When we designed our very first onboarding experience to welcome newbies into Slido and get them started, we knew that the first hours and days they spend with our company could either get them off to a great start or easily confuse them for a number of weeks.
And we were right! Some of the lessons we learned along the way inspired us to define the four key pillars of a great onboarding experience:
- Simple and easy to follow training content
- A transparent onboarding schedule with times and assigned trainers
- Infusing values into everything we did to get the newbies aligned
- Engaging the employees throughout the whole journey
From our experience, people at meetings listen actively for about 20 minutes and learn the best when the content is delivered in bite-sized pieces.
Therefore, we focused on keeping new hires continuously engaged and making them the center of attention.
In the next section, we’ll share with you the steps on how to replicate the training we originally designed for Customer Support teams.
Goal
The goal of the training was to teach new hires on the ways of communication using our company’s voice & tone and share some useful tips they could use in the future.
Run a warm-up discussion
We opened a discussion on the format of communication they prefer and started a simple poll where they could select their preferred options.
At this point, we were facilitating the discussion and asking follow-up questions to understand better the ‘why’ behind their answers.
Introduce the topic
After the discussion, we explained the platforms that we daily use to communicate with our clients and gradually introduced Slido’s voice & tone guidelines. Watch the clock as this shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes.
Group exercise
The core of this training was a group exercise. We organized the newbies into pairs or threes and gave them a simple assignment: Send an email with a solution to the client.
It was a great opportunity to observe how they work as a team and at the same time, allow them to feel the struggle of sending a quality response to the client. A simple process of learning by doing!
Once finished, they could send their responses to Slido. We recommend repeating this exercise multiple times during the training.
Summarize key learnings
Then it was time to display the responses live on screen. As facilitators, we went through the submitted texts to explain the basics and challenged them by asking questions to understand their intentions better.
The debriefing was an essential part of the learning for three main reasons:
We could discuss the parts we thought were well-written and also the parts that should be improved. Giving them more background helped people align and learn faster.
Observing the responses of their peers encouraged discussion which eventually increased the learning potential in the group.
New employees got a full hands-on experience on what it takes for Customer Support to provide a timely and quality response.
To conclude, we summarized the key learning points to give them a number of communication tips they can stick to when talking to the clients in the future.
Feedback
At the end of each session, we collected feedback by asking a number of simple questions:
- What were your key learnings?
- How would you rate this session?
- What would you like to work on next?
Feedback helped us identify any gaps we might have missed at the beginning. It was important to ask them about what they’d like to focus on next as it put them in the driving seat of their own personal development.
Wrap up
To elevate your onboarding training, bring engagement and interaction at the center. Encourage your new hires to share their insights in the groups and seek alignment through facilitated discussion. Boost the learning potential by giving them a hands-on experience and an opportunity to build on the gaps & learnings they’ll identify throughout the training.
