Plotting the Course for a Persona-Centric Onboarding Program
One of the best times to cultivate employee engagement is during onboarding . . . and as a result of a successful onboarding program. As a LeapGen consultant and HR practitioner, I am constantly exploring new and better ways to build a world-class onboarding program for my clients — one that will create productive teams made up of highly engaged employees.
To cultivate engaged behaviors, newly onboarded employees need to feel valued, believe their work at the company will be meaningful to the business, and understand the company will be making investments in their success at the company . . . just to name a few.
When it comes to crafting an onboarding program, many business leaders are still vexed on how to do it right. Leaders recognize the need for a robust and well articulated onboarding program but often fall short of delivering on their vision. The value propositions of onboarding are easy to understand — decreased attrition, increased workplace culture and lower time to production. Unfortunately, the steps and concepts needed to build a successful program are more elusive. This article introduces you to some concepts we use when designing onboarding programs.
When we work with teams to construct robust onboarding programs and workflows, we conduct workshops on the following three ‘thought’ exercises:
1. Vision Mapping
2. Persona Creation
3. Journey Mapping
What do you see?
The importance of having a clear and defined vision is the starting place to a great onboarding program. It is very common for the the vision to initially resemble a dream where some parts are vivid and real and others are really fuzzy and confusing. Describing a dream from start to finish can be challenging and, as time passes, can seem almost impossible. For a Vision Map to be successful it should be clear and concise and have observable and experiential components.
The Vision Map exercise is a great way to get process stakeholders to contribute to the process of helping build the foundation for the program while securing their buy-in. For a Vision Map to be effective and useful you need to develop the following:
- A clear vision statement: declaration of what an organization wants something to be, how it will deliver value and to whom
- Guiding principles: fundamental attributes, rules or values that represent vision and guide decision making
- User experiences: how things look and feel to different workforce personas (our customers)
- Measure of success: how you define success and drive accountability in alignment with the vision and guiding principles
The Vision Map should be used to align the people, process, technology and data around your mission and company culture.
People are different
Traditional onboarding programs focus on only one group of people — the new hires . . . which on the surface makes sense. Unfortunately, all too often, the program becomes static and can no longer address the needs of the changing workforce. Before any onboarding innovation happens, we must identify who the program serves.
If you were going to set a menu for a restaurant, you would want to know if you need any gluten free options, any vegetarian dishes, etc. It may be easy to lump all new hires together, but we know they are not — think demographics, technographics (i.e., digital native vs. digital immigrant), strengths, personality types, cultural backgrounds, etc.
The concept we preach and teach is called “Personas”. Mike Brennan, LeapGen’s Chief Services Officer and Co-Founder, has conducted a lot of research on the power of personas so I recommend reviewing his published works, but in the meantime I will summarize the notion.
Personas are a way to represent a group of users through the use of data including users stories, and role and goal-based information . The data consolidates a wide range of components into usable templates to better craft the onboarding experience. The process of creating realistic personas can be challenging, but it is a step many organizations fail to explore. With my experience of designing onboarding programs and learning & development curricula, I have found that the use of persona’s ultimately yields multiple onboarding program variations and processes that would otherwise be missed. Personas help to avoid the “one size fits none” program result that many leaders build.
Where are they going & where have they been?
Customer-specific journey mapping has become an extremely popular process that leading development organizations use to document the path their customers take when using their product. Journey mapping addresses key steps in the customer lifecycle and identifies what the customer’s experience in each step:
- What do they do?
- With whom are they interact?
- What steps do they follow?
- How do they feel?
We partner with our clients in HR departments to apply this concept to internal workforce stakeholder groups — e.g., candidates, employees, hiring managers, executives, business partners, salaried workers, contractors, etc.
Journey Maps for the workforce can take many forms depending on the HR leader’s objectives however core components of the map stay true. The primary component is a persona, which is the lens you will be looking through when plotting the course. We often see that a key stakeholder is the persona when designing onboarding programs. Journey mapping the current state of the identified persona will ultimately help you craft an ideal or future state of the program and is a great approach to ensure that all of your important interactions are captured and that the journey is true to your vision.
More needs to be done
By completing these three ‘thought’ exercises you will have built a foundation from which to start creating a successful onboarding program. Before your program comes to life many other factors need to be explored, including asking the following questions:
- Do my current process flows need to be remapped?
- Does my current technology support my vision?
- Do I have a roadmap and implementation timeline?
- Do I know how much will this cost?
If you are not sure how to answer those questions . . you’re not alone. Send us a message and we can help you usher in a world class experience for you employees.
If you will be at HR Tech World SF, we’d love to connect with you! Jason Averbook, LeapGen CEO and Co-Founder, will be the MC for the event; and the LeapGen team will be at booth #403 — excited to meet you!
ABOUT LEAPGEN
Leapgen is a consulting and education firm focused on helping HR organizations shape the future of work — through digitization — from strategy to designing and deploying new processes & technologies to optimizing and enhancing technologies already in place.
HR organizations that aren’t rethinking how they engage, manage and serve their people risk losing their talent. LeapGen partners with organizations to deliver a workforce experience that is as good as the customer experience. This means helping them meet the expectations of an increasingly mobile, social, multi-generational and multicultural workforce.
