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- One of the ways that we can improve onboarding is create more personalized onboarding experiences. One of the best audiences you can design for an Internet today is new employees. These should be interactive connected spaces.
- It should be rolled up to the user in the flow of their work, which in most cases is their digital hub, meaning their home page of their Internet. These are all examples of out of the box SharePoint, all the different things you can use with audiences.
So let's talk about core onboarding. And with core onboarding, the key word here is proactive. So proactive onboarding is something that's really important to improve.
One of the ways that we can improve onboarding is create more personalized onboarding experiences. So one of the challenges that we often see when we, you know, we have a lot of organizations that reach out to us, they say, hey, can you help us improve our processes? We say, well, which processes? We want to use power platform more, we want to use this more, et cetera. We dig into it.
And we often find onboarding is a great one because it's so standardized that if it is automated, which it often isn't, it's automated to be a general purpose. Like everyone gets the same experience even though there's very different business units and very different department needs and very different types of roles and so on and so forth. So what we want to do here is think about how do we tune that onboarding experience for different parties? And yet it starts from an organizational onboarding journey.
So, yes, you should have some place where in your organization you have news stories and information that helps new employees get up to speed and understand what's going on in the organization. This is important to have a space for because we need to place this to create this content. We need a space to have archives for this content in case someone wants to understand how this is changing over time.
We need to be able to create opportunities where you can connect people so when they get coming in the organization, we need to make sure they have a clear pathway to things that matter, like onboarding buddies or mentorship or how one on ones should be conducted with your manager. Very important because these are things we do understand, right? You should have a regular one on one with your manager. You should have these are kind of almost like rights, like expectations the employee should have.
And if there's gaps there, they should be talking to HR in a supportive way so that HR can help them get what they need, or that we can help improve the quality of those experiences because that helps with retention, efficacy and more. Or maybe there's resource groups or digital networking events, not just barbecues and in person networking events, but ones that are digitally focused to help people who are mostly remote connect with one another. Or communities.
There are great communities in most organizations that exist. Some of them are digitized, some of them are not. We need to make sure that there's a pathway for people to be able to engage on those.
And often we actually find that the new employee engagement on communities is much higher than existing employees, right, because they're coming in fresh and so they're very interested in that connection with peers outside of their working groups. And so that's the whole idea yammer Viva engage these spaces, create an opportunity to connect with people outside your working group. So it's important that we not just have a space for a new employee onboarding, et cetera, but that this space needs to connect with other patterns.
I find a lot of them are very just here's the onboarding checklist, and it's digitized in a PDF. That's not what we're talking about here. These should be interactive connected spaces.
And the other big thing is it shouldn't be that you have to go here. This is important, this content, everything that's relevant here should come to them on the Internet homepage. One of the best audiences you can design for an Internet today is new employees, because it's additive.
Meaning it just means that people will see new links in the top NAV or they'll see sections and content on the page, like content like documents or content, like links on the page that are relevant to a new employee and then they can go away over time. One of my other favorite things when we talk about audiences for these things is to look at the way they're designed. So a lot of organizations may even have a new employee audience, right, a new employee group that they do, let's say it's 90 days, but actually what you should have is a new employee two weeks, a new employee one month, a new employee 90 days, or whatever your periods are.
And the reason you should have multiple of those is because some of this stuff you really push. Like you take over a lot of that Internet homepage and you should, right, because that's the thing they want people to go to. They should be used to going to the Internet for all this information.
But after a period of time, more and more of that stuff becomes go to this place, go to the onboarding site if you want to engage within it more, and so on and so forth. And slowly that becomes back to almost the same experience that everyone else has based on the department and all these other factors of your audience targeting. It becomes changing.
It's also useful because if we do that technique, we can actually see the click throughs the interaction based on those time periods with the employee, which, again, this requires a little bit of analytics. But when you start to dig into that. It becomes very, very informative in terms of that ten day, 60 day, 90 day, 30 day, 60 day, 90 day experience of a new employee.
And again, you can do little surveys and other tools during that process as well. So having like a survey pop up on the homepage because it's audience targeted is a great way to do it. And then if they don't engage with that, maybe we then do a different scale where we email them it and so on and so forth until we eventually either get a response or abandon the pathway to getting feedback from that new employee.
All right, so that's the first one. And I've already mentioned this audience targeting. But again, it really shouldn't be just in this new employee onboarding site, if you even have one.
It should be rolled up to the user in the flow of their work, which in most cases is their digital hub, meaning their home page of their Internet. And so these are examples of, again, I find a lot of people don't understand how much you can audience target. These are all examples of out of the box SharePoint, all the different things you can use with audiences.
I'm not counting things like sections, which is something that Microsoft has publicly disclosed in a previous event that they are working towards eventually releasing. So you could have like, sections with audiences and things like that in the future.
