When we work with clients to help them design and deliver brilliant employee experiences, onboarding is very often where we start. Onboarding is more than just orientation to a new organisation; it’s the foundation upon which employee experience is built. A good onboarding experience sets the tone for a new hire’s subsequent journey with an organisation, and can significantly impact engagement, productivity, and retention.
And there is some neuroscience that helps explain why this first impression on new hires is to critical. For example the primacy-recency effect is one of our many cognitive bias explains that people tend to remember the first and last items in a sequence more vividly than those in the middle. In the context of onboarding, the first few days or weeks of an employee’s experience are especially influential. If the onboarding is positive, welcoming, and organised, it creates a strong, favourable first impression that will stay with the new hire. Conversely, a poor start—disorganisation, lack of support, or unclear expectations—can leave a negative imprint that’s hard to overcome. So first impressions really do count.
We were delighted to recently hear from Toby Sinclair on his experiences of improving the onboarding experience at JP Morgan (you can catch up on the webinar here). It is always super helpful to peak behind the curtain and see what companies are doing to improve employee experience and engagement. And this webinar was full of practical advice. Here are just some of the points that really resonated with me:
- Onboarding is not about VR headsets (or indeed any other shiny tech).
I get it, you want to improve onboarding and it’s a big messy, complicated network of inter-related process with multiple stakeholders. And the idea of a tech solution providing a magic bullet to fix all of this is incredibly tempting. But while is some great tech out there which can absolutely support a great onboarding experience, being welcomed into a new organisation is essentially a human experience - Avoid jumping straight to solutions.
You need to take the time to understand the current experience from the perspective of different stakeholders, not just employees, but managers who play a key role and subject matter experts who will support the overall experience, from recruitment, to IT, facilities to talent and more. - Building on the last point, take a people centred approach.
Spend time with different stakeholders to ensure you avoid assumptions about what will and won’t work. Explore the moments that matter with new hires, and this will help you prioritise where to focus your time and energy - Use EX Design tools to help overcome silos.
We know onboarding is a complex and messy experience with multiple stakeholders and sign offs. Navigating this landscape when you’re trying to make improvements can be a challenge. This is where EX design tools can really help. Gathering key players together (online or offline) to map the current journey and consider the ideal future experience is a really effective way to get everyone on the same page and working towards the common good. - Don’t rely on the onboarding survey to tell you how you’re doing.
Consider other metrics such as calls into the help-desk, and retention rates.
So what next? To help you master this critical experience you can:
- Sign up for free to The EX Space to access practical EX design tools to get you started today
- Subscribe to our professional membership to access our all new Onboarding PowerPack which gives you everything you need to design a brilliant experience. From bite-sized videos to practical tools, templates, and best practice examples, this Power-Pack is your all-in-one solution to creating a standout onboarding experience. Get in touch for a tour if you want to know more
- Get in touch with Emma to explore the ways in which People Lab can support you to design and deliver an amazing onboarding experience – we’ve worked with loads of companies to do this, and we’d love to support you.
