How to Leverage Design Methodologies to Improve Virtual Onboarding and Employee Retention

By: Adrianna LeBlanc, Product Designer, TribalScale

Why does your company need an onboarding plan?

A 2017 CareerBuilder study found that 41% of employers believed their lack of an effective onboarding plan hurt their company. They listed low productivity, high employee turnover, lack of engagement, and missed revenue targets as consequences.

By implementing a structured onboarding plan, companies can:

1. Increase Retention

Hires who had a negative onboarding experience are twice as likely to seek a new job shortly after, and 28% leave within six months. That comes with a hefty price tag when you consider that the average employer spends $4,000 and 24 days to replace them. Improving your onboarding experience could mean that your new hire stays with the company for up to three years, proving that first impressions leave a lasting impact.

2. Improve Engagement and Performance

The first three months at a company are uncertain for new hires, and they want structured training to understand their role and how they fit into the company. By creating consistent onboarding processes, companies can improve employee productivity and engagement by 70%.

3. Bolster Company Culture and Processes

Employees are looking for a culture that provides a positive experience and adds value to their lives in forms greater than a paycheck. The onboarding experience should excite them about the company’s future and culture, affirming their decision to join the team.

Is your company virtual? Remote onboarding is more important now than ever.

Remote working benefits employees by providing freedom and more time in the day, but it poses new challenges. Zoom fatigue, reduced micro-interactions, and lack of separation between work and leisure mean that companies need to bake good mental health practices into their process. They need to work harder to ensure that their new hires don’t become lost in the mix.

I’ve been working from home for four years P.C. (pre-covid), and I have had varying experiences with virtual onboarding. I stayed the longest with companies who took time to offer training, provide structured 1:1 meetings and project management, and ensure that I was on the right track. When the onboarding experience was good, I felt like I had a role in a like-minded community with ambitious yet achievable goals.

By implementing consistent onboarding procedures, departments can ensure that new hires feel valued and understand how their role fits into the big picture. If the company is a train, they want to know the destination and how they can get promoted to a higher class.

How to Use Design Methodologies to Improve Your Onboarding Plan

1. Develop a hypothesis by getting leadership feedback

The design team collaborated with the human resources leadership team at TribalScale to brainstorm potential pain points associated with the onboarding process. After the interviews, our initial list included:

• Over-abundance of information
• Lack of time to properly integrate into the company
• Absence of tool integration
• Outdated information in the company documentation

A good onboarding program should cover new hire’s first year in a new role. However, we decided to focus on the first impression and cater the survey to post-offer acceptance into the first week at the company.

2. Design the study

Primary Research

Survey: John Friere and I crafted a 25 question Google forms survey with multiple choice and paragraph answers. We broke it up into digestible pages that were organized by:

• Controls (the month that they joined the company, their department, and an optional name field in case we wanted to ask follow-up questions)
• Before start date (receiving information, their equipment, etc.)
• First week at the company (getting to know the company and getting familiar with processes)

We needed to ensure that participants could opt to remain anonymous so their answers would be honest. If we were to conduct video interviews or include a mandatory name field, we would have risked missing valuable details.

Respondents: We surveyed 21 employees who had joined the company in the last six months.

Filters: We included a team selector (management, human resources, marketing, design, quality assurance, and engineering) to understand the differences between departments.

Timeline: We gave the survey a one-week response period.

Secondary Research

The easiest way to be the best is to check out the competition, improve it, and make it your own. We conducted secondary research to look at how other agencies and technology companies made their onboarding process exciting. Doing so helped us spark new ideas to customize our process.

3. Collect data & analyze the data

After the survey results came in, I dug into my favourite part: finding patterns and pulling insights from the data. Thankfully, our team gave us generous and meaningful feedback, so we didn’t need to conduct follow-up interviews.

I used the following methods to organize the responses and visualize the data:

• Google Sheets: I ported all of the Google Form data into a spreadsheet to analyze it. I colour-coded the department responses to visualize differences between departments, and I looked at the positive vs. negative responses between departments in each onboarding phase.
• Mind Mapping: As I read through the responses, I jotted down elements of the system and dropped them into a Google Slide deck. Once they were all added, I organized them into the following categories and colour-coded them:
• Introduction (welcome package, welcome email, technology, assigned mentor, and onboarding material)
• Preparation (filling out forms, reviewing material, setting up accounts and technology, and schedule)
• Connections (stand-ups, 1:1’s, social committee introduction, mentorship, and socials)
• Training (company processes/procedures, learning tools, resource review, and department-specific training)
• Planning (30/60/90 onboarding plan, cadence scheduling, prospective client research, and education pathways)

The final mind map looked like this:

• Timeline: While each journey stage overlaps and won’t always be linear, I had an idea of where each element would come into play, so we organized it like this:

4. Build the report

Findings by journey stage

Before providing recommendations, I grouped the findings by journey stage, dropping the responses into a Google Doc and combining similar comments. I organized the responses into pain points, preferences and created data visualizations to aid the final report. Each colour-coded slide looked something like this:

Findings by department

I created department-specific breakdowns as each has unique needs, wants, and pain points. Rather than combining the data into averages, I included a percentage breakdown for each response, so leadership could easily see what’s going well and what isn’t. For example: “100% of TribalScale designers felt like they met key team members and knew who to turn to in their first week.”

Recommendations

As I analyzed the data, I noted the proposals and requests provided by each respondent. The number of responses that made the same comments increased the priority of a recommendation (high, medium, or low).

I then broke down the recommendations by journey stage and summarized them in slides that looked more or less like this:

Summary

I typically write the summary last, as I can combine the highlights from the findings by journey stage and department sections. Include the key points at the top of the report to provide a quick review for people who don’t have time to go into the deep dive.

5. Implement and Get Feedback

At the time of writing, we are putting the new onboarding plan into place. It includes a branded welcome package, structured cadences, mentorship options, and templatized documentation.

In 6 months, we will survey the new hires to analyze the impact of the changes on experience and retention. If there are any gaps, we will work to improve the onboarding system. Stay tuned for a follow-up post on our results!

Adrianna is a product designer at TribalScale. She is an interdisciplinary designer with skills in immersive, experience, visual, product, and systems. She has experience working in mobile advertising, AR/VR/MR, cryptocurrency, cannabis, gaming, inbound marketing, design, education, autonomous driving, and more.

TribalScale is a global innovation firm that helps enterprises adapt and thrive in the digital era. We transform teams and processes, build best-in-class digital products, and create disruptive startups. Learn more about us on our website. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook!