drop because they end of feeling “ghosted” during this critical buffer period between offer acceptance and their first day.

You could also risk offsetting all the positive perceptions the new hire has of your company from their preonboarding phase by that one negative feeling in their onboarding experience. This is what The Gottman Institute calls the 5:1 Magic Ratio. This means it only takes one negative interaction to cancel out five positive interactions.

That awkward dead silence from employers before the first day can give the impression of a cold and distant workplace culture. Remember, actions speak louder than words. You might be painting an image of a warm and approachable office environment in your recruitment ads, but feelings of disconnection during the critical onboarding phase can create distrust among new hires. What’s the drawback? Your new hire might already be hatching an escape plan, and they haven’t even began day one.

Giving someone the cold shoulder is never the way to go.

Applying Design Thinking to Improve the Onboarding Process (With Examples)

According to Harvard Business Review, implementing a formal onboarding program can lead to 50% greater employee retention and 62% greater productivity. Gallup data shows a positive onboarding experience is linked to employees feeling 3x as likely to feel supported in their role.

Design thinking can help you improve your onboarding experience so you can see these kind of results.

By design thinking, we mean the systematic process of applying human-centric techniques to solve business problems with creative and innovative methodology. Where art meets science. In simple terms, it’s an approach aimed at creating solutions by addressing people’s needs.

To help set you up towards an A-grade onboarding process, let’s walk through the five steps of Design Thinking.

Step 1: Empathize

Know their story. Applying design thinking in building the onboarding experience of your new hires starts off with taking the time to observe and understand them.

So, get ready to go undercover. Leave no stone unturned. Through techniques such as journey mapping and storyboarding, you can better assess the points of interaction between your company and your new hire. From there, you gain a clearer idea of who your new hires are, which experiences are most important to them, and what activities they are most likely to engage in.

Example: Perhaps your journey mapping exercise shows that new hires feel anxious after receiving their offer because they don’t know who to contact or what happens next. Based on this insight, you could send a welcome email the day after they accept, introducing them to their buddy, HR contact, and a high-level preboarding timeline.

Step 2: Define the Problem

Design thinking challenges HR managers to dig through the underlying problems that’s killing employee satisfaction.

Analyzing your new hire journey can lead to uncovering pitfalls in the onboarding process. By looking at a problem from different angles, HR managers are more likely to resolve unseen issues that’s been lurking around early on in the employee’s journey.

Example: Imagine a scenario where new hires are unclear about their first week schedule, despite HR having a predefined onboarding checklist. The underlying issue is that there’s no centralized agenda tailored to each new hire’s role. So the problem can be defined as: “New hires don’t feel prepared for their first week due to a lack of personalized guidance.”

Step 3: Ideate

Design thinking encourages HR managers to avoid obvious solutions, and hit breakthrough ideas. Don’t hold back! This is the time to let your imagination roam free.

Thinking outside the box can mean pushing past stiff and procedural new hire journeys, and moving towards more social and meaningful onboarding experiences. This means less reliance on formalities and paperwork, and crafting solutions that are simple, interactive and personal.

Example: Many organizations share welcome guides in the form of a PDF. But imagine also breaking up that content into mobile-friendly, bite-sized chunks that are drip-fed at key moments during onboarding.

Step 4: Prototype

Fail fast. Fail often.

Technology offers a plethora of features and tools that HR managers can tinker around with to help them turn ideas into tangible experiences. More specifically, onboarding software provides the opportunity for HR managers to craft the journey of new hires without feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work it entails. Letting your company’s personality shine through in your onboarding process can be an effective way to maintain that positive first impression among your new hires.

Example: You could prototype a new “First Week Connection Plan” that automatically pairs each new hire with both a peer buddy and a cross-functional colleague. Using onboarding software like Enboarder you can automate calendar invites for those casual meet-and-greets in the first 10 days, with each meeting including a simple conversation prompt like “What did you wish you knew in your first month?”

Step 5: Test

Feedback is your best friend.

Design Thinking is an iterative process that relies heavily on feedback to make consistent improvements to onboarding experiences. When updating processes, test them out and always get feedback, even more so from the new hires themselves. Asking new hires for their feedback can be a great way to make them feel valued and part of the team.

Example: Continuing on the “First Week Connection Plan,” send a short survey at the end of week two asking:

• Which meeting felt most helpful?
• Did you feel more connected to the company as a result?
• What could we do differently?

A Few More Tips to Improve Employee Onboarding Experience

Looking to really up your onboarding game? Here are a few other tips to keep in mind:

• Decide what success looks like: Think about which onboarding metrics matter, such as percentage of hires still employed at your company after one year, and report on your progress.
• Build cross-department connections: Make sure you set up time with other teams, and if your company is small enough, with your CEO. Our paper with RedThread Research found organizations with more connection are 5.4x more likely to be agile, 3.2x more likely to have satisfied customers, and 2.3x more likely to have engaged employees.
• Make it your #1 priority to be supportive: Ask yourself, “How can I deliver information in the most engaging way? How can I make employees’ lives easier? How can I better support them?
• Aim to inspire, not just inform: Rather than just drowning new hires in endless policy documents, make sure to include things like informal lunches and welcomes videos.
• Get personal: Your program should allow space for employees to bring their authentic selves to work and allow time for one-on-one feedback.

How to Make Onboarding More Efficient With Enboarder

Enboarder’s Intelligent Journey Platform can help you take these design thinking principles and put them into practice to improve your employee onboarding experience. We’ve helped organizations just like yours create hyper-personalized onboarding journeys that automate cumbersome administrative tasks while ramping new hires to productivity more quickly.

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