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Let’s Get Personal: A new kind of employee onboarding experience with Gnowbe

Melissa Yeo

In today’s employee-centric job market, how can your organization stand out?
If you’re thinking that your company’s branding or benefits package will suffice in attracting the hottest talent… you’re wrong. The secret lies in your onboarding program.

No period in the employment lifecycle is more important than an employee’s first few months on the job. This period is the new staff’s first foray into the day-to-day life of an employee in your company. It is also one of the most important opportunities to make an impression on the new hires, and transform them into loyal employees with the potential and know-how to make a positive impact on the business.

Done well, onboarding is one of the best accelerators to ensuring new hires get up to speed in half the time.

An effective onboarding process ideally accelerates the time employees need to acquire the skills, knowledge and mindset needed to become an effective member of the team; this is true even while ensuring an engaging employee experience and minimizing the administrative workload for the company.

Sounds like a far-fetched dream? Great news. It’s possible.

The key to achieving all of this is personalization.

Personalization onboarding experience

What it really means In many companies, personalization looks very much like this {Hello {name}! Welcome to {company’s name}. We’re so happy that you’ve decided to join {team name}!]. At a more refined level, onboarding is crafted to a particular job profile.  However, for authentic personalization to occur, the onboarding experience should be tailored to the new employee’s prior knowledge and experiences. Unfortunately, such cases are few and very far in between.

Here’s why it matters – People are radically different. Hence, assuming the concept of a fast-food nation when it comes to onboarding, where processes are standardized and normalized, is unlikely to set your new hires up for success.

Let’s walk through a common scenario together: Two new hires have just joined your team. As the person in charge of onboarding, how can you design the onboarding process to ensure that both individuals don’t bear the tediousness of working through “superfluous” onboarding material covering content they already know, or worse still, don’t need.

Let’s break this down further – New to your company and team, these individuals will have to:

  • Learn about general things like the company culture, vision and strategy
  • Get comfortable with the working style and productivity tools youuse, like Asana
  • Familiarize themselves with knowledge specific to the role they have been hired for  

Now, a problem arises because both new joiners will have individual knowledge and starting points. For starters,

  • Both staff have been hired to take on roles in different teams
  • One knows how to use Asana but the other doesn’t

So as the onboarding designer, what possible solutions do you have?

Option 1 – Have both new hires complete the same generic onboarding program. It works, but let’s be honest, it’s not an ideal option since both would have to work through things they already know, making the process unnecessarily time-consuming, disengaging and overall, just tedious.

Option 2 – Create an onboarding experience unique to the needs of the individual. This would score high in the areas of engagement, utility and relevance BUT would take a great deal of time and effort.

As it turns out, both options seem to have their shortfalls.
Is there a 3rd option, a magic bullet?

At Gnowbe, we believe there is, and have created it by developing a standardized onboarding program that could be easily shaped into various different versions depending on the interest, skills and needs of every single new, and individual, employee. Specifically, we created content in the areas which we felt new hires would need to get well versed in, such as:

  • General company knowledge
  • Tool knowledge
  • Product knowledge
  • Role-specific knowledge

Prepared once, these sessions could be pieced together repeatedly, in different configurations, to create different onboarding tracks for every single new hire.

Is this really possible? Yes, it is.
Let us show you how:

Personalized learning provides that critical preparation for learners, and in the process keeps them engaged and excited about learning.

Key benefits of better employee onboarding experience

  • Bring staff up to speed up to 70% faster, as they only go through material that they actually need
  • Time spent finding, completing and submitting paperwork is reduced by ⅔, as employees can access all necessary documents online
  • Minimize mental burnout and improve your staff’s capacity for short-term memory by 4x, by leveraging bite-sized content and allowing learners to go through short and focused sessions
  • Allow learners to participate in their own learning through built-in reflection activities and the group share board, which encourages them to take ownership of their learning, in addition to giving them the outlet to express themselves
  • Allow learners to assess their own learning progress with quizzes and periodic check-ins – Uncover skill spikes and improvement areas, making it possible for you to collaboratively design a personalized learning plan with the new hire from the get-go
  • Keep your onboarding team informed, with quiz results and evaluation ratings providing both qualitative and quantitative feedback, providing them with actionable insight to continually make improvements.

Sounds like something your company needs?

Your own personalized onboarding experience is only 1 call away 😊

Send us some information about your current onboarding situation as well as some material (optional) and we’ll prepare a short demo based on your company’s material. You may reach out here.

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