Summary: How Intranet Connections made me feel welcomed, valued, and prepared through the employee onboarding process.
I joined Intranet Connections just over 4 weeks ago. In that time, I’ve experienced the familiar ‘new employee dash’: forms, introductions, integration into existing processes. For the first time, I’ve also experienced the joy of a well-supported onboarding experience that has fostered a sense of belonging. An effective employee onboarding process helps new employees adjust to the social and performance aspects of their jobs, so they can quickly become productive, contributing members of the organization.
Our intranet (unsurprisingly), is weaved into our daily work experience. Office huddles, sales results, social events, team updates, documentation, and process to name a few. By customizing our intranet for the optimal employee experience, IC has given me a clear view of the company’s history, expectations, and culture in a way I couldn’t appreciate before joining. As a new employee, I came with all the expected questions:
- “Who is …”
- “Where can i find…”
- “What do we do about…”
And in virtually all circumstances, the answer started and finished with “it’s on the intranet…”
7 Must-Have Intranet Features For The Employee Onboarding Process
1. New employee checklists
Our new employee checklists include all the tasks new employees need to get up to speed, such as training, company policy reviews, and more. It allowed for a streamlined understanding of what needed to get done in the first few days.
2. Share onboarding documents with new team members
It’s no secret that onboarding new team members involve a large amount of content, including, professional employment contracts, procedures, employee handbooks, and so on. Our intranet makes it easy to share documents freely and easily, to ensure documents are always up to date, and not buried in the dark recesses of someone’s email account.
3. Information Discovery, Knowledge Transfer & Smart Search
It’s easy for new employees to get lost. Information discovery should be as simple as possible. I’ve used our intranet to understand diverse topics such as our sales process, our vacation policies, even what events we’ve done for previous Christmas seasons.
4. Employee Profiles
Employee profiles are a go-to reference for every new hire, and ours gave me a method for getting to know our team members on a more personal level. Over time, I’ll update my profile to highlight work experience and personal hobbies.
5. Team Spaces
As a member of the Sales & Marketing team, I’ve spent a lot of time in our department site. These virtual environments allow our teams to share content, celebrate wins, and highlight campaigns, and control who gets access to what content.
6. Stress-Free Customization
Turns out, personalizing our intranet for events, specific departments or other purposes is pretty handy. In my first week, I was able to post a Christmas site to share company events through the season with minimal direction and had a blast doing it.
7. Pre-onboard: Don’t wait for day one!
This is more of an approach than a feature: A few weeks before I started, I got my very own login, letting me browse and get a feel for IC’s information at my own pace before getting started. By including me in team communications, this ‘preboarding‘ strategy also ensured that I got to know my coworkers and feel more included by the time I started.
I joined IC because I was blown away by the passion for simplifying internal and employee communication for companies all over the world. Using our intranet on a daily basis since day one has left me feeling excited about our product, our business, and our people, and thankful for its place in my onboarding experience.
Does your company have any interesting employee onboarding stories? Share them in a comment below!
