Beyond the buzz items: how to create a kick-ass onboarding experience

The Fraedom team has worked hard at keeping their start-up vibe alive from day one and the business thrives by celebrating each of its employee’s personality and passion.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2019, more than 200,000 organisations benefit from Fraedom’s payment and expense management software in 178 countries. With a predominantly flat structure, the company employs more than 400 Fraedomites across 8 global offices.

Creating a kick-ass first day

At Fraedom, employee individuality is celebrated. As such, the People and Experience team is on a mission to ensure each new starter experiences a kick-ass first day. To help bring this to life, Liz Turner – Global Head of People and Experience (P&E) – supported by the wider P&E team, introduced handing new started out a Welcome Pack filled with essential company information, a pair of custom Converse shoes (that are colorable – so cool!) and t-shirts.  

It came to no surprise that the P&E team was inundated with positive feedback from Fraedom employees across all areas of the business following the Welcome Pack launch.

New starters, however, were not quite as positive. They loved the packs, especially the custom shoes, however the onboarding feedback surveys were still returning underwhelming results.

The challenge was set. How could the team improve the onboarding experience beyond the cool buzz items?

The first step was to understand what role onboarding played in the overall employee journey – from recruitment to engagement of existing employees and positively offboarding leavers.

Start by being brilliant at the basics

Despite 95% of employees rating Fraedom as a great place to work, new starters felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of compliance training necessary to be completed during onboarding.

When asked to provide some insight on what makes a great onboarding experience, employees had some surprising thoughts:   

• New hires valued their buddy, IT equipment, office induction and desk setup more than the cool stuff.
• Provisioning owners (the Finance, IT, Security and P&E teams) needed to know the right IT kit, have adequate time to fill order, and be confident in the approval workflow.  
• Everyone identified the compliance requirements for GDPR, Data Sharing and storage as a burden.

The onboarding & engagement solution  

Finding a mobile first solution that solved both the team needs, and the new hire’s expectations was a priority.

Fraedom’s first step was to implement HROnboard’s onboarding solution to automate and streamline the offer creation, acceptance and provisioning of new starters. Fraedom is now able to dynamically create contracts based on a predefined library of documents and workflows with multi-step approvals, customised for each region.

When it came to the candidate experience, the issue of desk readiness in the countdown to day 1 was sorted. Candidates accepted contracts faster than ever with no physical forms, lengthy bureaucracy or signatures. The digital acceptance process uses a 6-digit pin code on a candidate mobile. And with complex task and provisioning notifications everyone is kept in the loop, at every stage.

It wasn’t long until the Fraedom team rolled out the solution to manage re-contracting existing employees and offboarding leavers.   

Fraedom New Employee Welcome Kit

Creating a kick-ass first day V2

The team already had the elements for an amazing onboarding experience. What they needed was a better way to personalise and deliver these pieces in a way that didn’t overwhelm new starters.

Using the onboarding solution from HROnboard (a system enabling the P&E team to message workflows via text message), the Fraedom team can immerse their candidates into induction and share bite-sized chunks over time. Gone is the giant pack of all the wonderful things Fraedom does for its employees. Instead, information, meet-ups and tasks are shared with new employees and buddies before day one and beyond.

The team can encourage and facilitate communication and interaction without losing that valued personal touch.

And it’s an evolving process – Liz and her team are actively testing and learning. Changing and evolving content based on engagement indicators built into the app.

For example, the team had a task at the end of week one to update LinkedIn profiles. Engagement and completion of the task was low, so they replaced it with a mindfulness message that prompts new hires to take a breath and check out in-house wellness resources.

What about the results? Did this process improve engagement scores?

Liz Turner

Head of Global People & Experience, Fraedom

The best indicator for success is the positive feedback the team receive from new starters during onboarding:  

“Best first day and welcome program I have encountered. The speed in which it was executed was impressive” – Fraedom, new starter 

“I felt as if the red carpet was rolled out to welcome me” –Fraedom, new starter 

“The process was really great, I know where to come and what to expect plus not having to spend the first few days of my new job filling out paperwork was awesome.”  – Fraedom, new starter

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