Beyond the First Day: Creating Seamless Onboarding Journeys
Austin McKenzie, Electra Learning
So yeah, we’re going to talk about onboarding today. Basically, I just kind of want to change the message that onboarding should be a new adventure for a new employee starting the business, and not just something that is done because it’s the way that it’s done. My timing’s going to be way off. So this should be like an epic start to someone’s new career within a job. It shouldn’t just be the mundane, same thing where you’re given lots of paper to fill in, lots of things to sign. That’s not what we need within a job. So you start a new role, you’ve got lots of potential, but the first thing you’re handed is these documents to sign, the outdated slides. It’s the same old usual. It shouldn’t be a formality. This is the start of someone’s career, a new job., So we should be making that the same. If it’s done right, it can boost retention, engagement, and productivity. And we’ve seen an 82% increase in retention in staff. But if you don’t do it correctly, 23% of people will leave that job within six months.
Instead of a flat onboarding experience, create custom paths and challenges. Make it fun. Set the tone of your business straight away. It’s their next step in their journey, and we want to help them get to wherever that’s going to lead them. Give them any mini-missions. So meet a mentor, or deciphering a code. Get them to find out fun things about different members of their team, not just this boring stuff of, oh, this is John who does the admin stuff. Get them to find out fun stuff. Hands-on challenges. Make it more productive. Give them real life scenarios, real cases to work on, not just sitting there reading what has been done in the past. Get them to learn straight away from real projects.
Milestones and rewards are a massive thing. Now, if you can see where you are going, you’ll get that joy of great, I’m making progress. I’m going somewhere. And you can maybe dance like these guys. It seems funny, but scavenger hunts, like seriously. Get them to go to different places within an office to find different things. Just don’t have them behind a desk, watching a screen or reading something. Get them going exploring around the office. And what you have to remember, it’s really important, this person’s getting to know the team they’re working with, but it’s also just as important that the people who are in that team already get to know this new individual who’s joining them. It’s definitely two-way, two-way thing. It’s a team.
If you can gamify things, fantastic. The more things that you have them do, the better. If they’re just sitting there waiting for someone to tell them what to do, then you aren’t going to get the most from them because they’re waiting for things to happen. Onboarding should be a power-up. You should be boosting their skills, boosting their knowledge, giving them everything to catapult them to their potential, basically. You don’t want to do a big, big battle with a big foe and a big challenge. Badges. I know it seems ridiculous, but we all like to collect things. If you’ve got certificates, say, I’ve done XYZ, great. We’re all competitive to some degree. If you can show badges for the first meeting or the first project, then it’s great to have some sort of track record.
Give them those achievements, as I said before, milestones. Show where they’re going to go and what they’re going to do to get there and allow them to celebrate and express where they are in that pathway. Every hero is a sidekick. Don’t leave them to figure things out on their own, that you are not going to get the best from them. Assign them a buddy, a proper buddy. Someone they can talk to about anything they want, ask silly questions.
Leadership meetups. It shouldn’t be this thing where I’ve got to go meet my manager. Have a meet in a car park or the kitchen. Quick-fire questions, quick answers, nothing too serious. Values are something that every company will tell you is a huge importance. They’ll experience them when they join your company. So if I’m pointing, engage with your values, you can trust them, and they will trust you.
So that’s a really quick whistle-stop tour of what I think onboarding should be like. You know what you’re doing. I recommend we follow this. And stay curious, take ownership of this, and try and get that tone of your business through that employee. A little bit cheesiness, but come on, HR assemble, right?
Watch Austin deliver his session over on Vimeo >>>> DisruptHR Glasgow 6.0 – June 19 2025 on Vimeo
