4 Practical Ideas to Make the Onboarding Experience More Personal

It's the question most HR pros have: how can I make the onboarding experience more personal for new hires? In this video, learning expert John Helmer shares four practical ways that you can make the onboarding experience more personal, such as using psychological theories to structure the orientation and onboarding process.

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Transcript:
If you want to make the onboarding experience more personal for new hires, a good place to start with is focusing on your own experience. What was your first day at work like? Did they make you fill in loads of forms and talk at you all day? Or, alternatively, did you learn something really valuable through the experiences you had there about the values of that organization?

Getting the values across is really key in induction. However, you can't ignore the fact that new starters will have a lot of practical worries on their mind that you sort of have to get out the way before you can get them to focus on anything more abstract. Like, where do I hang my coat? Where do I park my car? Where’s my desk? Are the people here friendly are hostile? Is there someone I can ask a stupid question of, and they won't make me feel stupid for asking it? And so on.

Some people use Maslow's hierarchy of needs to structure inductions. This goes from physiological needs, like “Where do I go to the loo?”, through safety, belonging, esteem to self-actualization.

I've used this to help design a conference, the user experience for a conference and it worked very well as a design tool. The point is that the organization's values shouldn't just be a tick list, think about the experiences you want people to have that are going to show them about the values that you can weave into that story. Less tell, more show.

Another important thing is, perhaps, to make it active. One retail firm got inductees to make a video documentary about the organization that they were joining. They gave them a camera and said, “Okay, go away and interview anybody in the company you’d like, from the CEO downwards, and find out about the organization you're joining and tell us about it”. That's, I think, a really good approach.

When you start a new job, you've got a lot of energy. You want to get your teeth into things, so channeling that energy into a particular task like that makes it very useful and you will learn very quickly as you're doing that, about the organization that you're joining and about its values.

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