Welcome aboard: transforming employee onboarding with service design
In today’s competitive business environment, employee onboarding is more than just a procedural necessity — it’s a strategic opportunity to enhance organizational success. Numerous research demonstrates that excellent onboarding practices pay off: they increase the employees’ engagement, productivity and retention. Yet, organizations may struggle to deliver the type of onboarding experience that can achieve these critical goals. Employers may also fail to recognize the challenges employees face on their onboarding journey. Service design methods and tools can help organizations assess, evaluate and improve their onboarding practices.
In the current business landscape, companies do not just provide a product or service; they offer personalized, human centered experiences for their employees. It is more likely that when employees feel valued and respected, they will provide exceptional customer service, contributing to the organizations’ success. With the remote and hybrid working formats reset following the pandemic, the digital era has brought new challenges of delivering a seamless onboarding experience. While remote and hybrid work offer flexibility and cost benefits, they may also result in the reduced social interaction at the workplace, leading to reduced employee engagement levels. Employees who are engaged are more active and productive, having a positive impact on the workplace culture. Onboarding journey that is well-designed provides hires with a connection to the company’s mission and values from the start.
Evaluating and redesigning onboarding journey with service design
An employee onboarding journey transformation into a user-centric experience involves using service design tools and methodologies. Making onboarding more user-centric places employees at the center of the process improvement efforts. The double diamond model of design thinking encompasses four phases: discover, define, develop, and deliver.
First, it is essential to perform comprehensive assessments to determine onboarding process current state. Essentially, this is gathering quantitative data through surveys of employees to understand their satisfaction levels: how did their onboarding go and what do they deem as important in that process? This data should be backed up by interviewing representatives from various employee groups to get a deeper look at patterns like role clarity, training, cultural adaptation, and determine any gaps in the support provided. It is essential for a study to bring in as many various employee groups as possible, including hires with different locations, job titles, roles, and responsibilities to make sure the findings are aligned with the workplace employee needs.
As both survey and interviews offer a limited interaction possibilities, to further deepen the exploration of the findings, participatory workshops involving key stakeholders need to be organized. By including various employee groups, trainers, mentors, and supervisors, a collaborative problem definition and and brainstorming potential solutions based on identified challenges can be performed.
It’s vital to create user personas for different types of employees going through onboarding process together with the stakeholders. User personas may reflect different job roles, departments or employee types, mirroring their unique expectations, jobs to be done, needs and pain points. Designing and refining journey map that details the journey of an employee helps to identify specific pain points and gaps. By leveraging insights from user personas and journey maps work, organization is prepared to start developing solutions to the identified issues. Through detailed process assessment, tackling pain points at various user touch points, working together with stakeholders to define problems, creating prototypes based on insights, and iterative testing to refine solutions organizations can transform the current onboarding process into truly user centric.This should ensure that every part of the journey is optimized and designed to get the best possible start with the company.
Digital Tools
Incorporating digital platforms into onboarding does not only modernize it but also plays a crucial role in both making the entire process more efficient as well as engaging. With digital platform, organizations can automate repetitive tasks, ensure process quality and consistency across departments and make onboarding experience more positive. Digital tools can generate real time updates on an employee’s progression on their journey, so that managers can actively participate in the onboarding process. Automating onboarding plan creation and content maintenance can greatly reduce the pressure that supervisors and managers might have due to an overwhelming number of tasks. This will allow them to be more engaged in the onboarding process.
When looking at digital tools as enablers of a process improvement rather than a standalone solution, organization can achieve better efficiency and consistency in their onboarding process. Using digital tools not only improves the technical aspect of onboarding plan execution, but also aligns it with broader organizational goals of improving employee engagement and retention.
Personalized Experience and Supervisor Engagement
For new hires, position changing employees or employees returning from a long leave, onboarding experience needs to be adjusted to their unique backgrounds, skills and aspirations. Customized plans ensure employees get specific training and resources based on their needs, which makes them more satisfied and less likely to be forced to leave. This approach transforms generic templates into dynamic, adaptive frameworks that accommodate the diverse demands of a modern workforce.
Onboarding is only effective if supervisors and mentors are engaged and actively involved in the process. There is a positive impact on the onboarding experience from frequent check-ins, tailored content, and a structured process. Supervisors should provide onboarding employees with continuous encouragement and constructive feedback throughout the onboarding journey. Surveys, questionnaires, one-one-one meetings and continuous feedback loops will ensure that onboarding trajectory will to keep improving. By following this system approach, organization can increase the level of trust in the employees, thus leading to higher retention rates and better performance.
Transforming organization’s onboarding process with service design methods involves thorough assessment, collaborative problem-solving, prototyping, and iterative testing. By leveraging digital tools for automation and integration, creating personalized experiences, and ensuring active supervisor engagement with continuous feedback mechanisms, organization can significantly enhance employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention from day one.
Sources:
D’Sa, R. & Rantanen, O. 2024. Enhancing Onboarding: Evaluation and Redesign Through User-Centric Methods. Master’s Thesis. Turku University of Applied Sciences.
Image: Artem Podrez (2020), Pexels.
Thesis of the author in Theseus (Restricted access)