Effective Personal Onboarding

Flemming Fog, CEO of Triggerz, explains the essence of Onboarding in 75 seconds

The objective for on-boarding is to get people comfortable and productive in their new role as fast as possible.

The key to effective on-boarding lies in 3 parallel approaches:

1. Focus basic on-boarding on the learning that’s particularly important for each individual (Personalized plan)

2. Secure easy access to tools and resources, that help address challenges and questions that come up (Just-in-Time portal)

3. Connect the new employee to a network of helpful people invested in their success (like HR Partner and Manager)

Triggerz offer a standard solution for personalized on-boarding as well as support for highly customized flows.

In both cases, some ground-work has to be done first:

• Selecting a target group and a set of needs
• Defining the personalization questions
• Defining the onboarding topics
• Linking or creating relevant content

It does take some time and effort to complete the ground-work. But we have a well tested process for this - and usually the tasks can be completed in a few weeks.

As in all great solutions, it all starts with making certain that we understand the end user needs.

It is always remarkable how much we can learn from talking to the end users - and on-boarding is no exception.

The first step is to identify a target group with somewhat similar needs. To make the business case attractive, the size of the audience is important as it rarely pays off if less than 20 people are on-boarded per year. But when we look at 50 and above, its usually worth the effort.

When the target group is selected, we need a deeper understanding of their needs. Our development philosophy is always "User-driven development" and this starts with interviews.

We have found that individual interviews with representatives of the target group who have been in their jobs in about 12 months are a great source of insight. They have survived the critical phase, but still have vivid memories of what caused frustration and where they wasted energy and time. 5 interviews will often be enough to get a good understanding of the on-boarding topics, what will need to be personalized and the demand specification for the content that can drive the development.

The first step towards personalized on-boarding is to define the questions that creates the differentiated needs.

Below are a couple of examples of differentiation questions:

• Are you new to this company?
• Are you new to a leadership role?
• Do you lead other people? (if yes - what type of people to you lead)
• What line of business do you work in? (e.g. Finance/Sales/Communication/HR)

The on-boarding topics are the basis for the personalization and for making it easy to search for, and find answers to, specific topics.

Inspiration will come from the user interviews - as well as from common sense.

Typically, 12 - 25 topics are chosen for any given target group. The following are a few examples:

• Company strategy and vision
• "How to" topics (e.g.: "Budget process", "Employee dialogue process", "Use of internal IT systems")
• Compliance topics (e.g. overview of demands and link to specific training and tests)
• Job/role related topics

Triggerz' most important value contribution is to present the right content to the right users at the right time.

All information about user profiles, segments, system usage and feedback data are core in Triggerz, but when it comes to content - we link to it.

It's very easy to link to a piece of content and create a visual representation in Triggerz.

Most critical content already exist. It can be in the form of existing training material, existing guides/manuals and, surprisingly often, deep links into specific corners of the company intranet.

Existing content can be supplemented with content from open sources in the form of articles and videos - or by customized content in any form: From professional content from external sources or simple do-it-yourself videos created internally to solve a specific need.

Triggerz is source agnostic - and links to content deep behind corporate firewalls - as well as to anything that can be reached over the internet.

Based on 3-10 segmentation questions (e.g. “New to this company?”, “Leader role?”, “Type of employees?”) Triggerz will automatically suggest what “Learning packages” the individual should focus on for the first 100 days. In this example – the 6 most relevant out of a total list of 24 on-boarding topics.

Based on interviews with employees who have recently completed their on-boarding, the most common just-in-time needs for the on-boarding are identified. They are organized into a library of issue-based actions, that links to answers or learning objects. This can be everything from a deep link to an intranet page about how to order airline tickets, guides to handle difficult conversations about stress or a link to micro-learning objects about handling negative feedback. All these items are made easily searchable via free text search and topic based filters – creating a great knowledge resource – tailored to the perspective of the new employee.