The ‘DIGITAL’ Onboarding of New Hires

Continue reading to find out what you can do in each of these areas for providing a completely ‘DIGITAL’ onboarding experience to your new hires.

Documentation

• Email all joining-related forms to the new hires well in advance.
• Ask them to complete the documentation before their joining date. They can either digitally sign them or print, scan, and email the signed documents back to you.
• For countries where physical verification of original documents is mandatory, seek temporary waiver from the relevant authorities to postpone it until the situation improves.

IT Infrastructure and Hardware

• Plan well with your IT department to have all the necessary infrastructure in place before the joining date. This includes creation of e-mail ID, providing access to secure networks, and addressing all software and hardware requirements for each new hire.
• Ship laptops, desktops, data cards, or any additional hardware well in advance so that those reach the new hires on time.
• Ask your new hires to thoroughly sanitize the hardware before they start using those. Include sanitizers and wipes in the shipment itself, if possible.
• In case shipping of hardware is not possible, work closely with your IT department to enable new hires to use their personal hardware securely as per organizational policy.

Gameplan

• Have a solid gameplan, including a detailed breakup of planned activities to make your digital strategy successful.
• Put a contingency and troubleshooting plan in place to mitigate any unforeseen issues.
• Perform a last minute check with the new hires a couple of days before their joining date to ensure everything is working as planned.

Introduction and Welcome

• Kick start the first day of the onboarding with a quick round of virtual introductions.
• Have personalized welcome messages recorded by the CEO, Group Heads, Managers and/or colleagues, if possible.
• Walk the new hires through the detailed onboarding plan and set proper expectations.
• Arrange a virtual ice-breaker game so that the new-hires get to know each other. You can share virtual goodies with them at the end of the game.

Telecommunication Tools

• Familiarize the new hires with the different telecommunication tools available in the organization.
• Follow up regularly to ensure the new hires are comfortable adapting to this new mode of onboarding.
• Arrange digital fun activities and virtual team lunches to make them ‘feel at home.’

Alignment and Mentoring

• Assign a IT/Technical point of contact whom the new hires can reach out to in case of any technical issues.
• Align each of them to a ‘buddy,’ who can help them out with any other queries.
• Assign a mentor to each new hire, who can motivate and guide them during and after their onboarding.

Learning

• Assign existing onboarding course on the Learning Management System (LMS) to the new hires.
• If you do not have an LMS or an online onboarding course, engage an eLearning company for creating one for you. Based on your requirements, an LMS and online onboarding courses can be set up pretty fast.
• Use different learning strategies like Gamification, Scenario or Story Based Learning, Virtual Mentors, AR/VR/MR, or Simulations to engage the new hires.
• Focus on providing an immersive, contextual, memorable, and seamless experience to them.
• Track progress and performance of the new hires through the LMS and follow-up with them, if required.
• Alternately, you can also set up Virtual Instructor Led Training (VILT) sessions using one of the available tools.

So are you ready for implementing the ‘DIGITAL’ Onboarding strategy in your organization? Let us know your views by emailing us at marketing@mpsinteractive.com.