30 insights and 3 actions to take your onboarding process to the next level
from the cases presented @Onboard.Amsterdam 2019
On November 28th the Kromhouthal Amsterdam was the location for a spectacular 3nd edition of Onboard.Amsterdam. The very strong line-up and more than 1.000 participants made this years event an amazing experience! Tons of karma points go to @Appical for the great organization!
We're very proud to be a partner of Onboard.Amsterdam. This year we were present as the moderator of the Future of work stage and speaker at the Demo Dome. The rest of our team was at Onboard.Amsterdam as a visitor. With our Yes! We Connect team we spread out to the different stages and tried to gather as many useful insights as possible. We have analyzed the stories of @Tony’s-Chocolonely, @Zoku, @Swapfiets, @Zalando, @TicketSwap, @Heineken, @Euler-Hermes, @Royal-Netherlands-Air-Force. We harvested 30 insights for you to enjoy and contemplate. At the end you also find 3 actions to start right away to streamline your onboarding process!
Be purpose driven
1. Financial success is a means to reach the goal
Tony’s Chocolonely’s purpose is not te make their chocolate slave free, but to make the whole industry slave free. Financial success is just a means to reach the goal. During their onboarding new hires take a deep dive into Tony’s Time. To learn all about this purpose. Your onboarding process, your appearance, what you convey, everything you do should match your purpose.
2. Connect people and ideas
Hans Meyer: "Zoku connects people and ideas. With this in mind we radically redesigned the experience for business travellers abroad. Since 2016 this can be experienced in Amsterdam, soon to be followed by Vienna, Copenhagen, and... The redesign itself is also done in close connection with business travellers. To be able to provide the best experience for guests it is extremely important to have great people that give our guest a genuine warm welcome."
3. Be fan fanatical
TicketSwap is on a journey to becoming the world’s favorite platform for fans to buy and sell tickets. Their goal is to make buying and selling secondhand tickets easy, honest and safe. Their customers are fans, but they are fans themselves as well. They are🕺Fan Fanatical - The experience of their fans comes first. At TicketSwap everybody joins support ½ day each month. This collaboration with different departments gives a lot of insights to improve the service for their fans.
4. Think globally, act locally
Adam Corey co-founder of The Edison Restaurant: “My people don’t just work in a restaurant. They are part of a team that is doing good for the community. That’s why the team comes up with better ideas to become more sustainable every day.’’
Put your people first
5. It’s all about connecting people
Swapfiets started in Januari 2018 with 8 employees, at this moment they have grown to 160 employees. They are continuously focussing on attracting the smartest people. Coen Dieckman of Swapfiets: ”How do we give everyone the feeling that they matter? It’s all about connecting people to (existing) processes and create purpose in their jobs. Happy People = Awesome service.”
6. Listening to colleagues
According to TicketSwap, The Future of Work is listening to colleagues. Are you happy? Do you feel valued and appreciated? Do you wake up to happily go to work again? What are your needs? What do we need to focus on to remain a great employer? The answers of the these questions resulted in 5 focus themes: Learning & Development, Recognition, Social gatherings, Volunteering, Sustainability. For the theme Recognition they created compliment cards to praise their colleagues, they introduced employee awards for giving recognition and they use the platform Impraise to develop their people.
7. People are the heart of your company
Kay Goedhardt, Global Talent Acquisition lead Technology Heineken: “People are the heart of our company, respect for each other is important. We believe great moments of shared experiences are the best in life. Every month we organise activities such as meetup’s at the office: Meet the master brewers, brew your own beer, get connected to the heart & soul of Heineken. We also organize team challenges and inspiration days.” How do you keep your parttime staff engaged and motivate? Kay’s answer: “Don't treat them differently!”
8. Personal attention it is
Zoku's values are a strong guideline for the people that work at Zoku: take care, be the bus driver, above and beyond, sunny side up and always beta. The onboarding journey at Zoku is mapped out in detail and consists of a lot of personal attention from other Zoku employees for the new hires.
9. Be serious about people
Ynzo van Zanten: “We are crazy about chocolate, but we are serious about people. We are serious about the farmers, our employees and consumers. We don’t do satisfaction surveys. We just ask our employees: How happy are you? Not just at work but all about you? How can we help you to become happier? And as for our customers. The whole Tony’s team will pick up the phone, we will never annoy you with a dial 1 for … message. ;-)’’
10. A people centric approach is a must
Serhat Kakci of Euler Hermes: ‘‘Focus on people in this digital era. If you don’t have a people centric approach you will fail. At Euler Hermes people are the ‘Tree Trunk”. They are skilled, empowered, valued and united.’’
The onboarding process
11. Onboarding is a gateway
Swapfiets creates an environment where onboarding is THE gateway to help employees execute their jobs in the most effective way. Paying attention doesn’t stop when they are onboard. Their onboarding tips are:
Keep onboarding in the centre of attention
Assign onboarding to a dedicated person
Allocate time to get to know systems/structures
Don’t overwhelm the new hires with training & tools
Show them your operations
Evaluate.
12. Not onboarding but boarding!
Joanne van Ditmarsch & Ellen Meeuwsen-Scholten talk about Boarding at the Royal Netherlands Air Force. You should be talking about boarding and not only onboarding: Preboarding, Onboarding, Crossboarding, Offboarding and Afterboarding. Stay connected with the new hire. Your first impression is everything. Don’t overload the first day with TO much information, TO much new faces and NO interaction.
Every 3 years you Crossboard: you change jobs or location and therefore join a new team. We are not a group of individuals, we work as a team. We challenge you to be flexible and develop yourself. Employees can design their future themselves and an employability advisor helps you taking the next steps.
13. Define your goals
During the onboarding at Tony’s Chocolonely you take a deep dive into Tony’s Time and a shallow dive to get to know your colleagues. Zalando’s goal is to make sure their new hires are mentally refreshed and excited to join. At TicketSwap they want you to have Fanatical start. Day 1 is about the purpose: Fan Fanatical. On day 2 you join the life support team to get insights and learn about questions of fans. And on day 3 you join the after sales team. What went wrong, how can we still have a happy buyer and seller? Another part of their onboarding process is a bingo game. For example at TicketSwap Sriracha Sauce is THE holy grail. So during your onboarding time you have te eat at least once something with Sriracha.
Diversity and inclusion: Welcome everyone!
14. Think holistically
Sarah Cordivano of Zalando was all about inclusive onboarding. It is essential to design an onboarding process that is inclusive of different needs of your new employees. Sarah gave a lot of great recommendations of what can be done, but she also emphasized it will be more about thinking holistically of the onboarding process with an eye for inclusion. Create an environment of respect, connection and community, where all people can feel respected and valued.
Below we share the best practices she mentioned:
15. Be transparant about your values. Applicants have a choice. It is not just about location and salary. Also about values. So you have to be transparent about your values. Make sure your job description is inclusive and you have a hiring team that are unbiased and from different backgrounds. Make fair offers: no gender or other pay gaps.
16. As a team sent a welcome mail. 1 week prior to the fist week of the new hire. This adds to psychological safety, you feel more welcome and it costs nothing.
17. Include partners & families. Especially with relocation, onboarding is about the entire family. If they aren’t happy they are not going to stay. Put yourself in their shoes and provide an inclusive and diverse guide to the city with tips and help for housing, day-care, churches, yoga schools etc.
18. Provide a site map for the 1st week to make things less stressful. Pay extra attention to services for disabled people. Include: prayer rooms, family rooms, toilets etc. You don’t want people to say after a year: “Oh I didn’t know we had a family room.”
19. Create a method to record names and pronouns. Names in legal documents might be different form preferred names, especially for trans. You want to use the name your new hires identifies themselves with. If you use the wrong name that has a huge impact on them, it can be an attack on their identity to be called by their old name. Same goes for pronouns: “she/her”, “he/him”, “they/their”, “ze/zir”… You can visible share it or for example start a meeting by sharing preferred pronouns. Do not assume gender based on how people seem to look.
20. Work with buddies for comfort and safety.
21. Let a diverse group share their stories during onboarding. You make new hires see themselves represented in the company. If you don’t have a diverse group to do this, then start working on that!
22. Make joining to resource groups as easy as possible. Women, LBTQ+, black employees, … These resource groups give a sense of community and create a clear line of communication. If you want to work on improving your inclusion strategy for example with services for disabled people. Just ask your communities for advise.
23. Organize intercultural experiences. At Zalando we have: “This is My Culture” weekly lunch series. Employees give a presentation of their home culture. This creates great knowledge. It is an inclusive and intercultural experience. For example today is thanksgiving. This event is not only for Americans but for all people wo want to learn about this. Last week we had event about an Indian Feast.
24. Empower employees with training & tools. Help employees with unbiased communication. We have 75 resource books in our library. These are not a huge investment. But people can learn how to communicate in an inclusive way. Our inclusive communication guide was really successful because it was a simple tool to help people feel more confident. Leaders are role models if they want it or not. So give them the tools to be that role model. At Zalando we don’t have an obligated training about inclusion. We integrated inclusion in other trainings. In this way it’s not an add on, but part of Zalando’s culture.
25. Empower teams We had new joiner who was deaf. You have to think about audio as a whole and not only details as having subtitels. You need to empower the team for this, they could for example learn some sign language. Then a welcoming lunch with the team will make the persons feel included.
26. Ask for feedback and take the feedback to the heart. Be transparent & accessible. For example make reporting of discrimination as easy as possible.
27. Make inclusion part of your organizational culture. Inclusion is not a one time effort. It should be part of the companies culture. It takes time to make incremental progress. The biggest challenge often is capacity. So prioritize what could have the highest impact. Then trial & error what in fact has the highest impact. Inclusion is not a checklist but a continuous exercise in empathy. Challenge yourself to widen your own views. Empathize and connect with experience of others.
28. Each of us has a very unique story
Mounia Houari of Groei-IT: ‘‘People might look the same but they are raised in different families. Each of us has a very unique story. We only get to know people if we take time for these stories. If you now each other’s why. You really know how to work together. Employee wellness is not about Tesla’s or yoga. Its’ important to be accepted and feel connected. Then you will feel ok! If people don’t feel at home, they will find another home.’’ How can we create “moments” were we can build a personal relationship with people who aren’t open? Mounia: “They are probably not open because they do not feel save. Open up first, create a save environment, be patient. Start off with your story and maybe they will share theirs.”
Measure your impact
29. The importance of onboarding
Euler Hermes emphasises the importance of onboarding based on numbers form different reports.
It costs about 1,5 times an employees’ annual salary to replace that employee when he/she leaves. (Rockwell Collins Report)
A good pre- & onboarding process increases employees’ retention with 25% and improves employees' performance with 11%. (Erasmus University)
The chances to bind new employees to the company longer than 3 years increases by 69% with a good onboarding process. (Weave).
30. Your effort is paying back in the productivity of the employees
According to the Royal Netherlands Air Force: 54% of the new hires is more productive after a good onboarding process.
3 Actions to streamline your onboarding process
Hearing all these insights at Onboard.Amsterdam we concluded that you could start with the following 3 actions to streamline your onboarding process:
1. (Re)design your onboarding program
Are you starting up onboarding in your organization or do you already have an onboarding program in place? In both cases it is wise to have a thorough look at the setup. The most important question is: “What are the needs of your new hires in each step of the onboarding process?” By taking on the perspective of your new employee you will find out what they really need. In many cases it turns out that the onboarding process that is designed from an organizational perspective does not fulfill the needs of your new hires.
We can help you set up an Onboarding Design Session for your organization. Or you can join us for the Masterclass Onboarding in 1 Day.
2. Make a mark with your introduction day
Shouldn’t the introduction day be the best working day in the lives of your new hires? If you get it right the introduction day is a strong way to pass on your corporate culture and at the same time give room to your new hires to flourish.
At Onboard.Amsterdam we shared our insights in the Demo Dome. You can read all about in the e-book titled: 6 must do’s for the introduction day. Enjoy reading!
3. Calculate, measure, evaluate and repeat
Have a business plan in place for onboarding. This will be your guide in continuously improving your onboarding program. To help you get started with the business plan we created an ROI calculator for onboarding:
With this calculator you can find out what the total costs in your organization are for recruitment and onboarding. You can also set up a plan in the calculator that resembles the situation after your organization invested in a new onboarding plan. So find out for yourself what your expected savings will be!
If you need any help with onboarding, please feel free to contact me.
Frank Philips
Phone: +31 6 41189753
E-mail: frank@yesweconnect.nl