In today’s complex business environment, the need for effective onboarding practices has never been more critical. Driving the urgency for effective onboarding is the business’s need to meet the demand for talent, achieve performance targets and increase time to competency and success in the new role. There are also indirect, experiential objectives: to foster stronger connections between team members, strengthen their affiliation with the organization and ultimately increase retention.

If we factor in what must be covered in onboarding from a compliance or human resources (HR) standpoint with what is really needed to achieve that expanding set of objectives and expectations, it’s easy to understand how the transactional day, week or month of onboarding is now being imagined as an extended strategic journey that might require three, six or 12 months.

The real opportunity, however, isn’t an increase in the amount of onboarding that we provide (even if you interpret that training as support for the new employee). The real opportunity is a shift in the experience, and we can’t make that change without a shift in the rationale and methodology that we bring to our upfront needs and gap analysis.

High Priority, Low Expectations

Despite so much riding on the onboarding experience, the process often proves less than successful. A 2023 survey by Brandon Hall Group found that an average of 31% of employees rate their employee experience as less than satisfactory. When asked if their employers understand what employees want or need, an average of 48% rated the understanding as less than effective. The good news is that organizations recognize the importance of addressing this.

The Brandon Hall study also shows that an average of 41% of companies are prioritizing improvements in their new employee onboarding programs and investment in employee training and development programs, which is the highest-rated initiative globally to improve the employee experience.

Fortunately, there is an increased interest in reexamining onboarding training programs and devising strategies to develop richer, more meaningful learning experiences for new employees. But there is a strong precedent for the way that things have been done and new skills are needed to make the change.

Addressing the Gaps in Traditional Onboarding

Despite the best intentions, there are often gaps in the experiences companies hope to create for new employees and what actually occurs during the onboarding process. New hires find themselves isolated in conference rooms on day one, reviewing the requisite policy presentations, and being treated to a nuts-and-bolts overview as their orientation. Communication tends to flow in one direction, with insufficient opportunities for individuals to ask questions or to understand how or where to find answers. There may be too much information provided in too little time, with little or no connection to expectations for their new roles in the company. In short, new hires come away with the feeling that the onboarding does not prepare them to do their job.

To address these gaps, an approach informed by learner experience design (LXD) provides a valuable design alternative. It focuses on the needs of the learner rather than the needs of HR or the organization. It prioritizes communication over information, including frequent check-ins and feedback mechanisms. It often guides learners with a map or plan for how they can access answers to their specific questions. Above all, the goal is personalization to the department, team and role — and may even be tailored to the individual backgrounds, skills proficiencies, and experiences of the new hires. For the approach to be truly different, however, we have to begin asking different questions.

The obvious question is: How can we create effective learning experiences? The prerequisite question is: What experiences do new hires need to be successful? We need that answer before we can answer the learning question.

A Fresh Approach to Needs Analysis for Onboarding

The problem with current onboarding processes often stems from the planning that goes into it — or a lack of planning altogether. The way that needs analysis is often approached is incomplete and does not provide an organization with everything they need to meet their onboarding goals and objectives.

“The expectations and opportunities associated with onboarding need more than an assessment of skills, knowledge, and attitude. In addition to a skills gap analysis, we should look for gaps in experience,” says Michael Noble, Ph.D., vice president of AllenComm, a provider of award-winning learning advisory, design, tech and talent solutions. “Assessing those experience gaps is obviously critical to the learning experiences. We need to know not only the specific skills and knowledge new hires need to be successful, but we also need to know the experiences they will need to be successful.”

An experience gap analysis might look, for example, at the past experiences new hires have had prior to joining the company, including their education, prior employment, past organizational culture, industries they’ve worked in, and the technologies with which they are comfortable. It also should uncover the types of new experiences that can help with:

• Connection: The interpersonal and team relationships that need to be built.
• Company Affiliation: The sense of belonging that a new hire feels about the organization as well as their connection to the brand or customers.
• Readiness for the New Role: The confidence and preparation felt for the new role that can be demonstrated, or built-up with early win.
• Making a Meaningful Contribution: A working, firsthand knowledge of how their individual role contributes to the work of the team and the value delivered by the organization.

A Richer, More Personalized Onboarding Experience

“By identifying up front the new-hire learner’s needs for experience, we then have greater perspective and context to elevate the later stages of our design and development process,” continues Noble. “As we design the learner journey, we can better integrate formal, informal, and experiential activities. As we develop those activities, we have the context to create highly relevant, high-fidelity experiences. And, when we measure, we can look at the outcomes of these experiences to determine whether they are contributing to our metrics for readiness, connection, and proficiency.”

Here are some of the ways that an experience assessment can be a force multiplier for onboarding program design and development. Insights gained from the analysis of experience, in addition to performance and other needs, should provide onboarding and learning and development (L&D) leaders with the insights to:

Increase personalization in the learning journey.

When onboarding programs are geared for all new hires, they tend to be too generic, and learners struggle to understand their relevance. It is more effective to design both foundational and department-specific, team-specific and role-specific experiences. This will increase the relevance for learners and help them to transfer their learning experiences to the work on the job. The experience gap analysis not only provides content—the when, why, how, typical pitfalls, and best practices—but also should inspire activities that allow new employees to personally experience the content firsthand and have opportunities for practice and reinforcement.

Increase engagement in each activity.

Ideally every onboarding activity should engage the learner and help build a more comprehensive introduction to the organization and the employee’s role in it. The entire process may need to extend beyond a few days to provide opportunities for collaboration and reinforcement. It’s important to remember that the extra effort and spacing of these activities contribute to long-term performance.

Here are some examples:

• Project-based learning with a cohort.
• Manager check-ins.
• Internal networking.
• Practice simulations with feedback.
• rand, product and customer experiences.
• Mentoring, shadowing, debriefing and on-the-job practice.

Measuring progress and readiness.

Learners need feedback on their progress and performance, and ways to measure progress and success need to be designed into the onboarding program. Of course, measurement of experience is complicated and multifaceted, and may require field testing of various rubrics.

It’s not about right or wrong. We need data on factors such as confidence, affiliation, critical thinking, team connection and readiness for real-world situations. The data gathered from such assessments can also be helpful for HR, L&D and organizational leaders. For example, this type of data may inform a new hire’s first project assignments and guide their manager in helping them succeed.

Onboarding From the Employee’s Perspective

Of course, a new hire’s introduction to an organization involves much more than just onboarding training. A well-designed, engaging and personalized onboarding program has the power to build a strong foundation for the remainder of the employee experience. The key is to approach onboarding from the learner’s perspective. If we can accomplish the objectives that are most important to learners, the organizational priorities — compliance, time to competency, time to productivity, retention rates, etc. — will also be achieved.

However, the key is not to design the onboarding learner experience journey to those metrics, and that’s why we need to have an upfront understanding of the most critical experiences a new hire needs for long-term success.