Empathy based virtual onboarding | with Johnny Campbell

Welcome everybody to the Shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell, I'm your host and I'm the CEO and co founder of Social Talent. If it's your first time to the Shortlist, you're very welcome. If not, well, welcome back. It's episode number 64. We've got an exciting show for you today, one of our special summer series. It's episode 64 of the shortlist and this week we're going to be focusing on onboarding in a virtual world. Earlier this year we had the pleasure of hosting a social talent live panel and with a panel of experts from around the world talking about onboarding, how it's changed post pandemic, the importance of it and its connection to, I guess, employee engagement. And this week we're going to be broadcasting a talk from that from Anjana Sridevi, who is the global onboarding design and delivery lead at IBM and her group are responsible for helping onboard over 40,000 professionals every single year. So she knows a little bit about onboarding. But before we do that, let me just give you a bit of context. Welcome. As I said, you want to find out more about the Shortlist and find out more about our shows, what we've discussed in the past, what we're discussing in the future, you can go to socialtalent.com the shortlist we welcome our live listeners. We broadcast live every Wednesday at UK Ireland time 4pm if you're listening to us on YouTube or on LinkedIn, you're very welcome. We love to get your questions and comments live as we go through the show. If you're listening to our podcast or want to check out our podcast because you don't have enough time to finish the show. We are available on itunes, I should say Apple these days and Spotify and everywhere where you find your good podcasts. And we're available typically every Wednesday evening. Our new show drops and you can check it out and subscribe there. So why talk about onboarding in a virtual world? I recently wrote a blog article on LinkedIn that talked about how, really, when you're talking about how do you get the most out of your employees, how do you get that performance? Really, it's a factor of hiring, multiplied by onboarding, multiplied by engagement. That's where you get the kind of productivity and retention of great talent. If you haven't hired successfully, if you haven't onboarded successfully, and if you're not engaging that employee, you will not get the retention. Retention is a burning issue for folks. So let me take middle point of the Three factors that I think multiply together to give you a successful retain, successful employee, who you will retain. And it is onboarding. Some facts. First, onboarding, apparently, although we all have some sort of onboarding process in Our team, only 12% of employees agree that their company does a good job of onboarding. That's pretty poor. So before we launched into our live session a couple of months ago, we asked our audience of a couple of hundred leaders their thoughts on onboarding. We polled them. So, for example, we said, does your organization do a good job? Only 12% of employees think they do a good job. And it was interesting because we have a mix of it right. About 24% said, you know, they incorporate many best practices, continue to refine. 5% say it's very evolved. That's about 30% saying it's brilliant versus the 12% of employees who agree with that. But it was, you know, kind of interesting to Note that about 32% said it's in the very early stages. And about the majority, but 39% said it's improved a lot in the last six months, but there's still a lot of room to evolve. So this is definitely a topic most of us can focus on, need to focus our attention on. But again, going back to the stats, let me give you some more info from our polls of the several hundred people who are on the call. So we asked people, you know, in their opinion, which of the following was the best way for the company to measure onboarding success in the future. We give them a bunch of options. I'll tell you what came in number two. It was the new higher retention rate, like the metric. Do they stay in the first year, two years, whatever that is. But the majority would use how the employee feels an NPS score as the best way for the company to measure onboarding success in the future. So what would that look like going forward? That was the end of the show. So there's a hint as to what you'll learn from Angela in her presentation here around what the employee feels and focusing on the feeling. We also asked folks, what's the ideal amount of time to expect to spend virtually onboarding an employee? And stunningly, we had 6% say a week. You can finish an onboarding in a week. Good luck to you. We had a bunch of others said we could do it in 30 days. About a quarter of the respondents, 26%, said we could do it in 30 days, but the majority were saying 90 days. About 39% and 23% said six months. In fact, 6% said it could take a whole year. Data shows it takes six to 12 months. Alright, so anything less than six, you're just deluding yourself to really onboard somebody typically takes up to six months. But shortening that is so valuable. So what's the most important thing to focus on with virtual onboarding? So we gave the options of clear communication, empathy, structure and technology. What came out tops, it was clear communication. It's about focusing on clear communication when somebody's joining. And what do we think the biggest obstacle to onboarding is? To onboarding new hires, virtually the number one thing that came out was ensuring they're being exposed to the team socially, followed close behind by ensuring alignment with the rest of the team and company goals. And finally we asked folks what is the primary way their company was measuring onboarding success today? Half. Half the number one response was retention of information. Did they retain the information? Sorry, it's a lie. Half said, we don't have any measurement. None, Johnny, we don't measure this stuff. It's so important, we don't even measure it. But of those who did measure it, the majority said how the employee feels was the most important way. And by the end everyone agreed that was the major way that we were going to measure. So to see why, you know, 50% who said we've no measurement and we're not sure what to measure, all move to saying we should measure by how the company, how the employee feels, what their NPS scores. I'm going to hand you back over to Anjana from IBM and she's going to tell the story of Anjana's learning in IBM and how they developed and evolved their virtual onboarding process to really come up to post pandemic standards.

So as I said, my name is Anjana and I am part of the talent acquisition team at IBM and I'm responsible for the design and delivery of onboarding at IBM. Let me start with this quote and a story I think that will give us probably an overview of what I want to cover. Back in 2019, I was tasked with a group of team members from IBM to reimagine the onboarding experience that we were running at IBM. At that point in time we were 10, 12 of us from different parts of the world, all subject matter experts in their respective areas. We all got together in a room with Tikis and somewhere in Boston in a meeting room and we're all trying to design this best onboarding process or program that we can create for IBM. And halfway through that process, our then leader asked us this question, take me through the design of what you're creating and we all stop for a second design. We are creating a program, we're creating a process and where is design coming in that? And for us design is more with products. Many conversations back and forth and I think that's really when we started to look at onboarding from a designer's lens. Right? I mean what does a good onboarding design look like? And this code that resonates really well with every IBMO. This is from our Thomas Wilson Jr. Who is our second vice president of IBM. And this is in every IBM or CNA that good design is good business. And I think it's pretty much the same when it comes to onboarding experience as well, that having a good design is really important for you to create that experience. And that's really what we used when we were creating our onboarding experience way back in 2019. We applied design thinking practices and agile methodologies as we were creating that experience. And our focus really was to create an experience that will drive better human centered outcomes at any scale and a guiding principle so to say where create an experience that is focused on the user outcomes. Who are we designing for and what exactly is the need of that user? And we had to constantly remind ourselves throughout that process that you are not the user. So don't just say I think this is going to work but we really have to say what is the user looking for? What do they need? And really create an experience or create a design that is focused clearly on what the user is looking for. And then second is restless reinvention responding. The design should be created in a way that it can respond to the changing needs through rapid prototyping and iteration. And the pandemic was a really good example of us having to rapidly change and iterate the experience that we had created and then diverse and empower teams. Do you have the right mix of makers? I think everybody here would agree with me that it takes an army of people to make sure an onboarding experience is seamless and successful. And depending on the size of the company, it could even be hundreds of people. For example, in IBM we have hundreds of stakeholders involved in making sure that the onboarding experience that we offer to a new hire is, is successful and seamless. And it's really important that we have the right mix of people who's involved in creating that experience. Now let me talk a little bit about how we look at onboarding in IBM. In IBM, you are an IBMer. The moment you say yes to an IBM offer. So for the IBM new hires, day one is not really the first day. It's really a celebration of a journey that's already began when they said yes to an IBM offer. From the moment they accept an IBM offer, our new hires are immersed in a personalized onboarding experience that is tailored to their location, their role, their skill set and the level of experience that they have. So the way we look at it is that they are engaged from the time they accept an offer. So there is no real need to break the ice when it comes to their first. The new hires are immediately connected with their manager, their team, when they accept the offer, that we don't have to look at day one to create that connect or break the eyes. And instead of them feeling anxious on their start date or unsure of what to expect, our IBM or the new hires on their first day are enthusiastic, they're confident, they're connected, and they are well informed. That's really the design of the experience that we have at IBM. Now let me tell you a little bit about the experience that we had before the pandemic because this is the version that after the pandemic hit us, the experience, we call IT a standard IBM. This was implemented in 2019 and the focus was heavily on digitizing the experience, keeping it personalized at the same time with the goal of jump starting their careers even before they start date. So as I mentioned, the experience starts at the time they accept the offer. So we have the time from the time somebody made a decision to join the organization till their start date. And we leverage that time to complete some of the things that otherwise was done on either day one or after day one. So which really allows us to save time and helps in our hires becoming ready to work or being productive much sooner. And some of the strategic outcomes that we were, you know, that we had with the, with the design of standard IBM was improved personalized experiences. Anytime that you create an experience that focused on digital, I think the immediate assumption is that, you know, a digital experience cannot be personal. And that's not the truth. I mean we can really make it personal and tailored at the same time, even when it is digital. And that was clearly something that we focused on when we designed standard IBM and increased productivity and retention. And this was one of the poll questions. How do you really measure, do you really want to associate this also with retention? Can a good onboarding experience help the organization retained their employees and our increased business requirement to have people come and start say the very next day at a client side so is our onboarding experience designed in a way that it can meet the business requirement, which could be increased productivity and retention, of course, is something which is really critical and increased engagement and clarity as well. For the new hires, it's really important that engagement is key. And the hires, you know, especially when you're operating in a digital environment, that the new hires are engaged and they have the clarity that they need, you know, throughout the experience of onboarding. Okay, now let me tell you what happened with the pandemic. Now, as you could see in the previous slide, we were betting heavily on the digital experience to offer that, you know, outstanding onboarding experience. So to say it was working very well for us. You know, we had really good new hire feedback, really good feedback from the hiring managers. And then came the pandemic, you know, quite unexpectedly in some locations. And we had to adapt and change really quickly, you know, in some locations. And there are, there are some sites where we had to change everything in a matter of days. And I'm sure most of you who probably worked in moving to a virtual environment or moving to a remote setup during the pandemic would have experienced something similar. In the middle of all of these virtualization, it can be easy to forget what makes us all human. And that's really the feeling. How can we make the experience virtual, office, remote, but also make it personal and also consider the emotions of the highest. At the same time, how can we support our new highest emotions during a difficult time such as the pandemic? Joining an organization as such could be anxious or nerve wracking for some people. But joining at the time of a pandemic, when you have no clarity of what's going to happen, things are changing rapidly that could add to the anxiety. So as we started working to solve the logistics of remote onboarding and how do we respond to Covid, empathy and personalization became the focus areas that had to be spread across the end to end experience that we were designing. So these were the two key focus areas that were our focus as we were responding to Covid, our onboarding transformation during the pandemic. I think the best way to describe that is empathy based onboarding model. And I'm sharing this directly from one of the case studies that Gartner published in February which was covering the experience that we did at IBM responding to COVID 19. And there were three key focus areas. One was people centric journey mapping. This was, as I said in the beginning, the design of having people at the center of everything that we are doing and Then engagement focused initiatives and personalized and virtual support. And I'm going to quickly show you the article that was published in Gartner and we'll share the link with you so that you can take a look at that later. And this covers in detail about everything that we've done during this time. But I want to focus on a couple of areas. One is like the people centered journey mapping, keeping the new highest perspective at the center of everything that we were designing. And be it the experience that we had to change, be it the processes that we had to amend or any of the technology gaps that we had, or any technology that we were introducing, how is this technology enabling us to move through the end to end journey seamlessly with regards to the experience? In the absence of a live interaction, does the new hire feel integrated into the community? Do they still feel that sense of community? Do they still feel connected with the organization? That's something that we focused on the process. You know, we can't eliminate the process side of things. You know, you have to complete your paperwork, you have to get your machine, you need to get an email ID configured. That is really essential to the, you know, to the whole experience as well. Are the process steps easy? Is it relatively quick enough for the highest to move through? That's something we again started to think from a new highest perspective, right? I mean we have this real process, but does it really work in the setup that we are operating in currently with all of the challenges that people were facing? And there were so many challenges, people did not have network, some people could not get to our technology solutions. So there were many, many challenges that were that were there. And then of course the engagement focus initiatives, prioritizing the engagement by establishing and we did a few things in this area culture based network because our experiences is global and we have country and geo specific adaptations. But during this time we really looked at creating culture based network. We also looked at creating empathetic messages. We also started tracking new hires, emotional experience. And this was an area I think we spent quite a bit of time on in terms of reinventing. We changed our complete communications, we changed the way we ask questions in our survey. And I think our survey question started with how are you feeling? Do you feel okay? Are you anxious? Is there anything that we can help with? And then of course we asked more specific questions about did you get your machine? Or how do you feel about the support that you received. But the first change that we made really was asking them how are you feeling? And what can we do to Help. And then of course, the personalized virtual support. And this is not just for the new hire, but also for the hiring managers. We actually looked at what are some of the moments where there could be a challenge that the, that the new hire or the manager may be facing. And we identified three key areas. Moment of emotion, where the hire or manager is most likely to experience awkwardness or discomfort. And there could be moments of uncertainty, where people are most likely to be unsure about the process. And there is a certain amount of uncertainty. And people are scared to ask a question they don't know where to ask, who to ask. And then there's moments of change, where the hire or manager, they're most likely to experience a continuous change to the process. So we really identified what are some of these key moments and really try to solution them. Again, keeping the user in mind and seeing what exactly is the user looking for. And more details are there in the case study that Gartner published. But let me quickly touch upon some of the changes that we made during the pandemic. Communication. I think communication was really key, showing empathy and making sure that the intent is to reduce anxiety. We didn't want to give them a whole lot of instructions and tell them, just start doing all of these things and then you will be onboarded. But we really want to see to reduce anxiety and tell them that we're here to support and this is a challenging time for everybody. And you're not in this alone. We created videos. We created, as I mentioned earlier, some cultural networking group who were able to support new hires with some of the communications that we had to make. And then we leveraged digital platforms. Technology was quite important when you operate in a virtual setup. And we used digital platforms to share information, share resources that were rapidly changing by country. We had hires who were traveling, who couldn't move between borders. So there were many different challenges and scenarios that we had to respond to. And we used our digital platforms to be able to timely communicate with our new hires. Paperwork. Everybody knows this is really the critical piece of work. We made that 100% digital, making sure that the hires don't have to worry about printing something, sending something over to us, or coming to an office and dropping something. So made that process completely digital, which I think reduced a whole lot of anxiety. And that was one of the most asked questions from our new hires is what's going to happen to my paperwork? How am I going to do this? Who do I need to contact the network and connect? I think this is a very, very critical that we have, the hires have the support that they're looking for. And during this time, we extended the support that we were providing to the new hires before that as well as after they joined. We kept regular connects with the hires, the managers in Group 1 to 1, making sure that they had all of the resources and all of the information that they need. And people are really concerned about not coming to an office, not being able to mitigate, meet with their team. And that level of reassurance was really critical. And that's something that we did with our Slack channels, our internal communication channels that we use. Provisioning very important for people to start working quickly, making sure people get their laptop, making sure it is set up, configured, working. Another big, big challenge, I would say something that we had to constantly iterate and come up with new ways to manage, but that was one of the other changes that we had to make during the pandemic as well. And then welcome session. I know every organization will have an orientation session or a welcome session that we offer. And doing this virtually, of course, is very challenging, especially if your session is quite long. Our sessions used to be, you know, four hours long before the pandemic, when we used to run them during the pandemic. Of course, asking someone to sit for four hours in front of a computer and listen to, you know, to one person talking, of course, didn't seem like the best idea. And that's not really what our new hires wanted as well. So we split our sessions into two parts and messaged, you know, what should go on the first day, what should go on the second day. Made the session very interactive and personal. We also created some custom videos from ibmo's around the world, really sharing how working from home is for them and making it as real as it can be. You're working and you have your kids running around, you have your pet dog there, and this is all part of the work from home setup. And we wanted to make it as real as it is so that the new hires are not anxious and they're not worried about how this is going to work for them. So made it really interactive and personal. And I think this is one of the things that worked really well and what we were really concerned about, but the one that worked very well. In fact, our welcome session satisfaction during the pandemic was more than the one that we had before the pandemic. So I think that was something that was really good for us to know as well in terms of our results. And it was interesting when I looked at the poll that 49% of the organizations don't have a measurement. I think it's really important to do measurement to see where we stand in terms of the experience that we offer at IBM. We measure, we of course use NPS as a measure to understand how likely are our highest recommends that we offer. And then we also check if their decision to join the organization is reassured. And we ask that question a month after their start date. And we could ask some questions around their overall experience of joining the organization. And we do check retention as well. I don't have the numbers here, but just to give you a rough estimate, I mean, we onboarded 26,000 hires virtually during the pandemic last year with a net promoter score of 66. And 93% of our new hires reporting that they feel welcomed by IBM despite the virtual onboarding format and being worked remotely. And 95% of our hires felt reassured about their decision to join IBM after their first month. And these numbers are not easy to get. I wouldn't say this is how we started, but this is how we ended the year with. And this is what I want to leave you with. Right. I mean, reimagining the onboarding experience is not something that's easy. And I think there are always lessons learned. Even for us at IBM, it wasn't a success at the first attempt. We had to make many iterations. And I think that, and that's why these three are the key lessons that I would say that we learned as we reimagined the onboarding experience during the pandemic. First is fail fast and learn and iterate. Very critical and very important. And we had many instances where we failed. I mentioned about laptops earlier. I think that was one of the areas where we, you know, where we really struggled. The obvious option was ship the laptop to the new highest address and that solves it. And we set up a process, started to do it. Then we realized, you know, we don't even have shipping contracts in some countries. Some people moved home, they went back to their hometown, and we didn't even have the right address captured. So a complete process that you set up did not quite work. So we had to iterate come up with a new plan what's going to work. So it is quite possible and there are many areas you will fail, but it's important that you learn from it and then iterate and make sure that you work through that setting. Communicate and partner. Very, very important when you are operating remotely that you communicate. And your partner said that there are a number of people involved in making this a successful experience or a seamless experience. For the new hire, though onboarding team or HR or talent acquisition is the front phase. There are several other people who are involved in making this a success. So it's really important that you partner, be it with the hiring manager, be it the person who gets you the nacdo, be it, you know, the legal team that's looking at it from a compliance perspective. It's really important that we communicate and we partner with each and everyone who is involved because it is, it is, you know, a group of or it's a team effort. And last but not the least, don't just build, optimize. It's really important that we don't just build something and leave it at that, but we really have to look at optimizing it, you know, time to time. So I think those are the three key lessons that we learned from, from the experience and that's all that I wanted to share.

Angela, thanks for that. I hope you really got some value out of that. It's inspired you to think about your onboarding process and how it's so critical in terms of the engagement of your staff and how it really links to successful hiring. Do join us again next week for episode 65, when I'll be joined by Clark Barris. Clark Bauer is the Director of Talent Acquisition at World Vision. World Vision is a faith based nonprofit operating in over 100 countries whose mission is really to improve the lot of communities, families and children to overcome poverty and injustice around the world. And World Vision have been a customer of social talent for many years and we work with their recruiting team to really upskill them because obviously in the recruitment team and then NGO like World Vision helps save lives, literally helps save lives and improve the lot of different children and individuals faster in war zones, in natural disasters, in lots of different areas. So it's a really, really powerful mission to be supporting. We're proud to support World Vision, but Clark is going to be talking to us about executive hiring in the NGO world and what he's learned. So do join us next week. That is going to be Wednesday at 4pm Irish time. That's 11am the east coast of the US and 8am on the west coast. Or you can find the podcast when it drops on Wednesday evening on Apple and Spotify. Until then, hope you really enjoyed this show. We'll be back on a regular schedule next week.