Everything You Need to Know About Digital Employee Onboarding

In a post-COVID business world, digital employee onboarding has become a decisive experience in the new hire process.

But much like digital work environments themselves, the digital employee onboarding process is not without its obstacles:

• Forging authentic human connections in a remote setting is difficult, making it all the more essential.
• Moreover, studies show a strong correlation between productivity and mental health–two of the global workforce’s most prominent concerns during the pandemic.

Collaborating on a task, exchanging implicit knowledge, and forging human relationships.

All those things that can make or break an onboarding experience are significantly harder in purely digital settings.

So, how can you balance onboarding experience and remote work?

💻 But what is digital onboarding exactly?

In essence, it’s the introductory journey new hires undergo to familiarize themselves with a company–but done through digital channels. The more established remote work is in a company, the more it relies upon digital processes.

Like standard onboarding, new hires learn about processes relevant to both their department and the company as a whole. They also typically receive an employee mentor or “buddy,” who is there to provide support and answer any questions they may have throughout the journey.

Digital vs remote vs virtual onboarding

Let's keep this one short: 

In essence, you can use all 3 terms synonymously.

Digital onboarding means creating a new hire experience mostly leveraging digital channels/tools. Just like all other processes in business and public life, digital technologies help

1. automate tedious tasks
2. make information accessible at all times
3. create personalized experiences
4. ...and more

Digital onboarding leverages modern technology to get people productive faster and create standout experiences from day 1.

Remote (or hybrid) onboarding comes from a different angle: People are moving more and more to remote settings - and that is making human connections and informal exchange harder than ever. Hence, proper remote onboarding leverages the same technologies with the goal to overcome remote onboarding challenges.

At the end of the day, it's the same thing with a clearer objective.

Virtual onboarding we'll use completely synonymously to the prior.

💢 Challenges of Digital Onboarding

Working From Home: A Double-Edged Sword

What makes the work-from-home (WFH) model so effective (i.e., increased autonomy, flexibility, and downtime) can be the exact same thing that negatively impact employees.

79% of employees who reported maintained or increased productivity during the pandemic were satisfied with

• workplace social connectivity
• mental health
• physical health,
• and the availability of workplace tools.

In contrast, only 16% of employees who reported reduced productivity felt satisfied in these four areas.

So how does digital onboarding fit into all of this?

For one, a streamlined digital employee onboarding experience can do much to set the tone for a well-connected remote work environment. This means zeroing in on pitfalls typical of remote work settings: infrequent communication, reduced knowledge exchange, messy processes, and social isolation.

Secondly, digital onboarding can provide much-needed structure and easily accessible resource centers for new hires when done right. All of this leads to an increased sense of belonging and support, positively impacting employee productivity and health.

Let’s talk a little more about creating a seamless digital employee onboarding experience.

📈 The benefits: How proper digital onboarding helps

Markus Schwarz, People Experience Manager at Storyblok, knows, starting a new job isn’t easy. And being fully remote doesn’t exactly help:

Naturally, people will be at home with their laptop, without seeing anyone in person.

This causes remote workers to feel

• lost
• isolated
• insignificant
• and excluded.

“If you don’t solve this, you simply won’t be able to keep people for long in a remote setting”
- Markus Schwarz, People Experience Manager at Storyblok

The beauty of structured digital onboarding is that it helps both new hires and current employees. When executed correctly, a seamless digital employee onboarding experience leaves new hires feeling informed, connected, welcome, and confident of their role in the company. For the company itself, the most significant benefit cannot be overstated: reduced overhead and onboarding costs.

However, there are other benefits to digitizing employee onboarding, such as

• increased consistency
• faster time to productivity
• stronger employee retention
• and the ability to connect with new hires worldwide.

As we continue ahead in a remote work world, the digital employee onboarding experience is here to stay.

👀 What does a digital onboarding process look like?

A digital onboarding experience isn’t much different from standard onboarding in terms of content. Each digital onboarding experience should include:

• Preboarding processes
• A transparent and structured onboarding plan
• Relevant action-oriented tasks
• Buddy systems
• Interactive learning
• Virtual cohort events
• A method for gathering feedback at every stage of the journey
  

However, the timing and purpose of these components will be what make or break the success of a digital employee onboarding experience.

📝 How to create a digital onboarding process concretely?

Knowing what to include in your digital employee onboarding process is one thing, but knowing how to execute it is infinitely more valuable. In this section, we’ll break down each step of the process in greater detail so that you can create a more robust and straightforward game plan.

1. Preboarding process

Preboarding is the chance to leave a great first impression on your new hires. While it seems unnecessary in some ways, a solid preboarding process does translate to higher employee retention. 

Companies with a robust preboarding process are 81% are more likely to keep their employees beyond the first year, as the Aberdeen Group discovered.

In this initial stage, new hires should feel welcome, secure, and connected to the company. This translates to actionable items such as:

• 💻 Notebook setup
• 📅 Blocking off calendars for onboarding and other training meetings
• 📦 Sending ‘Welcome to the Team!’-type care packages to new hires
• 💬 Looping current employees in on the hiring of new employees
  

Coordinating these tasks beforehand can help leave a positive company impression on new hires. The last task on this list may perhaps be the most important, though:

Transparent communication among your current employees will make for a more streamlined candidate experience.

 2) Structure your digital employee onboarding plan

Clear plan = structure

Structuring your digital onboarding plan in a digestible, intuitive way can help strengthen new hires’ trust in the company.

After all, starting a new job anywhere can be overwhelming.

Make sure to have a clear structure in place before preboarding begins.

This means giving new hires a platform that addresses their critical questions and concerns and include other pertinent information that employees can proactively (and quickly!) find.

Clear tasks = action

You should also include action items for current employees and managers in your digital employee onboarding plan.

Action-oriented tasks can be things like

• Sending reminders to new hires and managers
• Reminding yourself to request a company ID
• Introducing new hires to their peers and asking them to meet
• ..and much more

Try to spread these action items out if you can, too.

Employee satisfaction with the digital onboarding process skyrockets when executed in smaller pieces.

Clear role = performance

You can orient new employees much faster by providing role clarity at the outset of the digital onboarding process. 

We recommend providing new employees with a thorough and detailed guide outlining their duties in the role. This helps dispel any uncertainty surrounding what the new employees are there to do for the company. It should also recommend a list of actions employees can take to succeed in the role along with expectations for the first 30,60, or 90 days.

3. The buddy system

The digital employee onboarding experience becomes infinitely more human when new hires have a current employee to help ease them into the new work environment.

Also known as the buddy system, this mentor-mentee relationship can help answer any questions related to company culture, work-life balance, and roles within the company.

The buddy system works, too. The Harvard Business Review found that onboarding buddies helped increase new hire satisfaction by 36% after the first 90 days on the job. What’s more, buddies who met with their assigned new hires at least eight times within those first 90 days helped boost new hire productivity by 96%.

The key takeaway is that the buddy system works best when given the time for the mentor-mentee relationship to develop organically. Encourage mentors to schedule regular check-ins, ask guiding questions, and send automated training reminders to new hires. Together, these actions create an invaluable sense of camaraderie through the computer screen.

4. Have fun with it

A healthy dose of fun makes any digital employee onboarding experience unforgettable. Between interactive learning and after-hours virtual cohort events, there are plenty of ways to energize your digital employee onboarding experience while ensuring that new hires get the help and information they need.

Let’s face it: attention spans are getting shorter.

This is where interactive learning can help re-engage new hires in a remote learning environment; quizzes, role-play exercises, and live discussions can break up the monotony of training presentations. They can also ensure that new hires absorb and apply new information correctly.

After-hours virtual cohort sessions can also foster a sense of community among new hires—especially if they’re informal. Whether it’s a quick icebreaker session in the morning before training begins or a Friday afternoon happy hour, the possibilities to forge genuine human connections in a remote work setting are endless.

🎉 Here are 17 ways to make new hire onboarding fun

5. Get feedback

Besides acing the preboarding phase, collecting feedback from new hires and managers throughout the digital employee onboarding process is crucial to success.

Not only will you be able to gather data on what you’re doing right, but the insights you’ll receive can help you tackle areas that need improvement.

Administer automated polls at the beginning and end of each phase to gauge the expectations and experiences of everyone involved in the process. Another suggestion is to schedule weekly meetings with managers and buddy system mentors to monitor new hire progress. No matter how you decide to collect this data, continuously collect it throughout the digital employee onboarding process.

✅ A checklist for digitizing employee onboarding

So you’ve decided to take the leap and digitize your employee onboarding process. What happens next?

Take stock of your current employee onboarding process and see what you can integrate into the digital version. If you’re having trouble envisioning everything you’ll need to include, use our handy employee onboarding checklist to better understand which tasks you can digitize.

Remember that by ‘digitize,’ we don’t necessarily mean ‘automate.’ While some tasks in the digital employee onboarding process can be automated–think reminders, scheduling, and feedback surveys–real people should execute more collaborative tasks.

Get the full checklist here:

By automating specific tasks, you’ll also give yourself more time and mental energy to devote to the people who matter most in all of this: the new employees.

🚀 Case study: Scaling onboarding while growing from 33 to 140 employees

In a fully remote company, onboarding is one of THE main challenges for people teams.

The People Experience team at Storyblok mastered this challenge, in a time where efficient onboarding meant everything.

Key facts

• ⭐️ 9/10 average rating from new starters
• ⏱ …while saving more than 68 hours (>2.448€) every month in repetitive work
• 💻 An overall consistent and engaging remote onboarding experience

They did so by digitizing

1. Preboarding
2. Company onboarding
3. Role-related onboarding

Get the detailed breakdown of how they did it here:

➡️ Storyblok saves 15+ hours every week while taking their remote onboarding experience to the next level.

➡️ Digital employee onboarding software: Everything you need to succeed

The good news is that there’s digital onboarding software to assist you with all of this. However, the better news is that we offer this software at Zavvy. Zavvy’s employee onboarding software makes your life easier by providing help with every phase of the digital employee onboarding experience. With our digital onboarding software, you can:

• 🎉 Excite before day 1 through guided preboarding
• 📝 Create a structured digital onboarding journey for new hires
• ⚙️ Automate specific tasks to streamline the experience
• 📊 Collect feedback, track progress, and see if you’re meeting your goals
• 💬 Integrate employee communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams
• 👬 Foster authentic and organic human connections

At Zavvy, we understand the value a seamless digital onboarding experience can create for new hires. This is why we’re committed to helping companies develop their digital onboarding journeys with our software. By empowering you, you can empower your new employees and cultivate a remote workforce that leaves everyone feeling connected, welcome, and excited to come to work each day.

➡️ Curious how it works? Learn more about our onboarding experience software here!