In my last blog, I introduced the idea of an onboarding app. We recently created our own where our primary objective was to engage with our pre-employees before they started and make them feel wanted and included in the Havas People family before they actually start. Everything else was secondary. As such we didn’t try to replace every aspect of our HR function. Contracts were still sent out in the post! We put ourselves in the shoes of a “newbie” (after all we’ve all been one) and added the content we’d want to see. Who is my team? What do they look like? What should I wear? Where can I get my lunch? What’s it like working at Havas People? I have a question, who should I ask? Stuff like that. We wanted them to feel welcome.
The concept was not entirely for the benefits of the pre-employees though. There were benefits we expected to achieve as a business. As a digital agency in London, we know that many of our staff will move around in the industry as they find their own path in life. Some will even come back to us! The overarching point though is that it is of benefit to us if our new employees turn up on day one, engaged, happy to be here and ready to go. In doing all of that we’re trying to shorten the learning curve to becoming an effective member of the Havas People family.
So after all of that, has it worked?
And if it did how would we tell? Well this is where the story becomes more personal and interesting than looking into the significance of statistics (although you can use these tools if you like). Compared to tagged media campaigns and website traffic data, the audience is very small and very engaged, the activity of the individual becomes significant as opposed to the general trends of the masses. Our approach was to talk to the people shortly after they arrived to ask them what they thought. By definition the audience is small, but the feedback has been only positive, incredibly positive in truth. The most significant feedback has been that they love finding out about the people they will be working with as part of their immediate team. It was a huge relief to hear the stories of how useful the app had been but perhaps more useful was the ideas for additional content that came out, many of which we will be building into the next phase.
A personalised channel
This takes me back to one of the points I made in my last blog about why sometimes an onboarding app can be put in the “too difficult drawer”. It’s the assumption that it’s not worth doing unless it covers everything, every aspect of the business, answers anything that may ever be asked. It doesn’t have to, at least not straight away. It can evolve based on the unique nature of your business and what your new employees want to know. The fact that some things our new employees wanted to know wasn’t in the app didn’t detract from their experience and their excitement to join their new team on day one. It has become a personalised channel to deliver our culture and values that fits snugly in their pocket.
Of course to some organisations onboarding actually starts at day one with the period before day one deemed to be pre-boarding. We wanted our app to be both, so we built in a little timer that changes the content before and after their start date so that the usefulness of the app and the investment we made can continue to benefit both parties.
If you’d like to take a look at our app, we produced a short video which you may be interested in. If you’re thinking about something similar for your company and would like to have a chat about it, we’d be happy to help.
“Time for another digital blog” I was told at the beginning of this week. I spent most of this week subconsciously putting it off/thinking of what to write about. As I head home with the weekend stretching before me and a carriage half-full of commuters doing the same it’s made me think about much of the work I’ve been doing over the last few days on a website we’re working on.
Of the commuters I can see in my immediate vicinity, about half are looking at their portable devices. I can see a Nokia phone running Windows 8, I can see an iPhone 5C, a couple of android devices I can’t put a name to, and a handful of tablets which judging by their protective covers are probably all different. As for myself, I have two different phones on me and the laptop I’m writing this blog on.
Well this is interesting, at least it is for me, because when we build websites for our clients one of the first things we discuss is “what devices do we need this website to work on?”.
The answer is usually something along the lines of “All of them” and quite often we also have some very old browsers on desktops to consider as well, usually imposed on our clients by their internal IT teams. For most of us that are office based this is a familiar problem, and no doubt this is usually for very good reasons but the list of browsers and devices we need to check websites on is getting longer and longer.
So how do we do this without heading down to the nearest Carphone Warehouse and either pretend to be looking to buy a phone whilst really checking to see if our website works on a Blackberry 9 (I know of some agencies where this was the standard approach) or buying a whole suite of devices at about £400 a go.
Our approach is to use a suite of the more popular devices for the target audience (which we determine based on statistics across all of our websites and independent research) in conjunction with browser based emulators, which give a very good approximation to a whole list of operating system and browser combinations. This can be time consuming but it’s the only way to be sure of the experience we want our client’s candidates to have.
Still its these little challenges which keep us on our toes as we strive to ensure our websites give a great candidate experience across any device (within reason!) they choose to use.
