New Hire Welcome Kit
Type of work: User Research, Service Design, Prototyping, Workshop Facilitation
Date: November 2017-now
Time commitment: ~10%
Brief
The workshop to re-imagine corporate onboarding gifted me a deeper understanding of process and revealed areas to play and supplement at my org level, ONE Design. One moment in particular that was key to keeping a new hire on the “happy path” experience was their first day with their team.
The challenge
The organization I work for, ONE Design, has almost doubled in size in the 3 years I’ve been here. The scale we saw manifested in communication breakdowns, duplication of efforts and inconsistency of experience. There was rarely just one way of accomplishing something. Specific systems and processes were not able to keep up with the rate of growth, onboarding being one of them. Onboarding is the gate that every design new hire must pass. Do it right and your new hire is motivated to get to work, has the tools to do so and is plugged into the right information. The primary challenge was to curate a first day experience that was memorable, useful, scalable, and customizable to the team or role.
My secondary challenge was resourcing. I’m aware of my skills and knew I needed a team with the right combination of expertise in research, physical and visual design.
The beginning of synthesis
Research
Designers are some of the most fun but challenging users to design for. To my fortune, my colleagues in ONE Design are very giving of their time if they believe it’s worthwhile and serves the greater team. I approached 20 of our newest hires with the intent of learning of their own personal experience from offer accept to month 1. I designed research goals and used a co-creative experience mapping activity to capture key moments of thinking, feeling, and doing. After collecting all this data, I consolidated moments to the “happy path” experience and teased out major high and lows.
Resourcing & ideation
Our design campus development program associates are some of the most eager and talented individuals I know. I proposed to host a day-long, interactive design challenge to their program manager, in the hopes that some would raise their hand to work part-time on this initiative. And it worked! By the end of the day, I had 3 people motivated to follow me on this journey.
Design Challenge kick-off
Storyboard templates used to communicate new ideas
Consolidated Experience Map
grounding in our why
The design challenge left us with a multitude of fleshed out ideas to explore but it was obvious that the first day experience was ripe for change. As mentioned before, it’s not uncommon for the segmented teams within ONE Design to fill gaps on their own if they don’t believe anyone is working on a solution at the org level. Using my network and relationships with Design Managers, we did an audit of the existing first day experiences and evaluated the similarities and differences across them all. The “WHY” was clear:
To create an early feeling of belonging
To provide unified and consistent messaging around our ONE Design values & culture
To amplify our first impression as an organization
To give permission for newbies to embrace being new
To engage early on and provide them access and avenues to other employee experiences
To onboard them earlier and faster so that they are ready to rock in their new roles
Lo-Fidelity Prototyping & Testing
We knew we wanted to create a physical touchpoint to match the feeling of commitment a new hire feels when joining a new company— a memento to mark their latest life milestone with something they could literally see and touch later on. The question was how to satisfy all the needs we saw above with the physical constraint. Through a series of flaring and focusing, we landed on a Welcome Kit, comprised of 7 unique items.
One of my other responsibilities is to program and host our bi-monthly Design Onboarding 2-day session. Each new hire is required to attend within their first 4 months of joining ONE Design— an excellent forum for testing ideas. In the session, I facilitated a small group testing exercise that involved interacting un-aided with a lo-fidelity prototype of the Welcome Kit. Following the session, we synthesized learnings and identified iterations needed for the next round of testing.
High-fidelity Prototyping & Testing
The testing exercise with our lo-fidelity prototypes re-energized, validated and encouraged us to share this work outside the vacuum of our mini team. There was no more perfect opportunity to do so than at our ONE Design All Hands, a yearly in-person gathering focused on connection and strategic alignment. We wanted to showcase the next iteration of the Kit and provide space for feedback so that everyone, who wanted to be included in the process, was.
scale & support
The All Hands showcase was a success so the team and I felt the pressure to deliver the final Welcome Kit. I tasked the team with refinements and took point for our roll-out efforts. I started by closing the loop with our Design Management community, who are the gatekeepers for disseminating information broadly across ONE Design. Together, we co-designed a scaling experience that tapped into our admin community for production and educated our people managers on this new touchpoint in context of the full end-to-end onboarding experience.
End-to-end Onboarding Experience with Welcome Kit introduction
Final Welcome Kit
Outcomes
Every design new hire is expected to receive a Welcome Kit on their first day starting in June 2019. The finalized product is a combination of items that are informational, actionable and encourage the new hire to embrace their newness. We purposefully added space for any customization a specific LOB or team would like to have.
The Kit provides a cost savings of about $40 per new hire for the core design onboarding budget.
For the hiring manager, the time spent preparing for the new hire is reduced by 1-2 days as many of the typical onboarding activities are now pre-planned and guided through items in the Kit.
Lessons Learned
Rigorous project planning and expectation setting is fundamental when leading a team of individuals who are engaged side of the desk.
Design assuming people managers know very little about the process and have little time to prepare. Keep instructions simple, contextually relevant and void of any corporate jargon.
A phased roll-out approach is best when introducing something completely new to the user. Allow them to first get acquainted with the change in MVP format then enhance it over time.