Stellar Elements (formerly projekt202) is a global design and innovation agency, acquired by Amdocs in 2017. In 2023, projekt202 was rebranded as Stellar Elements, an innovation arm for its parent company.
For a large organization, it's important to ensure new hires are onboarded into their new role quickly and effectively. They need to complete HR tasks promptly, get access to tools and systems required for them to do their job, and understand the requirements and expectations of their new role, among other things.
For the new employee however, finding and starting a new role is a major life change that can be stressful and overwhelming as much as it is or should be exciting.
I joined this project after generative research had been done with key stakeholders representing different business units across areas like Design, Technology, and PM, as well as internal teams like HR and Marketing. This research covered both understanding the existing process, and the challenges or points those teams felt, and was synthesized prior to my joining.
My role was to take the research to help create a new onboarding process for the company's new hires.
Employee satisfaction has an outsized impact on things like productivity, mental wellbeing, and ultimately, value to the employer.
We wanted to help new hires through their major life change so they could feel they made a good decision, and start their new role feeling energized and driven.
Some things just need to get done, quickly, such as technical tasks associated with onboarding. Setting up email and Slack, tool access, etc. And it's not always easy.
New hires usually need support to make it through this. In an ideal scenario, they have both written documentation and human support.
Especially in an agency setting where client-facing employees move around a lot, companies need to understand existing skills and career goals of their employees to make resourcing decisions.
Employees also need to know what growth looks like, and what expected of them in the immediate term.
We designed, in collaboration with the People Ops team, a cadence of onboarding sessions. The purpose of the sessions and the cadence of them was meant to achieve a few things.
After testing with existing employees and teams in different cultural zones across our global offices, our onboarding experience scored 6 out of 7 on usability, and was very well received by test participants (see feedback below). It has not yet been implemented, so further measurement is not available.
The first thing I did was start creating a service blueprint based on the research and synthesis work done prior to my joining. This was both to begin defining the end to end process we wanted to achieve, and to start wrapping my head around the research in a way that could be reviewed and discussed to increase my understanding of the research. Having a blueprint asset also gave us something for others to react to so we could start refining our needs and priorities for the effort.
We used this living artifact to extract & prioritize roadmap items to begin working toward.
Data (and countless books) shows that employees with an increased sense of autonomy and feelings of self-worth lead to better employee outputs. People will work harder, smarter, and faster if they feel valued, and in return, they produce more value for the company. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked by companies, and can lead to declining performance and employee satisfaction, and higher attrition rates over time.
To address this and the "major life change" problem, and, to start front-loading data collection around a specific new hire for their manager and resourcing team to use in the near future, our first initiative was to create a workshop focused on the employee themselves.
We did this to flip the paradigm of an employees onboarding journey being generally about the company - here's who we are as a organization, our values, our process, history, etc. Now get to work.
In order to get this implemented, we needed to take this onboarding session on a roadshow to leadership, service line teams, and to teams to different geographic locations to ensure this still made sense culturally for our teams in places like New Zealand, APAC and South America.
After earning approval from C-Suite executives and other global business leaders in the company, we finalized our handoff package that included training materials, document and communication templates, and the activity templates and facilitation guides.
Unfortunately, the work was shelved not long after approval due to unexpected corporate restructuring.
