A n undervalued element of in-person onboarding programs is the importance to new employees of social interactions with their peers and associates. Numerous studies have shown that these connections help to both orientate and encourage.

Being well connected to your coworkers reduces turnover and generally improves early productivity.

There’s also some evidence that this process helps “imprint” corporate culture. The interactions set expectations and communicate some of your culture’s subtler elements that otherwise may take a new person a while to identify and adopt.

An online meet and greet will just not offer the same level of connection or interaction as an in-person meeting, coffee, or lunch.

If your onboarding is now virtual, how can you ensure that an appropriate social dimension is included and effective?

Build in a social element from the ground up:

Make an effort to include a wide variety of virtual social elements. It’s not the same as in person, but at least it can be a reasonable facsimile.

Group events, meet and greet, and one-on-ones with colleagues, coworkers, and management are just some of the possibilities. Recruiting established employees and leaders to spend “quality” time is a good approach. Avoid the situation where busy leaders pop-in, dump data and run to their next meeting. Coach your presenters to allow for extended discussion and interactions after their sessions. Explain the importance of this process and how their participation can really make a difference.

In addition, there are a number of virtual event platforms that are relatively simple and inexpensive to use. They give you a chance to create self-serve interactions with various groups or departments. Employees can follow their own path depending on their role and interests. Hold a “Welcome” conference for a few hours. It’s not an unreasonable investment and after all no one has to leave their desks to take part.

Job satisfaction is often associated with workplace attitudes such as involvement in the organization, relatedness with co-workers/customers/managers, attachment, motivation — Semih Tumen & Tugba Zeydanli

Incentivize Network Development:

It sounds like a computing thought! There are a growing number of programs and systems to help encourage and measure how connected someone is to their new organization.

They typically offer a way to book informal meetings, provide guidance as who to meet with and even background material. Their aim is to encourage as many interactions as possible with the minimum amount of effort on the part of the managers and coworkers involved.

A component of any such system is measuring and monitoring progress for both HR and the employee’s management and providing the employee both encouragement and feedback.

Some programs involve gamification, leader boards, points, and even achievement awards. There are a lot of attractive tools to consider, but it’s important to find one that fits your culture and employee population.

Recognize the need for extended onboarding:

It’s common to think that virtual onboarding saves time and money. In some obvious ways, it does—for example, no travel costs, hotel expenses, etc. It doesn’t end there, though. In many ways, virtual is less effective at achieving the primary aim of onboarding – getting the recruit mentally engaged and contributing effectively.

Remote onboarding allows some people to remain aloof, reserve judgment, and avoid making commitments that would occur more naturally in in-person settings. It’s hard to tell who is in and who is not connected.

Repetition and reinforcement are a good solution. When the employee begins to interact with the organization, they are naturally more engaged. Examples are more real to them, early issues can be used as coaching opportunities, and regular sessions help improve professional connections with their coworkers.

Take every opportunity to get real:

Even in today’s modified work environment, there are still times when employees travel to your home office. Getting management agreement to take every opportunity to continue the onboarding process is a great practice. It’s never too late to encourage interaction and the development of connections.

Conclusion:

Onboarding has become a lot harder work for trainers and HR. The benefits are still there – employee retention and effectiveness, but it’s harder to measure your success and it’s a lot more work.

You don’t want to wait until the turnover numbers shoot up to find out you’re not entirely on the right track.

Take heart, though. There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had from getting a virtual onboarding program right especially if it includes a comprehensive social dimension.

Read more about onboarding here.

As COVID moves into the rear-view mirror, what has been the impact on the learning industry and onboarding?

From many conversations with our clients and colleagues, we have developed a simple rubric.

1. Things are not going back to the old ways, probably ever.

Remote working is now part of the official plan for the future. Why relocate or subject a knowledge worker to a long commute? Getting an on-premises onboarding class together is going to be impractical and hard to arrange moving forward. Not to mention you can save a big percentage of the average onboarding cost by using effective VILT (virtual instructor led training) sessions, e-learning modules, remote tours, and simulations instead.

Challenges of Onboarding 01:06 An A short video about onboarding.

2. All the stuff we “threw” online last spring needs a careful review.

The industry did a brilliant job of switching to online onboarding last year. Some companies moved their entire courses online in a couple of weeks. But in reality, this was not a lot more than recording existing material and posting them in an LMS or delivering them on Zoom. Good enough for a pandemic, but not good enough now. It needs going over and sorting out, but how?

It was amazing to see how quickly organizations switched to on-line learning and onboarding in 2020 – James Ringrose CEO RCP Learning.

3. Without a roadmap, this is going to be hard!

A roadmap! Applying a consistent methodology to reviewing current assets against a revised delivery approach is critical. How do existing learning needs translate? Can learning objectives be met, and how will the results be implemented?

4. There is an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of onboarding training.

Even the limited experience large organizations have had has shown that this is a great chance to address the differing needs of learners. Without wanting to start an argument, most folks can agree that in-person learning is a form of one size fits all. It’s hard to consider the needs of learners who can’t drink from a firehose and need time to review and digest. Remote learning fixes this and offers a chance to measure progress and performance.

5. Avoid turn-over and increase initial effectiveness and integration.

If you think this whole thing is a self-inflicted to-do list, we have supporting evidence to the contrary. Employee retention and effectiveness increase the better the initial training and introduction to your onboarding delivers. It’s a career-enhancing metric for you and a happiness metric for your employees.

6. There’s something we all missed.

There’s one critical snag with all this. What’s missing from online onboarding? Lunches and drinks in the hotel bar. Ok, I’m kidding. The missing thing is interacting and meeting with your peers and others. After a few days or more of in-person training, you recognize them, and they remember you. You are probably forced to meet your boss and their boss and sometimes the entire senior management. Even the most reticent and introverted employee is included.

Overall, our findings strongly emphasize the importance of social interaction for intra-MNE knowledge streams. — Niels Noorderhaven and Anne-Wil Harzing

7. Socialization doesn’t work online half as well.

So, what’s the solution? An after-training process to encourage and track informal meetings for “meet and greet” with the appropriate individuals for your role. Your boss, their boss, the HR person, etc. If it’s gamified and easy to see your progress toward a defined goal, it can go a long way to replacing the in-person stuff.

This is an exciting period in our industry! There’s a lot to look forward to.