Revisiting Employee Onboarding With Empathy And Agility

Companies across the globe have different formats of on-boarding; some theoretically structured and some replicating a tried and tested template but very rarely, carefully thought through. The initial days of an employee’s on-boarding leave imprints that go way deep into an employee’s engagement with his/her fellow employees and sets the tone for expectation and delivery in the professional capacity. While it seems obvious to give more attention to it, but more often than not, the HR Partners and the CXOs let this stage be ‘staged’ in tandem with undefined norms leaving it to individual's free-will. Autonomy without structure can’t create excellence, can it?

Across the stages of onboarding, the employee’s needs are different and they evolve gradually as one grows comfortable. Here’s the journey that most employees stride along before a greater integration into the organization.

These might vary from company to company, depending on the kind of employees one wants to groom. But the fact remains is that organizations have to define these personas and then sketch the objectives of on-boarding in alignment.

Broadly, the objectives of Onboarding are -

1. To outline the company’s values and mission to the new joinee.
2. To create an amicable experience and foster excitement for the new joinee and their fellow colleagues.
3. To introduce the work and design a personalized learning + contribution mapping in line with the company’s goals.

In an employee’s lifecycle, all the defining moments with the organization’s journey have been to be integrated seamlessly to help the new joinee understand the organizational and functional structures. It is extremely crucial for a new employee to know whom to reach out to for what. To create pockets of employee collaboration, a predefined working relationship and functional integration have to be established as soon as possible, not waiting for a few months to ‘settle in’.

To establish a sense of comfort for a new joinee and to welcome them in a non-threatening way, there has to be a common space for conversations. To recognize the new joinee and widen one’s scope to blend with the organization's capabilities, an end-to-end HRMS comes in handy. It sets a structure and creates precedents which inherently becomes a part of the organization’s culture.

Automate what can be automated

The opportunity is this. Starting from recordkeeping of employee assets to delegating tasks of project allocation, from hand-held learning to setting KRAs for evaluation, everything can be made more convenient and efficient through automation. This saved time and energy can go into familiarizing the employee with the cultural patterns and a lot more personal nurturing whenever it’s identified or asked for. Since every employee has a limited bandwidth individually; delegating tasks to field experts across departments for on-boarding can give track-able tasks to a 'team' instead of a bigger task for an employee or two. It then becomes the leaders' responsibility to set grounds for an integrated on-boarding instead of letting them figure out how they can make the best use of their organization’s time (which can be a lethal non-sync in expectations).

On-boarding is a significant landmark and is the first of all steps (quite literally), that may go into a long-lasting employee relationship. Make sure that first touch point becomes a stepping stone in creating trust and comfort for the employees, reliability, and accountability for the company.

We, at Darwinbox, have created an interesting way of designing a user-intuitive onboarding experience.

Curious? Schedule a demo today!