Storyboarding: How one company flipped onboarding on its head
Imagine this: you’re a booming technology company in the shadow of the nation’s capital, creating remarkable innovations for the private and public sector. Your key challenge isn’t how to do brilliant work; it’s how to find great talent, integrate it quickly, and hold onto it.
Enter Frontier Press. Over a period of four months, Press partnered with a leading technology and engineering firm to reinvent its onboarding process. The magic ingredient for transformation? Story.
This is what we mean. Leveraging recent research on employee engagement and building atop decades of studies devoted to narrative identity, Press instituted a story-driven approach to training, integration and empowerment. All of it in reply to the kinds of questions all companies ask:
Why does it take so long to get new hires performing up to the capabilities their resumes trumpet?
Why is it so hard to get new teams working together quickly?
Why is it so difficult to retain talent?
The answer is almost never linked to what you think it is. Why don’t new hires perform quickly? It’s not because they don’t understand the systems and processes and software. Why don’t new teams gel right off the bat? It’s not because of poor leadership or lack of role definition. Why does talent walk? It’s not because of compensation or benefits.
The answer to these questions is almost always linked to the idea of narrative identity—the idea that we define ourselves, find our purpose, and perform at our highest level when we have a strong set of stories to tell ourselves and each other. We need stories about who we are, why we’re here, and what we’re here for.
So: If want your new hires to integrate faster, perform to their promise, and contribute meaningfully, you have one task: Help them find their stories faster. Here’s how we did it:
Expand the onboarding horizon. Onboarding starts long before an employee shows up at headquarters to get their badge; it starts when they first contract with the company. That’s when their story and the company’s story begin to intersect. So own it. Construct a narrative around their integration that stimulates them from the moment they except the offer by showing them the steps in their journey. Further, full integration doesn’t happen when an employee submits her or his first time sheet; it occurs when they first engage with their team to collaborate to solve a problem. By making that collaboration a plot point in their fledgling story, it can motivate early collective engagement.
Make the first day memorable. Press designed an orientation training that surpasses standard explanation of health benefits and security protocols. Instead, it included a visit from the CEO — during which he told his own story of departing an old job to join this particular company. It invited participants to analyze and share their own backstories — where they came from and why they joined. And it included exercises that required unexpected collaborations among participants (including an unforgettable gamification we’d love for you to ask us about!). By they time new hires left the half-day orientation, they had formed memories with cohorts, they had a game plan for engagement and interaction -- and they had stories to link them to others.
Create a mash-up. When a company hires talent, a very simple transaction has occurred: an individual has chosen to intersect their personal story with a company’s narrative. The company’s job is to acknowledge the independence of the individual’s story, while welcoming it to contribute to the organization’s larger narrative. How do you do this? By modeling: highlighting examples of others who have integrated well. By sharing: welcoming the honest storytelling of new hires who share their integration narratives. And by commissioning: sending new hires on missions to meet various people, capture certain conversations, and engage disparate units. The faster new hires collect evidence that they are part of a larger whole, the sooner they’ll find their place and contribute meaningfully.
We’re months from this effort, and the results are indisputable. New hire feedback has endorsed the approach. Team performance has increased. And manager feedback suggests new employees are slipping into a groove faster than ever.
