#14: The dreaded new hire onboarding experience

It doesn't have to be this way

👋 Hi friends, it's Hesam with issue #14 of 4 bits. 4 bits is a biweekly newsletter where I share thoughts and musings on how to build memorable experiences.

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One quick life update:

I’ve become fascinated with zines. Originally used by science fiction fans in the 1930s, zines are informal, usually underground publications. By the 1970s, they were used for activist movements and to promote unheard voices. Zines are cheap to make: all you need is a printer, paper, and scissors.

Not my zines because I don’t have the requisite art skills, but this is what they look like. Image courtesy of Rebecca Pitts.

I’ve been wondering about how to use zines in the work I do. While I’m not currently running an activist movement, I wanted to try out the form factor of a zine.

A few weeks ago, the Dean’s office asked me to share some of the tools I am experimenting with while at Rice. So I walked into the Dean’s conference room with a stack full of zines.

A little unconventional, but it worked.

Turns out there’s a whole zine culture I wasn’t aware of, and there’s even a Zine Fest coming to Houston in November.

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The dreaded new hire onboarding experience

Picture this:

You land a new career opportunity and it's time for your first day on the job. You walk in excited but nervous, not knowing what to expect.

The day starts off with the lull of filling out paperwork at HR, getting your accounts activated, and setting up your new office. Everything seems like it's going okay.

And then minute by minute, the situation starts to spiral out of control.

You're brought into the new employee orientation, where someone reads you bullet points off a PowerPoint presentation that you could have read yourself. Their boredom is infectious; they've done this many times before and they sound like a tired robot.

You wonder if they hate this part of their job. Will you end up like them one day?

The rest of your day is packed with meetings. With each meeting, you become more lost. You meet new people and are force fed facts about the company and the processes you need to follow, most of which you forget by the time you step into the next meeting.

By mid afternoon, your eyes are glazed.

The endless drone of activity continues for the rest of the week: more meetings, more introductions, more information to remember. By the end of the week, you've learned nothing, felt nothing, and made little progress.

Sound familiar or know someone that has had this happen to them? It doesn't have to be this way.

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Onboarding: a better way

What if the employee onboarding experience was less about telling, and more about doing?

What if instead of packing their schedule, you gave a new person the time and space to explore from the perspective of the people you serve (your customers)?

Recently, we brought on someone new to our team. We were excited to have them join us, and didn't want to screw it up. We decided that we'd scrap our usual onboarding, and try a better way: let them see our program through the eyes of a student.

The onboarding lasted a week and included many opportunities to see and experience the work we do:

• On Monday, we had them attend a student information session and sit in the audience.

• On Tuesday, we ran them through an ideation workshop, helping them generate ideas that they could potentially pursue if they were a startup founder. Then, they attended a student activities fair where we had an information booth and they were able to watch us talk 1 on 1 with students.

• On Wednesday, they unpacked their core assumptions about the customer need, the market, the solution, and the business model for the idea they were pursuing. Then, they designed a quick and scrappy experiment to test the demand for their idea.

• On Thursday, they applied for a venture development program and were matched to a mentor. Then, we talked about zines for courses, because they had experience in the area and we wanted to consider possibilities for future projects. Afterwards, they interviewed two recent alumni, one undergraduate and one graduate, to learn more about their journey.

• And on Friday, they attended another, larger student information session. Afterwards, they created an informal presentation for the rest of the team, reflecting on the highs and lows of the experience, what they noticed, and what they're excited about working on next. As we celebrated their first week over drinks at happy hour at the graduate student bar, they shared their presentation.

Blue areas were where we replaced traditional onboarding with more doing, rather than telling

During the onboarding week, each day's session was led by a different team member. This approach changed the new person's interactions with the rest of the team. Instead of structured presentations or formal meetings where your first impression of a colleague might seem unnatural, you get to jump right into working on an idea that's uniquely related to you with your team member. Instead of the team member talking at you and transmitting information, they get to work with you on what they do best.

Doing instead of telling won't work everywhere. You might work for a large company where there's no flexibility in changing the process. You might work for a funeral home company and it's not possible to "experience" the loss of a loved one. But for countless other situations, a little creativity can go a long way in making onboarding feel less like a chore, and more like the beginning of something great.