How To Design A Culture-First Induction

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58% of organisations focus on paperwork and processes during their onboarding design, but it’s crucial to bear in mind that onboarding is also your new joiner’s first experience of your organisation’s culture, and therefore is a key determiner of future retention and productivity rates.

The emergence of people-centred workplace trends like prioritising inclusion, career cushioning, and connecting in hybrid mean it’s more crucial than ever to have a culture-first induction that immerses your inductees into who you really are as an organisation. Here are three ways to build an induction that properly immerses your new joiners into your organisation’s culture:

1) Make It A Journey

The average onboarding programme lasts 90 days, but research from Gallup claims new joiners do not reach their full performance potential until their 12th month.

As new joiners transition from one role to another – whether that be between two organisations or from life as a student, your induction becomes a liminal period bridging these transitions. Focus on taking your people on an induction journey that acclimatises them into new roles, routines, and the organisation at large.

Three ways to make your induction a journey:

• 1) Make learning the focus. All the best journeys have bumps along the way that provide effective learning moments. Your induction period should focus first on learning moments, and then performance and output. When reviewing work, de-briefing or setting goals, think in learning outcomes. Make it clear that this is a learning process. This will go a long way in making your people feel safe when they approach a bump or have questions.
• 2) Humanise the transition. Think about your first day before you settled into a new role. Now think about how your new joiner might feel throughout their onboarding journey. Consider all the unknowns they are currently navigating. Check in with them and provide reassurance – it can go a long way to boost their confidence during their transition.
• 3) Give room to breathe. All journeys require moments of pause to mark progress, take stock, and plan the next course of action. With that in mind, two weeks packed with content risks being less effective for your new joiner’s overall learning. Spacing out induction content and touchpoints can help new joiners build hands-on experience, reflect on this experience, apply learnings moving forward.

2) Invest In Psychological Safety

At the beginning of a new role there are a number of questions people grapple with to assess whether they feel comfortable being and expressing themselves, also known as psychological safety. How do your people feel at your induction? Are they comfortable asking questions and giving feedback? Have you asked?

Building psychological safety during a period of transition is crucial. It will enable a better transition for your new joiner and the organisation, resulting in 5x more engagement from your people and overall, makes organisations 3.2x better off.

Three ways to begin building psychological safety in your induction:

• 1) Role model openness. No two people will experience an onboarding in the same way. Where a person is in their career, the complexity of their role, their personal experiences; these all shape how that person will experience their onboarding. Meet people where they are. Allow people the space to try and learn. Encourage business leaders and line managers to share their own onboarding stories, the good, the bad and the ugly. This normalises the inevitable missteps that come with learning to perform in a new role, in a new team, in a new culture.
• 2) Create space for questions and feedback, especially in hybrid settings. New joiners may struggle with knowing when to ask questions or where to direct their feedback and reflections. Set clear agendas for all touchpoints and signpost. This could involve setting up new joiner groups to build a community of new joiners or take place in line manager 1:1s. Prioritise building and signposting clear lines of communication and feedback culture to make your new joiners feel psychologically safe. Make this part of your line manager training.
• 3) Go one step further and reboard people. Host induction activities for your current people. As your culture and organisation adapts, ensure that the experience your people receive is reflective of this. Organisational cultures are living things. They are changing and adapting as people join and as we learn about better ways of working from each other. Continue to remind your people of the culture you value. When you make a moment or an event of this reminder—for example at an annual offsite—it continuously breathes life into your people’s engagement with their work.

3) Build Connection

As we continue to navigate the hybrid workplace, we are hungry for connection. 60% of people are unsatisfied with their current level of connection at work and over 30% of people reported feeling lonely at work.

Foster connection through both the mode of your induction and the content you share. As new joiners transition into an organisation they may feel like outsiders trying to fit in. Provide a good onboarding experience that prioritises building connection with your people. For 51% of it would mean they’d go “above and beyond” in their organisation.

Three ways to build connection:

• 1) Use many modes to reach your people. Understand how different people connect, what they look for, and what energises them. The provide modes that can meet a multiplicity You might find that they prefer an in-person showstopper start. Virtual weekly catch ups for the later months as their transition eases may be more convenient for teams going forward and across geographies.
• 2) Provide choice and a variety of induction learning. Inductions are where people begin learning the keys for successfully working in your organisation. Give your people the space to choose learning modules that resonate with their personal strengths and weaknesses. Some new joiners may be more concerned about learning to network while others may want guidance navigating the processes in your organisation. Connect by providing various options for content that resonates.
• 3) Make time for social activities. Give your new joiners room to find their closest friends in the organisation and meet others outside of their workstream. Feeling connected to your organisation at large is vital for transitioning into the role and feeling like an insider. Include organisation wide kick off events, onboarding lunches, or evening activities. Prioritise getting to know your people, it will create connection and feelings of inclusion.

Rethinking your approach to inductions?

Our Induction Design Cookbook contains dozens of induction design ingredients to make your onboarding an experience that your new joiners will never forget, based on our 17+ years collaborating with talent teams around the world.