7 Learnings from Onboard.Week DAY 1
Day 1 of Onboard.Week is a wrap!
We have seen some wonderful interactions at the table between our guests Noortje Verwiel of Lightyear, Herman Rolfers of Heineken and Sander Houtveen of Visma. From all the learnings that were going back and forth, we selected these to share with you.
Learning 1: Define your north star
Herman Rolfers of Heineken was quite explicit about this. At Heineken the north star is: “becoming an employee centric organization”. And this north star has to be related to the big goals of the organization. Herman’s advice was to be bold in selecting your north star. Maybe you will never fully achieve it, but it gives you guidance over time.
Learning 2: Set up a team and create the business case
Change in general and HR specifically is tough. Many have to get involved to be successful. As Noortje Verwiel of Lightyear put it at the end of her presentation: “It is a team effort of the whole organization to make your newcomers feel at home.”
So, you need a strong team to continuously work on the improvement of onboarding for your organization. And you need a business case and KPI’s to get the backing of the leaders of your organization.
Learning 3: Involve your people
Involve your people in order to find out what gaps you have in your employee journey, or as Sander Houtveen of Visma calls it: “your people journey”. Also keep people involved in the design, piloting and implementing phase.
Learning 4: Think experience
In regard to processes and IT, think “experience”. As a reference think of the seamless integration of the apps you daily use on you mobile. There is one device that you use and within a couple of seconds you know what the weather will do, who won the elections, which people are interested in your product, how many people viewed your Linkedin page and what time it takes your bike to drive to the closest coffeeshop.
Here Sander added that it is not important to keep people in these apps, but to give them the right information as quickly as possible.
Learning 5: Think connection
Make room for the human connection so people will feel at home within your organization. There are numerous examples here of activities that can be done live or online.
And in the current situation- with corona - you should pay extra attention to this, because the normal moments to connect with coffee corner chit-chat, drinks after work, lunches, toilet talks, a walk & talk after lunch,… have all vanished.
Learning 6: Keep culture up
Transferring culture is one of the most important elements of onboarding. The viewers and speaker agreed on that. Organizations big and small, young and old, need to invest time and energy in maintaining their culture. And that is a continuous process which never stops. A strong point made by Noortje on the question of staying successful in the future in a fast-growing start-up company.
Learning 7: Check-back
Ask your new joiners for feedback. How are they doing themselves and what do they think of your onboarding? Sander threw in an example of Toyota where new hires are requested to come up with a serious improvement of the process within the first month being on the job. And they take that quite serious there.
And that was just day 1. More to come the next days.
You can still register on Onboard.Week
See you there!
Frank Philips
Yes! We Connect, content partner of Onboard.Week