Top 8 Ideas for a Creative New Employee Onboarding | AcademyOcean

Highlights:

• What are Onboarding Activities?
  
• 8 Ideas for a Creative New Employee Onboarding
• The best ideas for onboarding new employees

The best way to welcome and retain new employees is to build a strong onboarding process. Effective onboarding is all about planning ahead and thinking from your new employee's point of view. It doesn't begin and ends on your new hire's first day with you. It starts at the beginning of your hiring process and ends when your new employee is fully settled into their role.

First things first, let's figure out what employee onboarding is. ExactHire gives us the most appropriate definition of this phrase.

“Employee onboarding, also known as organizational socialization, refers to the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders.”

What are Onboarding Activities?

These are crucial components of the onboarding process, ensuring that newcomers seamlessly transition into their roles within an organization. These onboarding ideas activities encompass various stages, from preboarding to post-hiring integration, with the ultimate goal of helping newcomers become effective, engaged, and well-acquainted with their job responsibilities and accepted culture.

8 Ideas for a Creative New Employee Onboarding

Look at the best onboarding ideas that can enhance the experience for newcomers:

Preboarding

Before a new worker's official start date, consider initiating preboarding activities. These onboarding process ideas involve offering them essential information and resources, such as company policies, the worker handbook, and any necessary paperwork. Preboarding helps newbies to adapt quicker, prepare for their first day, and feel more confident about joining the organization.

Welcome Kit

Create a personalized welcome kit for every new person. This unique onboarding idea can include company-branded items like T-shirts, office supplies, or a branded water bottle. Such fun onboarding ideas make newcomers feel appreciated and turn them into brand ambassadors, promoting your company both inside and outside the workplace.

Welcome Gift

In addition to the welcome kit, consider giving newbies a special welcome gift that reflects your company's dos and don'ts. For example, you can present them with a company-branded item or a thoughtful gesture that shows you value their presence.

Creative Employee Introduction

A creative employee introduction process where newbies can present themselves to everyone in some interesting, memorable and unique way, such as through a short presentation or a creative project.

Creative New Employee Onboarding Icebreakers

Break the ice with creative onboarding activities. Conduct specialized team-building exercises or games that motivate new people to interact with each other and learn about the enterprise culture in a fun and engaging way.

Buddy System

Talking about welcoming new employee ideas implementing mentorship by pairing newcomers with more experienced people. Workers who can serve as mentors and guides during their initial days. This fosters a sense of belonging and helps newcomers navigate their roles more effectively.

Start on a Friday

Consider scheduling new workers' start dates on a Friday. This allows them to ease into their roles over a weekend, giving them extra time to acclimate before the workweek begins.

Rookie Cookie Program

Finally, one of the most exciting ideas for onboarding new employees is to develop a specialized program where newcomers are encouraged to meet with different teams or departments within the organization over coffee or snacks. This informal networking opportunity helps new hires build relationships across the company.

Organize a Creative New Employee Onboarding Social Eve

Host a creative onboarding social event where new people can mingle with each other in a relaxed atmosphere. This can be a themed party, a team-building outing, or any event that fosters social connections and team cohesion. 

By incorporating these new employee onboarding ideas and onboarding activities for new hires into your routine, you can boost the experience for newcomers and set the stage for their successful integration. Remember that best new hire ideas contribute to higher employee retention and satisfaction, ultimately benefiting both the team and the company.

The best ideas for onboarding new employees

• Make it memorable

Welcome new hires like never before. An employee onboarding kit is the best way to do it. Employee onboarding kit is a very important marketing tool as it helps boost companies' brand.

Giving your new employee office supplies, a T-shirt with a logo of your company or a branded water bottle helps to represent your company. Automatically your new employee turns into a promoter and champion of your brand even outside of the office.

• Make it automated

Employees are often fired due to the fact that they are underperforming or don't fully understand their role and responsibilities. Is it their own fault? No. In 90% of the time, it happens because of the bad onboarding or even of its absence. Lack of time is the main reason why companies abandon full-fledged employee onboarding. There is a way out.

Make your employee onboarding automated. You will spend your time now, but you will save it in the future. Surely, you must have some onboarding docs or handbooks, instructions to the software your employee needs to use, manuals, etc.

All these things you can collect in one place —  employee onboarding academy. It will help to reduce the waste of human resources, and to tell about the most critical points about your company and employee's role and responsibilities.

AcademyOcean tool can be easily used for your employee onboarding. You can fill your Academy with any type of content. Everything you have in different folders you will have in one place. Moreover, you can add slides, videos, animation, quizzes, certificates. In other words, everything that makes it dynamic and interactive.

One of the coolest features of academies is that you can edit content whenever you want. Just add a new piece of information and save it. Academies is a great way to make training fascinating and interesting for new employees with the help of gamification elements to encourage them to continue on their learning journey.

It's easy for new hires to forget information they learn in one-on-one sessions with their supervisors, since there's so much of it. They may end up asking supervisors a lot of questions, which can be distracting. With an academy, the new hire can return to the information on their own at any time.

One more essential part of onboarding is to bring the mission and vision of your company to new employees. They should clearly understand the values and main goals of your company. One of our customers has created an "Academy of Inspiration", which perfectly explains all of these things. Every newcomer receives this Academy on his first day of work. It helps them to become a full member of the team.

Academies allows you to have detailed statistics on each reader, for example, the number of lessons they've learned or time spent in your Academy. This helps to identify the effectiveness and inefficiency of employees in their first days of work.

• Make it valuable 

Make your new employees feel that they are cared about. Fill your onboarding with the most crucial things. The new employee should find all the answers to his possible questions. If you notice that three or more employees ask you the same questions, add the answers to the Academy.

"We focus first on the people and how we incorporate them into our company, and then we focus on how to drive the business." — John Chambers, Executive Chairman and former CEO of Cisco Systems