These 6 Companies Came Together to Create People-First Onboarding—Here’s How to Get in on The Conversation

With the Great Resignation still blazing, getting your onboarding program right—especially remotely—is no joke. After all, one company’s offboarder is another’s onboarder. 

You want to make it personal, but you don’t want to clog employees’ calendars with one-to-one meetings. You’re feeling the pressure to get new hires up to speed on every detail, but afraid of overwhelming them—or, dare I say it, leading to their churn. And you know you should be integrating newbie feedback, but you’re just not quite sure how. 

In fact, we’ve talked at length with the teams at Spendesk on just how tricky it can be to master an onboarding program (and how they’re pulling it off despite the challenges). But the topic is so broad that we knew we were far from having plumbed its depths. So, we decided to bring some great minds together to tackle the issue, head-on.

Eager to be part of the conversation? Sign up to join the L&D Collective and receive your own invitation.

L&D Collective: A chance for L&D practitioners to come together

At our latest L&D Collective meet-up, L&D pros from leading tech scale-ups came together to share their ideas, challenges, and tips for creating people-first onboarding programs. We’ve included some of these pearls of wisdom, below:

The importance of meeting in person

For instance, Pia De Marcillac, a People Development Manager at Qonto, shared their strategy for bringing new joiners to their physical headquarters in France—something that’s great for building rapport, but probably not scalable in the long run. Their founder also makes an appearance for each onboarding cohort (every two weeks), which helps new joiners get to know the company and makes them feel welcome.

Global vs local content

Estelle Guiot, Payfit’s Fulfillment & Development Specialist, went over how they’re distinguishing local from global onboarding. As the company is growing fast, she’s focused on scaling their onboarding and perfecting its contents, which is dense and full of plenty of meetings during week one.

Making new hires feel welcome from day one

Partoo’s Pauline Mielczarek (HR Specialist) also shared her tips for ensuring new hires feel welcome: from day one, the founder speaks to each new employee, and finds five minutes to chat with them one-on-one. This is a powerful way of initiating newbies and making them feel valued. She even sets up preboarding communication to reassure them that they’re going to receive a warm welcome and a structured first few weeks.

Naming a co-pilot

As for Eléonore Petit, People Growth Partner at Ornikar, she relies on the help of ‘co-pilots’ or buddies that guide an entire cohort of new hires during their onboarding. They, too, get their founder involved, in that he leads an hour-long culture code session to help new employees find their feet. Ice-breaker activities are sprinkled throughout.

Customer-centric onboarding

At Malt, onboarding is both customer-centric and based on new hire feedback. All discovery meetings during the packed schedule of their week-long onboarding are graded by the new hires, explained Julien Martino, Head of People Development, so that Malters know how they can improve for next time. They also throw new joiners right into ‘real work’ by having them put on their sales hats and call up customers, so they get a boots-on-the-ground feel of the business and its clients.

Onboarding based on collaboration

As for us at 360Learning, we reiterated the importance of collaboration to our entire onboarding process: we believe onboarding should be an opportunity to build the relationships and internal network that will help new joiners be more impactful in their jobs.

Related: 6 Steps to a Great Remote Onboarding Process - and What to Avoid

Join the conversation

Our participants spent a great evening sharing best practices, challenges, and advice. But this is only one of a long list of meet-ups we have planned on a variety of L&D topics.

Eager to be part of the conversation? Sign up to join the L&D Collective and receive your own invitation.