Re-imagining New Hire Onboarding

Type of work: Service Design, workshop facilitation, co-design

Date: February- June 2017

Time commitment: Side of desk ~20%

Brief

I was working as a project manager to the Chief of Staff of ONE Design at the time when this opportunity landed in my lap. The Head of Service Design was in the process of hiring her new first hire and was frustrated at the complexity of our corporate hiring and onboarding processes. Her frustrations stemmed from the lack of transparency into milestones and timelines which in turn caused anxiety. There was also the impending fear that she was going to mess it all up, which I later found out originated from her own personal, negative experience as a new hire. She was determined to create a better experience for her first hire but just needed someone with the right connections to help.

The Challenge

The first challenge was to influence an internal, horizontal organization (the Hiring Logistics Team), that services the entire company not just ONE Design, to allow outsiders to help them explore new techniques to improve the new hire onboarding experience from offer accept to day 1. Once I was able to gain their trust, the next challenge was to find a way to visualize all the moving parts, players and systems in their end-to-end experience and align on opportunity areas to tackle going forward.

Existing Corporate onboarding Roadmap they used to communicate the process

Research

Before I could approach the Hiring Logistics team (HLT), I needed a good grasp on the process as the hiring manager and new hire experienced it. Therefore, I started with creating a touchpoint inventory of everything I could get my hands on (email correspondence, intake systems, conversations) and by laying them out over time, clear milestones and players emerged. Once these were revealed, I was able to make sense of the HLT’s dynamics and structure which allowed me to find connections, develop trust and start absorbing information from the source.

Alignment

The team’s AE was clear on what she wanted to see out of this engagement with me acting as a consultant. They needed to define the guiding principles for the experience, map the current state process and leave with actionable objectives for the next quarter. I was transparent with my intended outcomes which were to empower her team to work in a co-creative, generative and user-centered way and to bring back learnings to guide my own ONE Design-specific onboarding work.

Pre-work

Up until this point, I had been engaging with the HLT as the sole designer. Workshop facilitation is grueling work and requires wearing many hats-- MC/lecturer, activity tee-up’er, discussion moderator, and room manager. So, I sought out help by reaching out to my networks in Service Design and Content Strategy, both disciplines I felt could lend their expertise to this particular type of work. Two fellow ONE Designers stepped up to the challenge and we set off designing the workshop agenda.

Current state of the process was known by multiple stakeholders. A key goal of the work was to gain alignment across these teams. In order to expedite this step and focus on the desired state, we decided to work with individual team members to consolidate a current state blueprint of the process from the point of view of the new hire and hiring manager. This was printed large and hung in our room during the workshop.

Workshop

The workshop agenda above outlines how the full day session divided up. My team and I took turns playing different roles. We started with an introduction to Service Design methods and in particular, the anatomy of a service blueprint. Then, we grounded ourselves in the current experience by having a representative from each of the disparate teams service storm their respective roles.

Through a series of activities (storyboarding, future blueprint creation, and ideation), we arrived at 4 main opportunity areas that guided a discussion around what a Minimal Viable Experience (MVE) would look like for the next quarter.

The process was manual and dependent on personal touches between team members and the users. This leads to human errors and is at odds with current team resourcing.
The systems for tracking individuals and milestones were old and didn’t talk to each other. Manual overhead slows down timelines and results in higher chance of error.
The team’s hierarchy and separation of duties presented outwardly as disjointed or uncoordinated to the users (hiring manager and new hire). This especially showed up when recruiters handed off new hires to begin the onboarding process with the HLT, then again handed off to the hiring manager/ new team.
The HLT services new hires across entire company which shows up in communications as generic and confusing. Large improvements could be made by simply re-organizing content and using natural language that meets the new hire or hiring manager where they are.

Outcomes

The workshop was a success in that we left reaching all 4 of our goals, which brought a new closeness between members of the broader team. The disparate groups within Hiring Logistics and Recruiting had never engaged in this way before and experienced new methods that were co-creative, holistic, and resulted in tangible outcomes. The feedback we collected at the very end was overwhelmingly positive and noted that they loved the interactivity and human-centered mindset.

The main output of the workshop was the concept evaluation matrix which outlines the ideas generated in the session, their effort, value, and priority order. The team left clear on which new features they wanted to design and prototype to close the gap between current and desired states. The team also left feeling inspired to leverage these tools going forward. Since that workshop, I have met monthly with the individuals on this team to check in and consult. They’ve started incorporating current and future state blueprints into their quarterly planning and regularly use tools to gain empathy, ideate, and prototype.

By way of working alongside this internal team, we developed empathy for the work they do and learned more about the limitations of the process that impact our new ONE Designers and their hiring managers. With the knowledge gained, we better understood the areas we could create ONE Design-specific experiences that enhance and supplement the current (and future) corporate onboarding process. You will see more of how this work translates to others in my portfolio!

Lessons learned

Push back when you hear there is no time for user empathy interviews. Gaining empathy is probably the most important step in the design process. When done co-creatively, it can also be used as an alignment mechanism. I found that individuals were attached to ideas that they felt most familiar with or that most impacted their work rather than concerning themselves with the entire end-to-end experience.
Include more technical stakeholders who could speak on behalf of the current systems and the feasibility of concepts.
Set realistic expectations on my engagement before and after the workshop. I was overeager! They loved the workshop so much that they wanted us to continue working with them through prototyping and implementation. Alas, I need to get back to my normal day to day duties but it was definitely hard to say no!