Making Social A Part Of Employee Onboarding

Deb Bardhan
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

Employee onboarding has so many moving parts that assimilating a coherent social experience into your organization’s onboarding process can often become an afterthought.

Social assimilation is one of the key factors that determine the success and longevity of new employees at their job. Think back through all of the places you’ve worked at, you can surely count friends you’ve collected over the course of your career who you met at work. After all, we all are social beings and not having a network around us that we can lean into at work, where we spend a good portion of our life, can be quite demotivating.

Given how important this is, should we then leave this to complete chance and let our talented employees figure out how they develop a network around them? That can be one way of going at it but perhaps not the best way. Employees who are not too extroverted can face an especially challenging time reaching out to colleagues and fellow workers to make that connection.

So what’s the right way to go about this? While there is no secret recipe, there are a few things that hiring managers, HR partners, and company leaders can do to enable social engagement for new employees.

When thinking about social you can also dice it into internal and external social engagement. Internal social engagement helps employees develop work connections that get them more engaged at work and become happier employees over time. External social engagement is about reaching out to your networks outside of work to share experiences that make you excited to come to work. While internal social engagement leads to happier and more productive employees, external social engagements can let you reap big ROI on social recruiting and attracting top talent that is already pre-vetted by your own employees. Social recruiting while a new phenomena has shown to be a powerful recruitment framework. Infact most top employers like Google get their highest performing employees through social referrals.

As a co-founder of Xpand, our team has spent more than 10,000 hours thinking and working to help global organizations transform their onboarding processes. We’ve taken a thoughtful approach into how we enable both internal and external social engagement for employees into the onboarding process. In my next post I will share a few ideas on how we have gone about it and hope it sparks some discussions and actions for your teams.

Written by

Deb Bardhan is an entrepreneur and early stage investor based in Silicon Valley. He is the co-founder and CEO of Xpand, an enterprise SaaS startup.

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