The Onboarding Experience Template

What if onboarding could be personalized, fun, and actually useful? Here’s a plan for doing just that.

In many (see: most) companies, the lack of attention paid to an employee’s first week serves as a wasted opportunity to include and appreciate a new team member and capitalize on their excitement for the new role to create something productive for the team.

Think about the sheer number of start dates and grapple with the reality that a typical first day is composed of a series of unaspiring moments and awkward small talk.

Take this dramatized example as context:

Allie’s First Week, Current State

On her first day, Allie is asked to show up and check in with the front desk, who didn’t know that Allie would be starting in the first place.

After playing a bit of phone tag, Allie is led back to a barren desk a few minutes later (her boss has not yet arrived to the office), where she’s told to review the ethics and compliance manual for the next several hours.

Eventually, a friendly person from the floor introduces herself and whisks Allie around the office, managing to interrupt various different people to introduce her. As a result, Allie worries that she has managed to annoy every one of her colleagues on her first day of employment.

The manager arrives and notes just “what a crazy week” it is and sends her a series of “onboarding documents” and asks Allie to take the week to review the documents and complete the HR New Hire Trainings.

Oh, and there’s also a team lunch planned Wednesday to welcome her to the team with an undefined group of people she’s yet to meet.

Allie leaves the office at the end of her first week feeling a bit unsettled and very unsure of where she fits in her new team structure.

What if the New Hire Experience was re-imagined to capitalize on new hire energy and provide opportunities for fresh eyes to poke at old processes to encourage innovative thought and imagination?

Allie’s First Week, Reimagined

The experience begins weeks prior to Allie’s start date, when she receives a couple of personally tailored resources (pro-tip: I’ve found success providing a couple relevant books and/or organization swag) in the mail.

Alongside these small gifts are two handwritten notes: The first is from the team’s leader, thanking Allie for choosing to work with this specific team and expressing the team’s excitement for her official start date.

The other is a message from her mentor, introducing herself, sharing some of the basics (e.g., where to go, what to wear, when to arrive on your first day), and telling Allie that she will be met in the building’s lobby at 9am.

Over the course of Allie’s first week, the team gathers to run through a series of team-building activities, content-rich boot camps, and immersive workshop experiences, culminating in a short, yet powerful “personal workshop” alongside the new hire.

Part team building, part structured workshop, a team member (serving as facilitator) runs the new hire and team through a series of specific activities designed to identify potential gaps in the team’s current construction/outputs/skill sets to which Allie can most add value.

By the Friday of her first week, Allie leaves the office incredibly excited at the prospect of the defined value she can add to the team and at the opportunity to meet with and experience her new team members firsthand.

The Challenge

To create an immersive, exceptional series of moments that

a) immediately provide a new hire with concrete evidence of the collaborative, accelerated culture of the organization he/she is joining;

b) allow the new hire to meet many of her colleagues (many of whom are distributed across various offices) from the get-go, immediately building trust, confidence, and camaraderie; and

c) create a “personal action plan” that lays out an ambitious yet accomplishable series of opportunities with which Allie can augment the team’s capabilities and offerings in their first 100 days, giving Allie some tangible “skin in the game” from Week One.

The Onboarding Experience Template

1) Run a StrengthsFinder assessment with the candidate to be completed 1 week prior to start:

This quick assessment identifies a person’s unique sequence of 34 themes of talent and details how individuals can best work with and interact with one another on a team.

It is used as a cost-effective strategy for quantifying individual’s unique traits, skills, and growth areas, and providing clear, data-driven insights into how they can best support and advance the causes of the broader team.

Building this type of methodology into new hire criteria is a fast, fun, and cost-effective way to build camaraderie with the team from Day 1, and create a clear “lay of the land” for new hires in how best to work with their new colleagues moving forward.

2) Host trainings, boot camps, and workshops over the new hire’s first week, culminating in a one-day “personal workshop”:

a. Team Bootcamp/Our Approach: Although the broader company likely offers its own onboarding experience, it’s also critical to ensure that new hires joining your team understand your specific approach for identifying, iterating on, and solving problems, which may diverge from that of the broader organization.

This workshop, to be delivered on Day 1, offers a series of interactive content on your specific approach, and myriad case studies of how you’ve applied it to your clients, with plenty of time for Q&A.

b. Hands-On Mock Challenge: Week 1 should be immersive, experiential, and hands-on.

As such, there’s a novel opportunity here to use a rapid decision-making exercise like the Lightning Decision Jam (i.e., an hourlong, rapid solution generation exercise) to have some fun in exploring a mock internal/client challenge (or even a challenge that the team may currently be grappling with and could use some surface-level ideation on).

This gives the new hire immediate, firsthand experience into the type of team, culture, and work that they’ve decided to join.

c. Culture Workshop: Inspired by the founders of Google’s People Analytics team, this workshop is designed to introduce the idea that jobs are not static sculptures, but rather flexible building blocks.

The workshop begins by providing various examples of individuals becoming “architects of their own careers,” customizing their tasks and relationships to better align with their interests, skills, and values (e.g., the artistic salesperson volunteering to design a team logo or the extraverted financial analyst communicating with clients using video chat instead of email).

From there, new hires look at their familiar jobs in unfamiliar ways, and set out to create a new vision of their roles that was more “ideal” but still realistic. (Note: Googlers who were randomly assigned to go through this workshop, and think about their jobs as “malleable” rather than strictly constructed showed a statistically significant spike in happiness and on-the-job performance.)

d. Personal Lightning Workshop: The culmination of the new hire’s first week, this half-day workshop would repurpose a number of exercises from the Google Ventures design sprint (e.g., Long-term Goal, Moving You Forward/Holding You Back, Solution Sketching, Effort-Impact Scale) to create “The First 100 Days”, a personally tailored action plan that the new hire wants to accomplish in their first 100 days with the team.

Specifics of the plan would be based on the new hire’s passions and skills (as identified over the course of the workshop) that are more unique (see: unfound in the current team) and additive to the team’s culture and current approach.

Outcomes

This first week experience should offer a direct and actionable output, specifically through the personal “100 Days” plan of action for the new hire and a formal mentorship program.

The Action Plan should detail specific OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) that are challenging yet eminently achievable, in an effort to directly measure the new hire’s output over their first 100 days.

Personal Plan of Action

a. A better understanding of the new hire’s own strengths and growth areas (through the StrengthsFinder Assessment and through a series of structured workshop exercises), and how their personality and working style gels best with each of their new colleagues.

b. A set of discrete objectives and key results (operationalized as a series of specific goals & projects to be completed) that the new hire would be expected to and supported in accomplishing over their first 100 days.

These projects would be specifically tailored to be challenging yet accomplishable, with a key goal of introducing them to the various departments, teams, and individuals across the organization that they will likely come into contact with throughout their tenure.

Mentorship Plan

a. One member of the team will be assigned to each new hire as their mentor, who will have written into their measurable, end-of-year goals the responsibility of ensuring that new hire’s success within the team and across the company (success metrics to be operationalized upon creation of the formal program)

b. Supplementary and in support of the Personal Plan of Action, the Mentorship Plan will lay out an actionable approach to ensuring that the new hire has all the guidance, shadowing, and support needed to be successful in their new role.

Meant to be an iterative and ever-changing document, mentor and mentee will meet regularly to update and improve the document across their first 100 days on the job.

Granted, the above does not come free: the time spent preparing and executing on this plan to create a seamless Week 1 takes a level of dedication and commitment that may at first feel like overkill.

However, I assure you that the work involved in successfully implementing a plan like this pales in comparison to the work and time involved in consistently needing to find, interview, hire, and re-train new employees.

Give it a try, and see for yourself!