How do you adapt your culture and values onboarding to different roles, teams, and locations?

In my experience, when planning an onboarding journey, you have to decide what the audience you are recruiting from needs to know on their first day and aim to teach no more before they begin. Overloading with information on skills just adds anxiety. Then plan a journey with the managers on how the contextual skills get built over time, building mastery, autonomy and purpose in to each stage of the lifecycle and having a good and transparent framework so that team members can review, adjust and personalise their journey as they go.

Onboarding and orientation and assimilation and integration are part of the process and agree that it goes beyond day one and week one and month one. We remember so many moments from those first few days and hours and we often forget to refresh those sensations. We also get caught up in work quickly so our full assimilation to the team (meeting the right people the right way) can get lost. Love the comment above on gamification as well. It’s important to feed into the needs of each person too - ask them what they like during onboarding. Set the goals and expectations from the start and add to your success portrait!

One thing that is helpful is to create a gamification profile for every employee and learn about their intrinsic motivations, likes and dislikes, hobbies etc. Small gestures can sky rocket retention. As an HR / Talent Acquisition Executive with 11+ years of experience I learned that DoorDashing a sick employee some Dominos Pizza or surprising your high performer with a Nebraska Huskers Game is more meaningful than a huge end of year bonus or an expensive Christmas Party.

Customize the onboarding materials: Create customized onboarding materials that are tailored to specific roles, teams, and locations. This could include videos, presentations, or training modules that are specific to the job function, team, or geographic location. By tailoring the materials to specific audiences, you can ensure that the onboarding process is relevant and engaging.

Incorporate local customs and traditions: Incorporate local customs and traditions into the onboarding process to make it more relatable and engaging for new hires. For example, if you have offices in different countries, you can incorporate local traditions and customs into the onboarding process to help new hires feel more connected to the local culture.

I'm a huge believer in having a "fun budget" and creating memories with new hires. This will not only increase work moral but will also foster creativity and innovation within a work space.

Constructive feedback and appreciation for their efforts can go a long way in helping the new hire assimilate into the organizational work culture. These frequent check ins can also be helpful for the organization in learning and gaining from the new hire’s previous experience.

Feedback is important, to receive it and provide it, especially giving your feedback of how the onboarding process is going to someone else than your online manager.

This is one of the most important aspects of the ongoing onboarding process and when done properly the web of belonging is strong and sticky and it becomes quite tough for people to leave organizations. There are formal, structured programs that can be put in place and now many tools can also be utilized. @Richard Rosenow can talk in much detail to the #HRtech space as well.

Building intercompany connections is even more crucial if most employees are WFH. At my company, we have peer mentor programs and leadership programs for new or aspiring leaders. We also have a handful of Teams channels that are focused on different interests, video gaming, plants, pets, and more. A popular addition has been our Life At Trupanion Instagram account with a ton of fun employee-generated content.

Allow for networking time and create the right opportunities! It’s about learning form people and getting the inside info that you don’t get from the onboarding program.

Every training is only value-added when it specifically ties to reinforcement of organizational values. I use a see, do, review technique. See: Recommend they view a video, read a book, listen to a podcast or participate in a training event; Do: Provide an opportunity to apply knowledge with a direct assignment and Review: Have participants explain to their peers what they learned, how they applied the learning, how it ties to our values and how it impacted their team. In this way, every learning experience becomes an opportunity to empower all teammates to become culture champions.

We worked with a company to set up their onboarding company and the initial outline that they had in place or in mind was not at all what the employees needed. We did some user interviews and went to the place of work to “test the process” and found it would have been a disaster. So many people and processes were left out. It’s important to have all stakeholders involved in some capacity in the process. Iterating is fine - continuously improvising helped successful companies get to where they are today.

It’s an ongoing process of fine tuning and a adjusting all the time. Different people have different needs whether it’s by function, scope, geography, age, gender etc