Promoting your brand and elevating its visibility isn't just about attracting new customers or retaining existing ones - it's also about inspiring your team at any stage of their journey with your business.
So many elements of your brand and values have been cultivated organically based on your organisation’s history and culture, which is ultimately engineered by the people who represent you every day across all business avenues.
Your people have the potential to be your best brand advocates; therefore, strategic and value-driven brand education is crucial when onboarding new hires.
From awareness to understanding
A large percentage of your new hires will have researched your brand from an employee’s perspective. Throughout the onboarding process, they need to be educated on your brand's core identity, how it operates, and how it is perceived in the marketplace.
Onboarding is about more than educating new employees on the brand; it is also about exciting them to be part of it and contribute to its growth. You are not presenting facts; you are telling a story and celebrating milestones to immerse your new employees and provide a sense of belonging.
The full brand picture
A brand doesn’t exist solely within its logo, guidelines or value proposition. It’s built on history, culture, values, customer perception and why your people want to work there.
A set of rules and reports does not define your brand. While its essence should be evergreen, it also needs room to evolve. A brand lives within the shared vision, values, and strategy of its talent. It grows and develops as the team and business expand and innovate.
So, when onboarding fresh talent, as well as ensuring they feel familiar and confident with your brand identity, product portfolio and customer base, they also need to know what it means to their peers to be a part of that.
Information or experience?
For a lot of new starters, generic onboarding feels like a checkbox exercise and some meaningless paperwork to keep them occupied so they’re not being a nuisance during their first few days. For an employer, it’s an opportunity to deliver something impactful as someone embarks on a brand-new chapter with your company to boost confidence, productivity, progression and retention.
Onboarding should immerse, interact and engage people to increase their confidence in representing and embodying a brand. Interactive elements such as videos, image galleries, timelines, hotspots, polls and pop-ups are more likely to engage people and increase their information retention.
Onboarding with purpose
The more established, historic and complex a brand is, the more important it is to support new hires and infuse confidence in their brand knowledge and understanding.
Incorporating interactivity into onboarding elevates engagement and increases content consumption. By including assessments throughout onboarding, you can track how well information is being received while reinforcing the importance of your process to new starters.
Create an onboarding journey, where new starters can reflect on their progression and understanding by implementing mandatory assessments which can release gated material after successful completion.
Central and seamless
Joining a new organisation can be overwhelming at any level, so creating a seamless onboarding process is crucial for employers who want to welcome and onboard their new hires as quickly as possible.
Integrating onboarding communications, contention and training, provides a structured and comprehensive onboarding experience for new starters to easily navigate and access all the information they need in one central location. Ensure your onboarding journey focuses on learning rather than logistics.