It’s your first day at a new job that you are excited to begin, and upon your arrival, it seems like no one was expecting you at all. There’s no onboarding process and you are left on your own. This isn’t the way new hires should be welcomed, but sadly this happens all too often.
Onboarding begins before the new hire sets foot in the door on their first day. So are you prepared to make a good impression?
In this 30-minute webinar, Make Blended Learning Work for Onboarding, Cammy Bean, Kineo US VP of Learning Design, and Chip Cleary, VP of Solutions & Consulting share tips and insights for designing a blended program for new joiners.
4. 4
Thanks for the inputs of our clients!
Based on our guides
Now with more “worked examples”
5. 55
Poll
Think about your corporate onboarding program as it exists today.
How would you characterize it?
o We don’t have one
o An event
o A blended program that starts at the joining date
o A blended program that starts pre-joining
6. 66
Poll
Here are some typical goals for onboarding programs. Think about your goals.
What do you see as your single biggest opportunity? To better …
o Welcome the employee to the tribe and build relationships
o Reinforce that he/she made a great decision in joining
o Share “how we work here”
o Share critical “getting started” policies and processes
o Build job-specific capabilities
o Other [please enter a comment in the chat]
8. 88
In short …
Run a campaign … start before Day 1
Be human … share stories
Clarify the journey … provide a map
Provide a home … reflect your personality
Mind what matters … invest in key roles
19. 1919
In short …
Run a campaign … start before Day 1
Be human … share stories
Clarify the journey … provide a map
Provide a home … reflect your personality
Mind what matters … invest in key roles
20. 2020
Chip Cleary
VP of Solutions & Consulting
chip.cleary@kineo.com
Your hosts
Cammy Bean
VP of Learning Design
cammy.bean@kineo.com
@cammybean
[Chip]
Welcome, welcome!
We have a simple premise: Blended learning is going mainstream. It’s crossing the chasm from the early days with few adopters and more smoke than heat to becoming a part of the everyday ways in which organizations drive learning and performance.
That‘s taken awhile and, at this knee-bend in it’s maturity curve, some organizations are deep into it and others are just getting started.
Today, we are holding the third session in a webinar series to help share something we hope will be the single most useful thing to companies seeking to further adopt blended learning: providing worked examples. Each session provides 30 minutes of worked examples on a particular domain. We’ve covered leadership and sales. Today is onboarding. In three weeks we’ll follow up with our final session, on compliance.
We’ll spend 5 minutes on introductions, 15 to 20 minutes on sharing, and then leave some time for Q&A. Thanks for joining, let’s dig in.
[Joint: Chip to intro]
[Chip]
Part of C&G Group.
[Cammy]
We’re hoping to advance the thrill of blended learning by sharing out the best practices we’re seeing.
We started that with our guides and are trying to move ahead with these webinars.
This is a new format … 30 minutes … so we are going to keep it snappy. Please post your questions as we go along. Our hope is to leave time at the end to tackle them.
[Cammy to summarize. Sabrina to run poll]
Let’s get a sense for where the group is starting from today. Think about your onboarding program as . That will likely be a complex set of programs. Try to boil it down for where you are today. Which description would be the best for most of your programs?
“If you had to pick one box.”
[Cammy to summarize. Sabrina to run poll]
Now let’s get a sense of where you would like to go. What brings you to the session today?
[Chip]
A tension we see across onboarding programs is between the goals of the organization and the goals of the new joiner.
Your organization often wants to make sure that new joiners understand the rules and how to get the work done. That’s different from new joiners who want to develop a sense of belonging and gain confidence that they made a good decision.
You can tick the box on both … but it means taking a staged approach.
[Chip]
Here are the key points we’ll cover today about blended approaches to onboarding. What we’ll show in the next few minutes are “worked examples” around these points.
[Cammy]
One key idea is that “onboarding” starts even before “Day 1”. You can consider it to start the moment the new joiner accepts your job offer.
Here’s an example from a hospitality organization, Guoman.
It outlines what’s expected of them in their first few weeks.
It’s structured as an eZine/eMag that provides a fun way of delivering practical messages that welcomes new staff to the team, outlines what’s required of them, the journey they are on and what to expect over the coming weeks. Uses a mix of audio, video and traditional elearning, addressing the Guoman induction principles of Belonging, Believing, Behaving and Beginning.
If you were joining, would you want to get this the day you hit send on your acceptance email?
[Chip]
Often, corporate onboarding programs focus on “hard” things: rules, HR procedures and so on. But new joiners want the “soft side” … which is often best conveyed by stories.
Part of the onboarding journey can be connecting new joiners to people inside the organization to share stories. This can come in the form of live activities … for example when we at Kineo onboard new joiners, we set up a structure in which the new joiner interviews key team members to understand the stories of some recent work they’ve done.
And in larger organizations, we can use technology to help. Consider this example. This is actually from an elearning resource that was not planned as part of an onboarding experience. But it could readily be. This video wall allows a new joiner to rapidly experience the stories of a variety of team members in various roles across the organization. What a great way to see what people in the company care about!
[Chip]
Here’s another example from EasyJet, which is the UK’s largest airline.
In such organizations, it can be impractical to get one-on-one connects with people in different parts of the company. Again, technology can help.
Joining a complicated organization like an airline? Want to know who all those other people are and what they do?
[Cammy]
For those of you in organizations that run orientation as a 2-day event, you realize this approach has one really nice feature: it’s easy to explain and easy to deliver.
Now, when we create a blended learning onboarding journey that involves a campaign, we create a big challenge. All of a sudden, our solution has a lot of pieces. See the tiny print? Don’t sweat the details … each box represents a different step on this organization’s onboarding journey.
Given a complex program like this, how can we help our new joiners understand what they have done? What they need to do next? After all, they’re *already* probably confused and overwhelmed. Doesn’t that come with starting a new job?
[Cammy]
Well, provide a map.
Here’s an example from a recent client proposal.
We can break down the detail to make it simple for joiners to see where they are and what to accomplish next. Such a map is critical for a blended onboarding program.
[Cammy]
And here’s another example. This is from the City & Guilds Way. This is a program in which people new to the workforce earn a qualification.
Here also we provide a map.
But once you have a map, you can also push it farther. You can build on top of the activities on the map to add an extra layer of engagement and competition – ideal for our target audience here –an engagement layer.
Here, new joiners earn points and badges as they complete key tasks. You can set “extra challenges” as we do here so that new joiners can earn bonus points.
[Chip]
So, once we have a campaign and a journey, where do we house it? One thing we know we want is to create a great impression. Our new joiner will be wondering, “What kind of organization have I joined?”
The natural place for a “journey” to sit may be your LMS. But sometimes, you may not like the user experience that your existing LMS offers. Well, it can be worth creating a new portal to house the onboarding experience. That allows you to reflect your personality.
Let’s look at an example. We mentioned easyJet before. Here are some screenshots of their portal.
It starts with an introductory video wall, then a welcome from their CEO, Carolyn McCall. Includes testimonials, interactive timelines, real staff talking to camera and interactive exercises that explore what it’s like to work at easyJet, its history and how staff can achieve their ambitions. A great example of quality art direction and learning design developed in Storyline.
Here’s another example for TUI, which provides travel services. This is part of an onboarding and support portal for a key role, travel advisers.
A truly unique, visually appealing solution that rivals the very best travel brochures and websites. Along with the TUI brand and a carefully-honed tone of voice, the solution uses the power of narrative - anecdotes, examples and shared experiences – with rich media, including video and photographic images. Challenges and competitions provide a competitive edge. The solution has proved so popular that advisers even use it when dealing with customers!
To make it portable, we developed the assets using Adapt which gives us responsive HTML5 multi-device delivery.
A third example from BUPA. Building on what makes recruits apply to work at Bupa, using great design to bring Bupa’s vision, values and work to life.
[Chip]
Finally, you may have noticed that some of our examples combine general induction with role specific. For example, the TUI platform was really tailored for travel advisors. That’s only one of TUI’s roles … although a disproportionately important one.
If your organization has one or a few roles that are really critical and you want to improve retention and accelerate onboarding, don’t be afraid to follow the money.
Here’s another example, Countrywide.
As the UK’s leading provider of integrated property services, Countrywide employs around 11,300 people nationwide, all with industry training requirements. To help uplift and improve the onboarding, induction and continuous professional development (CPD) provided to the team, Countrywide partnered with City & Guilds Kineo.
Countrywide’s goal was to create a development pathway for the Countrywide team to recognise and professionalise their skill sets to become the best in the industry as well as raising the profile of the AgencyPro system and increasing customer recognition, creating a unique selling point.
This project allowed Countrywide to deliver it’s onboarding in bite-sized pieces throughout induction … while also going beyond to create a custom qualification. For this UK company, we developed a custom Level 2 qualification in Residential Property Sales. Achieving this qualification starts employees on their journey to becoming professionally recognised by their peers, with a clear path for progression within the organisation.
[Chip]
So, stepping back, these are the “worked examples” we’ve shown today.
What I like about these examples is that they point towards an approach that really combines one-on-one human elements and scalable cost-efficient ways to meet the very different needs of both new joiners and the organization.
OK, let’s pause there. We’d love to hear from you. What goals would you add to this list? What questions do you have for us?
[Chip]
Time for questions … Sabrina to offer up from the feed.