Enhancing the Onboarding Experience for Onsite Employees Post-Covid

November 2022 — By T.J. Duane

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, employees regularly commuted to the office to complete their daily tasks, conduct business meetings, and provide various in-person services. The ability to work from home was often a privilege reserved for senior management and upper-level employees. The pandemic changed everything.

Though many employees were on remote or hybrid home-to-office work schedules, many companies are now requiring a more frequent, if not full-time, on-site presence. Large companies such as Google and Goldman Sachs have begun to revert to traditional business methods and are requiring jobs to be performed on-site. However, the task at hand is not so simple.

As companies begin to expand their workforce and on-site presence, they’re having difficulty connecting with employees who are either new to the office or returning after years of working outside of it. The pressure to implement an enhanced onboarding experience that helps engage, excite, and retain employees has never been greater.

The Importance of Creating the Best Onboarding Experience

Fostering meaningful relationships from the first day of employment, or even a return to work, is crucial. Studies show why onboarding is important for organizations of all sizes. Around 1 out of every 3 new hires leaves within their first 90 days of employment. Yet, around 40% of onboarding programs last less than a week. Though the HR department may not have the bandwidth to support an extended onboarding experience, there are certainly simple yet effective ways to onboard with engaging tools.

The Benefits of Connecting With Employees Through Effective Onboarding Tools

Working remotely during the pandemic provided perks to employees and companies alike. However, many of the benefits of in-person collaboration and personal relationship development were left behind. Now that companies are beginning to bring workers back into the office, they have a responsibility to re-engage, re-acclimate, and re-energize them. But with HR managers and leadership stretched thin, companies are looking to third-party tools and platforms to help them enhance their welcome or onboarding experiences.

The best tools can help:

  • Increase camaraderie. Working from home caused individuals to experience a physical, mental, and emotional state of isolation. Social interactions were limited to video conferences, emails, phone calls, and direct messaging. Employees no longer participated in frequent team-collaboration events and were often unaware when the company added new hires to their team. Effective onboarding tools not only bring people from the same department together, but they also make employees company-wide more accessible. Initial connections are also much deeper, as new employees can share their whole selves with their colleagues, rather than just their current position or resume.
  • Boost personal confidence. Making personal connections is difficult when you have no context to base them on. Onboarding tools can help instill confidence in employees before day one, as they’ll already feel a sense of familiarity with the culture and their colleagues.
  • Improve retention. Employees who feel excited and engaged are more likely to stay. One Gallup poll showed that the 51% of employees who were considered not engaged, were also looking for new job opportunities. The right tools that prioritize engaging and connecting with employees can help ensure they stick around.
  • Save valuable time and resources. Implementing a new onboarding tool may sound like a lot of work, but the best tools are designed to save organizations time and money while enhancing the onboarding experience.
  • Tailor employee experiences. Beyond the benefits to employees, effective onboarding tools provide organizations with valuable insights into their new additions. This allows leadership to personalize the employee experience, from the way they provide feedback to how they assign tasks to their teams.

EnergyVault, a global energy storage company, has been growing quickly. But rapid growth doesn’t come without growing pains. The organization was struggling to connect with its employees as the organization grew. With so many people joining in a short period, EnergyVault needed a solution that could connect new and existing employees in a more meaningful way.

Through BrightCrowd’s digital welcome books, they’ve seen an 86% participation rate among its employees. Teams are not only creating their own pages, but using the search feature to find other employees within the organization that share similar interests. EnergyVault even used BrightCrowd to celebrate their IPO on the NYSE!

Add BrightCrowd’s Digital Welcome Books To Your Onboarding Experience

The best onboarding experience is one through which employees can share their authentic selves and get excited to come to work every day, especially after working from home for so long.

With BrightCrowd’s digital welcome books, new employees will have the opportunity to:

  • Create personalized pages that provide valuable insight into their professional work style, personal hobbies, and otherwise unknown fun facts about themselves
  • Meet the members of their team in a fun and interactive manner to develop a rapport with employees across all departments
  • Gain confidence and reduce nervousness associated with starting a new job

At the same time, BrightCrowd digital welcome books allow companies to gather relevant information about their workforce while reducing onboarding costs and efforts by:

  • Limiting the amount of time human resources must allocate towards creating welcome emails and organizing meet and greets
  • Learning what motivates and empowers employees for more effective coaching
  • Developing a customizable welcome experience for everyone

In as little as 20 minutes, growing companies can create their own digital memory book that helps them connect with employees, increase retention rates, and build an engaged workforce.

Welcoming individuals back to the office in a post-Covid era may seem daunting. Use BrightCrowd to help connect with employees in a meaningful way and make the transition process as seamless as possible.

Learn more about BrightCrowd and how we’re partnering with growing companies like yours every day.

T.J. Duane