Improving Virtual Onboarding for New Employees

The employee onboarding process is arguably more essential in 2022 than ever before, and your business needs to leverage the best practices possible to help support, train, and keep all of the new talent you intend to hire this year.

Onboarding: Essential Basics to Understand

In basic terms, onboarding is a process new employees go through when joining a business or company to help prepare them for their new job. It immerses them in the company’s culture, introduces them to their coworkers to create team cohesion, and encourages active participation. A quality onboarding process is essential because it can help drastically improve new hire productivity and encourage employees to stay with the company for the long haul. In short, it allows you to welcome recruits and get them invested in the company from the get-go.

Onboarding typically involves four key phases:

• pre-onboarding,
• welcoming efforts,
• training,
• easing employees into new roles.

However, there are a wide array of other elements that onboarding should involve to be as effective as possible in 2022, including the use of gamification tactics provided by an expert of quality game solutions, like Emeraude Escape. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

Critical Tactics for Effective Employee Onboarding in 2022

Now that we’ve covered the essential basics that companies need to consider when facilitating effective new hire onboarding, let’s delve into the best practices they can leverage to ensure their onboarding process works as effectively as possible.

1. Start Onboarding Before One Begins

It’s a mistake to think that onboarding begins on the first day of employee training or whenever they walk into the building or log into their virtual office for the first time. The most effective onboarding practices start long before an employee’s first work day. Companies should leverage welcome emails, pre-state emails, pre-work virtual meetings, and other tactics to help bridge gaps with new employees.

Companies can also leverage dynamic, collaborative, and engaging digital seminars to help facilitate their efforts. Custom digital seminars can serve as great connection platforms. They typically include everything from introduction videos and tutorials, to engaging activities like quizzes and other challenges.

2. Assign Onboarding Buddies or Partners

According to evidence reported in the Harvard Business Review, 56% of new hires who were assigned a buddy during their onboarding process were more productive because of the connection they made with their colleague. That increased to 97% when there were more than eight interactions between buddies within 90 days. Having new hires work together as buddies or in teams can improve their overall satisfaction with the onboarding process.

Discover also: Partner Portals 101: Drive Loyalty & Sales With Gamification

3. Leverage Regular Check-Ins With Managers

It’s essential to establish clear lines of open communication between staff and ensure that all new employees know they can count on their managers. Regular check-ins between managers and new staff can also help ensure that everyone is fully aware of crucial expectations, processes, and progress. At a minimum, try to schedule meetings during days 1, 7, and 14. Have another meeting on day 30, and then schedule one more after every 30 days.

Emeraude Escape can help you leverage gamification with ease!

4. Get Teams Involved in The Onboarding Process

Don’t forget about your older employees and teams while you’re focusing on onboarding the new ones. Remember, these new employees will become part of those teams in the future, so it’s a good idea to facilitate at least a baseline connection between everyone. Ignoring teams can stir up a lot of confusion, miscommunication, and unneeded drama over time. Introduce new hires to their future teams, and explain their eventual role to everyone involved to ensure everyone is on the same page. You can also encourage bonding with some games and team-building exercises.

5. Share Key First-Week Information With New Hires

The information new hires receive during their first week will be a large part of the foundation for their future work for the company, especially when learning about critical values and work culture. That said, you don’t want to overwhelm anyone by loading them up with too much information too quickly. Some of the must-have information and activities involved in the first week should include;

• A company, CEO, and manager welcome
• An exploration of company values, vision, and goals
• First week schedules
• Team introductions, rituals, and ceremonies
• Key team terminology and lingo

6. Use Engaging Games and Activities For Employee Onboarding

We’ve mentioned the benefit of games in a few of the above sections. Still, we want to emphasize the critical nature of gamification and its role in effective onboarding processes, especially regarding team building. Leveraging activities like digital escape rooms, speed gaming, and battle royale-based games provide a fantastic opportunity for new long-standing employees to connect and get them excited for their future work with the company. Making the onboarding process as fun and exciting as possible can positively impact employee morale and facilitate better communication.

Similarly re-onboarding your employees may be critical. Typically, we contributed to a large re-onboarding process for Microsoft by creating a giant hybrid Escape Game with physical and digital experiences for the 2000 employees of its campus of Issy-les-Moulineaux at the post-covid return to work period.

Related: Everything You Need To Know About Gamification

7. Get and Leverage New Employee Feedback

One of the best practices any business or company can leverage during employee onboarding is to get critical feedback from everyone going through the onboarding process. This tactic will provide vital insights into what does and doesn’t work, so the company can make continual adjustments and provide future employees with a superior onboarding process. Send out assessments and surveys, and ask for personal input from as many people as possible to get a complete picture of how everything went.

Concluding Thoughts to Keep in Mind

Our team of experts at Emeraude Escape hopes that the above information helps you better understand the essential nature of employee onboarding, its various vital phases, and the use of gamification to enhance the effectiveness of the process!

Need top-quality onboarding games? Contact Emeraude Escape today!