Design Thinking to Re-Imagine New Employee Onboarding
Experience Map: Visualizing the desired Future State
Create better experiences for your employees and customers.
Client: Our client is a global non-governmental, humanitarian aid organization, and attracts talent at their field offices globally—and their U.S. headquarters.
The challenge: The objective of the human resources team was to redesign their onboarding process to better serve the needs of new employees.
Our approach:
Start with empathy.
Several members of the client team conducted in-depth interviews with new hires across different global locations to understand their experiences around the onboarding process.
Workshop 1: Current state mapping.
Drawbridge facilitated a collaborative workshop for the core team to come together, and collectively map the feelings, experiences, and feedback collected from the interviews. Visualizing this onboarding journey — right from the recruitment process, through the first three months — highlighted areas of strength and opportunity, and surfacted insights for the future state design.
Workshop 2: Design thinking to design a better solution.
After firmly grounding ourselves in “end user” insights, we facilitated an ideation workshop to co-create the new onboarding process.
We taught workshop participants basic drawing skills, which empowered them to bring their ideas to life by visualizing several versions of their ideal solution. After several rounds of iteration, feedback, and cross-pollination of ideas, we converged around a design prototype, ready for the client to test.
Final deliverable and activation: After the workshop, Drawbridge also created a visual Onboarding Experience Map for the client. This visual artifact helped the client team share the vision rapidly, get feedback, and align all stakeholders around the new process - and set them up for success.
“Future State Mapping Challenge: How might ensure that new team members feel welcomed into the organization, feel connected to their team, and are well prepared to be successful in their role?”
Why is this important? Organizations spend time and money recruiting top talent — and it’s critical to make sure that new hires feel welcome and supported. Gallup finds that only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees. Organizations with a standardized onboarding process experience 62% greater new hire productivity, along with 50% greater new hire retention.
Collaborative design thinking got our client to a better solution than a traditional, siloed, problem-solving approach would have.