The importance of an awesome onboarding (that doesn't end after day one)

Erin McGee, 4 min read

What’s the most important perk for a new hire?

Free food? Fancy facilities? A fat-stacked salary package?

Nope.

The opportunity to learn, progress, be an individual – and know that the work they do matters.

And within the early days of a new job, most people can gauge pretty well whether they’ll be provided with these kinds of opportunities.

What onboarding does for culture

Sadly, almost everybody has a horror story of starting a new job and feeling completely and utterly useless.

Sure, maybe someone from HR showed you around and had IT set up your work computer with all the right accounts - you probably even had an orientation session with your new manager. You might have even been given some company merch.

But, what happened next?

For many companies, the entire ‘onboarding’ process stops here (if it even gets that far).

New hires are thrown into the deep end without a well-rounded understanding of how the company operates and how its people interact with each other.

In other words- the company culture. Without validating the new employee’s place within the larger organisation, they’re left with confusion around whether the company values them being there. And who would want to stay in a job where they’re not valued?

An awesome onboarding process keeps the ‘new job excitement’ levels up and encourages new team members to invest themselves in not only their role but the company, too.

By nature, people want to do a good job – and as a manager, you need to make sure your employees feel in their gut that there’s nowhere they’d rather work. And through doing this in the early days, you can improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.

It also pays to think outside the box with onboarding activities. Doing the usual ‘welcome the new guy’ charade won’t attract the best talent. Creating an experience that’s radically different than what people have ever seen, however, will.

Ask the new hire to share a little about themselves before they start: a quirky bio, photos of their pets, a video of their coolest party trick – stuff that you can’t scrape off their LinkedIn profile.

Onboarding (and learning) should start before Day 1

A common misconception is that onboarding and training new hires are one and the same (they aren’t).

Training is an integral part of the onboarding process, however, it is only one part. The onboarding process should start well before a new team member steps foot through the door on their first official day.

It should begin as soon as the new hire says yes to their job offer.

They shouldn’t sign the contract, send it off and then… crickets.

The interim period between saying yes and hitting the desk are super important in conveying culture and avoiding first-day anxiety and thumb-twiddling. You can bridge the gap by inviting new hires to Slack channels, team WIPs and company events. Introduce them to a mentor so they’ve got someone to ask questions that come up.

Important company information, fun facts about the team and general orientation ‘stuff’ can also be communicated via email or any internal communication tool your company uses. However, the issue of information dump is real (and sometimes crippling). If your company’s orientation program starts with a sentence like “Now, we don’t expect you to remember all of this” – you’re doing it wrong.

On no other day would a manager be able to dump 100 pages worth of information (with no context) on someone’s desk and expect them to be capable of storing it in memory within a few days or weeks – so why is it that way with new employees?

Communicating onboarding information gradually, in smaller doses is therefore way less daunting than having a chunky employee manual dropped on the desk. This way, new hires are able to develop an understanding of the context for the information they’re receiving. 

Case Study: Mortgage Choice Onboarding Campaign

Recently, Yarno partnered with Mortgage Choice to run an onboarding pilot campaign for recent and new starters in their Sydney Head Office. 
The Mortgage Choice L&D team were keen to both reinforce key onboarding information and to evaluate the Yarno knowledge measurement and reinforcement platform.

What they were looking to improve:

Before working with us, each new starter’s onboarding basically consisted of one face-to-face induction with L&D. The problem they faced was surrounding the lack of reinforcement of this important information and of consistency of knowledge levels.

The L&D team were interested to see if this could be achieved with Yarno, a web-based knowledge delivery, quizzing and reinforcement app.

How Yarno helped:

Yarno introduced and reinforced key onboarding knowledge over a 7 week period. Onboarding concepts and takeaways were distilled into a knowledge-packed quiz format by Mortgage Choice in collaboration with our legendary Instructional Designer, Joel.

And the results?

The pilot was a success! 88% of all questions asked were answered and learner performance improved by 16% over the 7-week campaign. Learners were engaged throughout the campaign, with 87% participating regularly.

Even better, learners reported were more confident about and aware of Mortgage Choice products and partners and felt better aware of key policies and procedures. A majority of learners also had a clearer understanding of how their role related to the company vision and strategy for 2017 and 2020.

That’s not all, folks - onboarding shouldn’t ever ‘finish'

Whilst, of course, new hires eventually settle in and find their feet in the company, the onboarding experience shouldn’t just end. Ideally, it should just morph into a continual upkeep of company culture.

Consciously keeping up traditions, celebrations and other aspects of your company’s culture makes the onboarding experience less… artificial. It’s just not a good feeling for the shiny-new-hire excitement to wear off and under the surface, for the company to be just like the one they left.

Not to toot our own horn – but we do this pretty well at Yarno.
We’re lucky enough to have a team that’s equally invested in the company and each others’ success, so we do as much as we can to keep our culture and values strong.

From Joel’s monthly Courageous Feedback sessions, weekly Pechakucha presentations in the team WIP, to our ‘celebrating the small wins’ lunches when we achieve something awesome, it always feels good to be able to work here. 

Culture is just a sum of all the little things. So it’s important to make sure each new hire onboarded feels like their own little piece of the puzzle. 

A little bonus read: 

Erin McGee

Erin McGee

Erin is an ever-trusty wordsmith and resident spreader of good vibes. You'll find her chatting up a storm in Mandarin, yelling kiai's at jujitsu and eating dark chocolate at 2pm sharp.

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