Onboarding 101: How to “wow” your employees from day #1

How to welcome your employees with a ? 5-star onboarding.

Hey, we are Ramón Rodrigá?ez and Andrea Marino, Co-Founders at Nova, the Global Top Talent Network.

Welcome to Talent First, our newsletter where those who believe that talent is the most important resource in the economy get together.

Every week we cover a new topic related to attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining talent, as well as the learnings from our journey building Nova.

Summary:

• ?? Onboarding 101. Research shows that the impact of a good onboarding process on employee performance and retention is extremely high. Today, we dive deeper into one of the secret sauces that have made an impact in building a powerful company culture: a great onboarding process that is often rated 10/10 by new employees. If you want to increase performance by 70% and retention by 82%, keep reading.

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Onboarding 101: How to “wow” your employees from day #1

Since we launched Nova in 2020 and up until January 2024, Nova has not had a “People” or “Human Resources” team. The reason was not that we didn’t give importance to it, but the opposite: for us attracting, developing, and retaining top talent has always been the most important task for us as founders, as we believe that with the right people, almost any business can thrive (provided that you are willing to pivot your way to success). That’s why we decided to do it directly ourselves.

Therefore, for 4 entire years, Nova’s Head of People was a combination of Ramón and Andrea, each providing his skills and experience to make our employees as happy as we could. Now, since January 2024, we are proud to have found a person who can perform this job even better than us, Cristina Mateo, who is now our Head of People and has brought incredible value through 1-1 monthly coaching sessions or a more structured approach to Learning & Development.

In any case, as our own “Heads of People” during the period 2020-2023, we designed each and every process that could be assigned to the “HR” department of a company. Following the employee journey, the main processes we designed were:

• Recruitment
• Onboarding
• Performance Review
• Career Development
• Learning
• Offboarding

Since we were kind of experts in recruitment and we could use our business team to source top talent from the network, designing a great onboarding was one of the first processes we worked on.

Although we can of course keep improving it, we can proudly say it has been pretty good from the early days. Almost 100% of the +120 people who have joined our team in these last 4 years have given great feedback about this process.

Let’s now reveal how it works.

First things first: why onboarding matters more than you thought

From our previous experiences, we understood that good onboarding was important, but we did not realize actually how important it was until we started doing some research.

According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), effective onboarding programs can improve employee retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.

This is a crazy figure. You may read the full PDF here for more insights on why great onboarding programs can have such an important impact on performance and turnover.

Thus, with these figures in mind, we designed an onboarding program based on 3 principles:

1. Context, context, context. From the beginning, we knew we did not want to simply onboard a new person to a specific role in the company. We rather picture every new employee as a potential future leader of the company, and so they needed to have enough context on what is our vision and strategy to be able to contribute.
2. Asynchronous by design. As we aspired to grow the organization fast (and we did!), we could not onboard every new employee fully in person, as that would have required either big batches of people onboarding at the same time, which is complex to manage or would have simply consumed 50% of our time. We went for a mainly asynchronous format.
3. Personal touch. We wanted every new employee to feel important and to directly break into our culture. Therefore, we wanted a process that felt truly personal and where the new joiner could meet the most senior people in the organization. By having this highly personal approach, we knew we would preserve our culture and make each new joiner feel part of something bigger from the beginning.

Onboarding structure: start with the context and narrow down to the role

Imagine you were onboarding your Chief Commercial Officer, or someone high up in the organization who was going to have a big impact. I am 100% sure the CEO will be happy to meet this person on the first day and, for the coming days/weeks, would discuss the overall company’s vision and strategy to give lots of context to this hired

Picturing each new hire as a potential future leader of your company is not easy, but it has a high ROI. If you do not think this way, it’s easy to reduce the importance of the onboarding process of more junior people and reduce the onboarding to a very narrow set of tasks. However, research shows that context improves performance in almost any type of task by 20-30%:

• A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that contextual factors, such as organizational culture, work environment, and social support, significantly impact employee performance by +25%.
• According to Cognitive Load Theory, the presence of relevant contextual information can reduce cognitive load and enhance learning efficiency by 30%
• A study published in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering found that software developers with access to comprehensive contextual information about the tasks they were working on were 20% more productive than those without.

Thus, we decided to onboard people in 3 steps:

1. First, we would go through an initial phase where we would maximize the new employee’s context by explaining the company's history, its business, its mission and vision, and the main traits of its culture. Then, we would introduce this person to the latest strategic plan (typically of the year or an update from last quarter), and walk each person through all company departments, so they had a great understanding of what everybody did and how it all fitted our overarching strategy. This phase lasts 3 or 4 days in total.
2. Then, for each specific department, we designed a second part of the onboarding where the new joiner would dive deeper into their particular role and function, thus narrowing down the focus to what they would be doing going forward. This second part is highly variable, as it may last for ~2-3 weeks in the Technology department while it may only need a few days in Marketing or Sales.
3. Finally, once the first 2 phases of “formal onboarding” are finished, new joiners start their normal job but keep learning and improving their performance with close support from their direct manager for as long as they need to be fully productive. This may take from 1 month to several months, depending on the role, the seniority, or the department.

Today, a newcomer will have the following blocks in the initial phase of general onboarding to the company, which is designed as we saw to give them lots of context:

1. Platforms and Tools: A short session showing them the basic tools we use at Nova to work and communicate (Slack, Email, Notion, Drive, etc.).
2. General Onboarding: This is the longest session with an overview of the vision, mission, culture, business model, and business plan. This is delivered on the first day to give a big context before going through the departments
3. Strategic Priorities: A short session around the year/quarter goals and OKRs to dive deeper into the short-term priorities of the company and what is now important for us.
4. Department Sessions: finally, each department has a session led by each Head of Department, diving deeper into the main KPIs, processes, and priorities of each department. We have:

Onboarding methodology: high-tech and high-touch

At Nova, we often say we like to be both high-tech and high-touch.

• High-tech means we aspire the create a highly scalable platform business that can impact millions of people around the world (actually we estimate there are about ~10M potential Novas around the world).
• High-touch means we always like to stay very human and forge deep, trusted connections with our members and partners, as we are in a people business and we firmly believe a personal touch makes a big difference when you deal with highly demanding audiences like ours.

Therefore, our onboarding also needed to combine the technology that would make it “scalable” with a personal touch that would make newcomers feel special. We thus created a structure by which, for each “module” in the onboarding, we would have 2 parts:

• A recorded video from a person on the Management Team, which would be content-heavy and would download all the information we believe is important about a topic in a structured, pedagogic, and easy-to-digest way
• An in-person session with the person recording the video for 30-45 minutes where the newcomer could ask questions about the content and get to know the leader in a more personal way.

Combining these 2 parts, we ended up creating a process that was highly scalable and enabled us to onboard people 1 by 1 and almost every week without losing too much time from our company leaders and creating a feeling of being valued and important to new employees.

This methodology was also partially translated to the specific department onboardings, where the function also tries to record / document as much content as possible while leaving some well-designed moments for a more personal touch in a meeting.

Onboarding tools: calendar + kanban + videos

Now that you know the principles and the basics of how we designed a top-notch onboarding system, let us show you actually how it works and what tools we concretely used to design it:

1. Tentative Calendar

Although the formal meetings with managers and leaders in the company are formally booked via Google Calendar, each of our employees gets a Kanban as they join where they more or less understand what is expected from them in the first 3-4 days. This gives them clear guidance on what they should be doing for the first few days, reducing stress and helping them navigate the first few days in the organization with confidence

2. Kanban

The second tool each new employee has is a Kanban with different cards. Each card is typically composed of one of the sessions we saw above, although we add some extra cards for key tasks such as some optional learning sessions on key tools (i.e. GSheets or GSlides) as well as a session with the manager to align on bonus and individual KPIs.

3. Videos

Finally, we have a repository of all recorded videos by the managers, where new employees can watch the content they need for each session. We document the date they were recorded to give context on how recent the information is. Below you can see why the onboarding week at Nova is also known as the “Netflix” week ??

Onboarding key messages: what your new employees cannot miss

We can ensure that if you take the time to set the tools above and follow the principles we outlined, your onboarding will be very successful, probably more than 95% of the companies out there.

However, there is one final “secret sauce” that has made us successful: delivering 2 key messages in one of the first sessions. It’s always one of us, as founders, delivering them, typically after the “general onboarding” where they have been given a lot of context on our business and culture:

1. Discuss the company culture in detail and explain what has made other people not successful in the past.

It’s not the easiest of conversations, but we are pretty clear on day 1 on what are the things that have not worked with other employees in terms of culture. This enables us to ensure that the new joiner is aware and ready to live by our principles and values.

In our case, it’s been mainly around principle #6, “Humbleness”, as we have sometimes failed to identify in the interview process whether the top talent we encountered were also humble people who were willing to welcome feedback without rejecting it and did not feel threaten or attacked by it. By letting people know about this on their first day, I set the expectation that we will give them lots of feedback and that we expect them to welcome it in a certain way.

2. Create psychological safety and ensure they do not fear to ask questions

The second message we deliver early on in the onboarding process is that we do not expect people to remember everything. Since we propose an onboarding with lots of context, there is often a feeling of “overwhelming” or “information overload” which can create anxiety and insecurity.

To create psychological safety and avoid these feelings from sinking in, we stress that there is no need to remember everything and that no question is stupid for the first few weeks. The purpose of the context is for them to have an overall idea of things and to know where to search and who to ask for, not to remember every detail of our strategy and processes (which will change).

With these 2 messages, your onboarding will not only be more useful, but it will also feel great. And the outcomes will arrive soon.

Bonus: what are we now doing to bring it to the next level

Although we are proud of our onboarding process, it’s clear it still has gaps and room for improvement. We are concretely working on 2 things now:

1. Increase the frequency of video recording: startups change fast, and at Nova, we are constantly adapting our business, improving our products, and streamlining our operations to grow. Therefore, any video we record becomes outdated in just a few months, which becomes problematic as we might be telling new employees a very different story from the reality we live in at a given moment. Thus, our new goal is to record these onboardings once every 6 months.
2. Introduce a better “pre-onboarding”. The whole process of preparing for a new employee is something we have disregarded for too long, which has made the process of contract creation and signing, labor risk prevention, IT setup, or account creation highly volatile and ad-hoc. We are now in the process of streamlining it so everything is ready by the time a new employee joins.

We hope these learnings can be useful for any of you in charge of designing the onboarding process at your companies.

Believe us: any good hour put there will have a high ROI.

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