PowerPack

Designing a Great Onboarding Experience

Our Onboarding PowerPack provides a comprehensive suite of resources to help you reimagine your onboarding. From practical tools, templates, detailed how-to guidance, and best practice examples, it will supercharge your activity and help you create a truly standout onboarding experience.

Who is it for?

This PowerPack is crafted with you in mind – the leaders of projects and change within your organisation. Whether you're a seasoned HR professional, leading HR change, or involved with supporting the onboarding experience, this PowerPack will equip you with everything you need to design and deliver better onboarding experiences for your people.

Why onboarding matters

  1. First impressions count: The onboarding process is an employee's first real interaction with your company's culture and values. A smooth and welcoming onboarding experience can create a positive first impression, fostering a sense of belonging and motivation right from the start.
  2. Accelerates integration: A well-structured onboarding programme helps new hires acclimatise faster, enabling them to become productive members of the team sooner. This reduces the learning curve and accelerates their contribution to your organisation’s goals.
  3. Reduces turnover: Research shows that employees who experience effective onboarding are more likely to stay with the company longer. By addressing their needs and concerns early on, you build a strong foundation of trust and loyalty.
  4. Boosts engagement: Onboarding is a prime opportunity to engage new employees, making them feel valued and supported. Engaged employees are more enthusiastic about their work and more likely to go above and beyond in their roles.
  5. Aligns expectations: A comprehensive onboarding process ensures that new hires clearly understand their roles, responsibilities, and performance expectations. This alignment reduces confusion and sets the stage for clear communication and effective collaboration.

What you can expect...

This PowerPack is designed to help you navigate the complexities of the onboarding experience with ease and confidence. Packed with guides, tools, and templates, it offers a comprehensive, yet accessible framework, built on the latest thinking. It’s not always necessary to follow every step and or us every tool - but we've provided all the options to make it work for you.

This PowerPack covers five distinct phases, outlined in the diagram below which we’ll walk you through.

In summary: Part 1
Getting started

Getting ready to design a new experience or re-design one which already exists involves several key steps to ensure that the process is well-organised, and supported by relevant stakeholders.  

Part 2 Scoping space   
Discover Find out what your onboarding experience should be to meet the needs of your people, and the organisational context and where it is and isn’t delivering.  
Define This is about defining your onboarding experience as a result of your discovery activities. This is where you’ll set a vision of the onboarding experience you want and use that to prioritise where to focus design efforts. 
 
Part 3 Opportunity space 
Discover This is where you use empathy to broaden and deepen understanding of what you’re working on from the perspective of the people you’re designing for. Here you will speak to  and spend time with people who are involved with the onboarding experience.  
Define Using insight from the discovery phase you will revisit and possibly re-define the onboarding experience you are working on through your people’s eyes. This problem or opportunity definition creates the focus around which ideas are generated and solutions developed.

Part 4 Solution space
Develop This is where you generate ideas – lots of ideas – to solve the problem or realise the opportunity, eventually focusing on one or more to develop and test.  
Deliver Ideas are turned into rapid small prototypes to test and get feedback. By testing different solutions at a small-scale, you can reject those that don’t work and learn about and then develop the ones that will.

Part 5 Moving from Prototypes to Implementation: 
What’s Next? As we move through this PowerPack we’ll share lots of practical tools with you to help you design people-centred onboarding experiences. 

The tools we’ll share will help you to understand the problem you are trying to solve, or the opportunity you have identified. Getting clear on what you are trying to achieve is the foundation of creating a brilliant EX. You will use the tools to help you put your people at the heart of your approach and understand where to focus your efforts.

Examples of just some of the tools and templates included in this PowerPack...

  • A template to create your case for change
  • Stakeholder mapping tool and template
  • Example metrics for measurement
  • A template for an organisational context review
  • Journey mapping tool and template
  • Service design blueprint tool and template
  • Best (new start) EX activity
  • Future vision activity
  • Example personas
  • Pen portrait tool and template
  • Empathy map tool and template
  • A variety of user-observation tools
  • Sense making activities
  • How might we question tools
  • Ideation activities
  • Concept sketching guidelines
  • Prototyping pro-forma
  • Questions for testing
  • A brilliant onboarding EX essential checklist
  • + worked examples for many of these activities