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The Power of Pre-Boarding

Let’s talk about the often-overlooked period between someone accepting a job offer and the first day in the role: the pre-boarding experience. Here’s why it’s crucial and the tangible benefits it brings to both new hires and organisations:

  • Engaged from the start: Build on the excitement and enthusiasm from the recruitment process and start to build a sense of belonging before they even start their new role.
  • Accelerated ramp-up: Using the time between acceptance of the offer and the start date allows new hires to hit the ground running and shortens the time to productivity.
  • Cultural immersion: Pre-boarding offers an opportunity to introduce new hires to the company’s culture, values, and mission, helping them understand what makes the organisation tick and show how they can start to contribute to its success.
  • Connection with new colleagues: An opportunity to build important and valuable relationships prior to joining can lead to a smoother integration into the team.
  • Reduced stress and uncertainty: Reinforce the new hire’s decision to join and help alleviate any doubts by providing a clear narrative for them as they prepare for their first day.
  • Retention and Loyalty: It makes new hires feel valued and appreciated. This early investment in their success can optimise loyalty, commitment and retention.
  • Brand enhancement: A positive pre-boarding experience contributes to a strong employer brand, which is crucial for attracting, engaging, and retaining talent.

By recognising the importance of the pre-boarding experience and leveraging it to its full potential, organisations can set new hires up for success quickly, minimise the risk of early attrition, drive engagement, enhance their brand and achieve greater organisational success.

If you are looking for creative and effective ways to build an exceptional pre-boarding experience then here at Motivait, we can help.

We design, develop and deliver digital experiences to enhance employee knowledge, connections and engagement.

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Unlocking Success: Enhancing your new hire onboarding

It’s not just a nice to have – it’s a crucial first step towards success. Here’s why enhancing your onboarding experience for new hires matters more than ever.  

  • Setting the Scene: Providing the foundation for their journey within your organisation and re-enforcing their decision to join. 
  • Accelerating Integration: Immersing them into your company culture, processes, and team dynamics reducing time to productivity and improving their feeling of belonging.  
  • Making it personal: A relevant, personalised experience making them feel special and important and showing that your company really cares about them.   
  • Equipping them for early impact: By providing the necessary tools, resources, training and support, you can empower them quickly to focus on the business goals.  
  • Retention: A positive onboarding experience is more likely to help them feel engaged and loyal to the organisation, reducing the risk of early attrition.   
  • Making connections: It isn’t just about what you know -it’s about fostering relationships in the business encouraging team building, knowledge sharing and collaboration.  
  • Brand development: They will tell their friends, family, contacts and ex-colleagues developing the company’s brand in the market and making it easier to hire.    

 Don’t underestimate the power and value of the onboarding experience. It really can make a difference.

We design, develop and deliver digital experiences to enhance employee knowledge, connections and engagement.

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Effective onboarding: time to get emotional

The onboarding of new employees continues to be a topical and important subject for organisations, particularly in the current job market where the number of vacancies far outweighs the number of available candidates and where remote working is becoming more common practice. Hiring is a timely and expensive activity. So it is paramount not to throw away all that time, effort and cost with an onboarding experience that leaves the person uninspired and possibly even regretting the decision to join in the first place. Creating that sense of belonging and connection with colleagues is much harder to achieve when there is much less, or no, in person interaction. Getting people to bring their best selves to work in a state of mind that unleashes their self-expression and enthusiasm for further exploration and learning is the desired outcome of an effective onboarding programme.   

When to start 

Through the attraction and recruitment phase of the employee journey, expectations are being set and clarified and the potential employee is starting to build a picture of the organisation’s culture and values and what it might be like to work there. They are continually questioning and assessing whether it will be a good fit for them and whether it is somewhere they believe they will be able to prosper, develop their skills and career whilst making a valued contribution to the development of the business. The momentum that is being built through these stages must continue up until the moment they join and during those vital early stages after. They need to start their new role with the confidence that they have made the correct decision, ready to embrace the new challenge, fit in with their colleagues and contribute from as early as possible. They are also often, simply asking themselves: “will I be happy there?”   

There is a debate as to when onboarding should commence, ranging from the moment a candidate accepts the job offer, through to the day the person starts. Many organisations believe the optimum time to start is the latter, but more are realising the benefits of starting the onboarding experience much earlier; from the moment the candidate signs the offer of employment and returns the contract. One of the arguments for starting the formal onboarding at the time of signing the contract for instance is that this is the moment that garners the most enthusiasm and excitement from the employee, and we should not forget the importance of emotion in decision making. Particularly, when there is the opportunity to respond to, reinforce and encourage those emotions: “Yes, I will be happy here. Yes, I made the right choice” 

The importance of getting onboarding right  

Research by Glassdoor has shown that great employee onboarding can increase retention by as much as 82% and productivity by over 70%. Yet, a Gallup survey found that only 12% of employees strongly agreed that their organisation did a great job with onboarding. These figures alone show that there is scope for organisations to do better. It is important for companies to critically assess their onboarding, check their processes and regularly ask for feedback from new starters. Evaluating what works and what doesn’t is key to success, and the results may surprise you. 

Graphic showcasing: 58% of organisations focus their onboarding on a process and paperwork. 33% said their onboarding was informal, inconsistent or reactive rather than being structured and strategic.

Historically, onboarding has been focused on the process and not the human and emotional connection. Employees expect IT equipment and email access to be ready for when they arrive, they expect a pile of forms to fill in and get back to HR, they expect overview PowerPoints and maybe the odd corporate video. Employees who can easily understand, absorb and connect with essential company information in those first few days are obviously more likely to become productive faster, meaning they’ll feel better about their own position and knowledge in their new role.  However, even if the content of your onboarding is the best, if it is executed poorly or leaves the employee feeling overwhelmed or overloaded with information, then they’re not likely to be inspired and could be disengaged from the get-go. 

Onboarding needs to be so much more than just a process. What we need to be creating is an emotional experience for the person – one that helps them really connect with the organisation, excites them, makes them proud to be part of it, feel valued and energised to bring out the best of their qualities, sets them up for the road ahead, and encourages them to want to tell others how great it is. In other words, it is all about invigorating them. It is this emotional connection that will stimulate their motivation, commitment, and participation, driving their future engagement and performance.  

The balance of effective Onboarding  

Baek and Bramwell of Cornell University conducted research into how you measure the effectiveness of Onboarding (Onboarding Effectiveness). They concluded that one of the best measures of an effective onboarding experience was ‘Time to Proficiency’. They defined this as the time it took a new hire to reach full productivity within the context of their role. For this to happen, a new employee needs to have a structured onboarding experience, with specifically defined outcomes, and an experience that is engaging to them. At the end of their onboarding, employees need to have achieved four clear objectives for the best chance of ongoing success (Baur); Role Clarity; Self-efficacy; Social integration; Knowledge of organisational culture.  

Motiviat | getting emotional over onboarding information on time to proficiency

A fundamental part of ‘Time to Proficiency’ is the context of your job (understanding company culture, your customers, products and services and colleague relationships). These set the tone for the content of your job (meaningful work, task suited to skills, teamwork, communications) which are the cognitive experiences that will shape your beliefs, perceptions and attitudes. If the reality of these experiences on content does not live up to the expectation set around the context you start to get cognitive dissonance which hinders building that vital emotional and human connection.  

A vital sense of belonging  

Creating an effective onboarding experience that has real impact, is consistent, valuable and enjoyable may seem like an impossible feat, especially with the added complication of needing to deliver it in a way that is accessible for a range of working practices, functions, or settings.  

We have all witnessed how technology has helped people during the pandemic, as workers were asked to work from home, technology enabled teams to stay connected. Without tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, working effectively would have been incredibly difficult, if not impossible. Technology can also certainly be used to play a significant part in onboarding to drive that quality of experience that is so important regardless of where employees are based. In a world where personalisation and differentiation are not only sought after but now expected by individuals, there is the opportunity to create something as a true reflection of your culture and values, making an impact on new employees or candidates and leaving them feeling they really made the right decision compared to your competition. 

Combining accessibility and ease of use, and really understanding the user’s motivations needs and expectations, creates an experience that is built to evoke a memorable and valuable emotion in the individual. It can help start to build those essential personal relationships and connections with colleagues regardless of where they are based through encouraging teamwork, collaboration and sharing experiences thus creating a greater sense of belonging. So, by stimulating their emotions during the onboarding process you reduce the risk of them quitting early or not even starting at all, getting them to be productive and contribute more quickly, helping them to settle in and feel as an integral part of the organisation, becoming your best ambassador.  

Do you want to find out how to deliver an effective onboarding experience? Find out how our solutions can help you here. Take a look at an Onboarding Solution in action with Zebra Technologies: MOTIVAIT | Partnership in Action – Zebra Technologies.  

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A New Opportunity for Enhanced Digital Onboarding

First impressions count. A statement that without a doubt applies to new employees starting a new job, and how they will perceive their team, managers, and organisation as a whole. They’ll have an initial picture built up based on the recruitment process and their own research. But it is only during the onboarding process that they get their first “real” view into the company: the first exposure to other people they are likely to be working with, to the true corporate culture and to some of the more practical aspects of their new day to day life. The early days of their new working journey and the experiences within it will shape their feelings and attitudes towards their role and future with the company or organisation. So, if they aren’t being made to feel excited, engaged and inspired from day 1, it will inevitably impact their engagement and loyalty, their willingness to stay long term and how they speak about their experience to others.

At some point we have all had to sit through monotonous, repetitive and disengaging training or learning modules when starting a new role – PowerPoint presentations and ice breakers – and 58% of organisations studied admit their onboarding programmes revolve solely around processes and paperwork. Can this really be the best first impression to give someone who you’re looking to develop into a productive, happy employee and ambassador for the brand?

Even more timely and relevant is the need for onboarding programmes to be agile and flexible enough to adapt to the changing work circumstances many of us have found ourselves in. Over 1/3 of the UK workforce are now working from home (up 10% between 2019 and 2020), and with 85% of those stating their expectation to move towards a more hybrid approach in the near future, it seems that organisational practices and approaches will increasingly need to be more inclusive of disparate or disjointed teams.

This is precisely where technology can step in to transform onboarding programmes and processes into experiences that guide employees through informative, impactful learning journeys wherever they’re joining from. While simultaneously helping individuals feel immersed within the organisation and aligned with culture and values from day 1. Irrespective of whether they’re in the office, starting remote, or separated from peers, managers and their physical working environment.

These experiences should be curated to ensure employees leave their onboarding period feeling well equipped and motivated to embark on and make successes of their new roles. Bauer et al state in their research that by this point, employees should have achieved four key objectives for the best chance of ongoing success:

  1. Role clarity: employees understand their role, expectations within it, how to perform in order to achieve expected results
  2. Self-efficacy; employees feel confident in their ability to perform and contribute
  3. Social integration: employees feel connected, valued & trusted
  4. Knowledge of organisational culture; employees understanding and adjusting to company politics, social norms such as language, goals, values and history

So, how do we implement these objectives in a way that’s accessible, impactful, enjoyable and sustainable?

Digital Onboarding, With a Difference

Games and gamification are already being utilised in the attraction phases of recruitment, with games being created to simulate everything from a day in the life of a new employee to testing an employee’s soft skills.

Following that trend into the employment phase of an employee’s journey, we can make use of gamification to create unique and engaging experiences that keep them informed and interested up to and during their first few months of employment.

Creating these kinds of experiences takes time and expertise, balancing the needs and culture of the company with needs of the new employee.

We consider these weeks and months as a quest, creating a structure around what they need to learn and understand early on. Each stage or level of the quest represents new knowledge and experiences that will help them to learn. Focusing on intrinsic motivation, we choose mechanics that support the employees with social connectedness, education and goals to focus on, all in an environment that promotes exploration and discovery at their own pace. To this we this we add mini-games and interactive learning materials all tied together with interesting narratives and storylines. This gives the individuals reasons to want to continue rather than just knowing they have to continue.

Weaving in these dynamics and elements enhance the overall experience significantly, and research shows these types of great onboarding programmes and solutions can lead to higher retention rates, with some studies stating as much as 69% higher retention after 3 years.

Right now, as we focus more and more on digital transformation and open our minds to new and improved ways of working, there is a key opportunity to stop relying on default or traditional methods, simply because “that’s how it’s always been done.”

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The Importance of Being Onboarded

Onboarding is nothing new. If you have worked at any medium or large company you are likely to have been through it, but it was probably called induction. For many, it is a few days of icebreakers and PowerPoint slides explaining the company in more detail, various important departments and other information needed to get going.

If you are a gamer, you would know this better as the tutorial level at the beginning of the game.

In both cases, the end goal is the same, get a new person being productive as efficiently and effectively as possible.

The big difference is the delivery mechanisms used.

First Impressions Count

An employee’s first look at the “real” company happens during onboarding. This is the first exposure to other people they are likely to be working with, to the true corporate culture and to some of the more practical aspects of their new day to day life. It is also the company’s first opportunity to make them feel at home and like a valued new member of the team. Sure, they will know something about the company, they would have had interviews, done research, possibly gone through assessment centres, but this is different. It is a time where a company can ask itself the question “What do we want our employees to think of us?” If you want them to think of you as a company driven by a culture of “death by PowerPoint”, it might be best to stop reading now.

Onboarding does not stop in the first few days after the induction, though many may feel this way. A study for the Academy of Management journal found that the first 90 days of a person’s new job were essential for creating social connections and bonds to the company. If they felt supported during this time, then they felt more positive towards the company.

What Makes Good Onboarding Experiences

Baek and Bramwell of Cornell University conducted research into how you measure the effectiveness of onboarding. They concluded that one of the best measures of an effective onboarding experience was time to proficiency. They defined this as the time it took a new hire to reach full productivity within the context of their role.

For this to happen, a new employee needs to have a structured onboarding experience, with specifically defined outcomes, and an experience that is hopefully engaging to them. At the end of their onboarding employees need to have achieved four clear objectives for the best chance of ongoing success (Bauer et al):

  1. Role Clarity; employees understand their role, expectations with it, how to perform in order to achieve expected results
  2. Self-efficacy; employees feel confident in their ability to perform and contribute
  3. Social integration – employees feel connected, valued & trusted
  4. Knowledge of organisational culture; employees understanding and adjusting to company politics, social norms such as language, goals, values and history.

How We Approach Onboarding

Some are also of the firm belief that onboarding into a new company can (or should) actually start from the day a new employee signs on the dotted line. The time before they step foot on company property is ripe for helping them start to understand some of the basics about their new employer. Much of what would traditionally be done in a conference room over a few days, can be achieved online during the weeks they are waiting to start the new role.

Games and gamification are already being utilised in the attraction phases of recruitment, with games being created to simulate everything from a day in the life of a new employee to testing an employee’s soft skills.

Following that trend into the employment phase of an employee’s journey, we can make use of gamification to create unique and engaging experiences that keep them informed and interested up to and during their first few months of employment.

Creating these kinds of experiences takes time and expertise, balancing the needs and culture of the company with needs of the new employee.

We consider these weeks and months as a quest, creating a structure around what they need to learn and understand early on. Each stage or level of the quest represents new knowledge and experiences that will help them to learn. Focusing on intrinsic motivation, we choose mechanics that support the player’s with social connectedness, education and goals to focus on, all in an environment that promotes exploration and discovery at their own pace. To this we this we add mini-games and interactive learning materials all tied together with interesting narratives and storylines. This gives the players reasons to want to continue rather than just knowing they have to continue.

Good onboarding can lead to higher rates of retention in companies, some statistics quoting as much as 69% higher retention after 3 years for companies with great programmes. It gives employees the opportunity to feel at home and become productive faster. Don’t waste this key opportunity to create a more engaged workforce by relying on traditional or even default methods, simply because “That’s how it’s always been done”.

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Motivait



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