Starting your first day at a company is a very important touchpoint in our journey as employees. It isn’t the first or the last point of contact, but another in a long list of moments that encompass the person’s life cycle in the company. Learning about and understanding which those moments are, and doing so under the prism of employee centricity, is fundamental to working on the employee’s experience (EX).
The touchpoints need to be studied from a very human perspective. The emotions we feel during these interactions is what is truly important when studying the EX. Ultimately, each touchpoint could be perceived as positive (gain) or negative (pain) and therefore, it could be a valuable moment that positions the company or, on the contrary, be a clear point of improvement, given that the employee experiences a significantly lower emotion.
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Onboarding, a touchpoint that concerns us
Is onboarding the first touchpoint? No. The first touchpoints are those that lead us to find and learn about the company, like for example, when you read a job offer, when the company calls you as a candidate or when you visit their website. However, we can consider onboarding as a moment of truth, a moment that can mark the difference and be etched into our subconscious mind until the day we leave the organisation, even keeping it with us as a souvenir for the rest of our professional life. It is for this reason that, in the human resources departments, a lot of energy is spent designing onboarding processes, to be able to make this moment a moment of gain.
Onboarding is also a touchpoint that can last hours, days, even weeks, with it being split into different moments. This larger dimension of the touchpoint turns onboarding into a key project within the people management process and makes detailed planning of all the actions that are part of that moment or moments necessary.
Straight to designing gain moments
Companies often forget about a highly important piece of information that is also very easy to obtain: finding out how people feel, and this leads me recall my last article, where I spoke about the key to everything being asking and listening. Back to basics: Asking and listening how people feel at certain times; what they remember, what hurts them, what they value, what they are missing and what they have too much of. Doing it in this way is what helps us to design moments and experiences that are perceived as pleasant, as they have sparked positive emotions in us.
The People department as BETWEEN is clear on one mantra: listen to the betweeners. That’s why, in order to redesign onboarding, the department has relied upon qualitative tools such as the focus groups These focus groups have been implemented with the aim of bringing together groups of betweeners and to be able to detect how they felt, feel and would like to feel and live, during an important time like that of onboarding. In order for this detection of needs to be representative, it was essential to involve all the departments, be they directly, indirectly or not related to the onboarding. In this way we are able to have a global vision and different ideas to subsequently get to work on designing this hugely important stage (which is more than a mere moment).
But it doesn’t end here
Living and working in VUCA settings forces us to be on constant alert and working in the present. This makes any company strategy, either strictly in business terms or in terms of people, undergo constant reshaping, adapting to the changes and needs that arise. Reinventing or redesigning onboarding is a process that starts, but that doesn’t finish; it is a constant work in progress, adapting to the present moment and sensitive to changes that make it be amongst the top of the touchpoints in the employee’s life cycle.
At BETWEEN, we are focusing more and more on projects that are putting the employee (and their emotions) in the spotlight. We know that this is the only way to create satisfactory experiences, and WOW experiences in the work place. Highlighting the positive emotions that are experienced at certain times and “repairing” whatever does not create them is our impetus and our daily driving force.
