Hacking HR to Build an Adaptability Advantage
An effective onboarding solution could engage employees earlier, so that they are more productive and will stay longer. Engaging new hires between day of offer and day of joining can help reduce pre-join churn and time required to post-joining induction and will reduce turnover that occurs in the first 30-90 days. The effective onboarding could be the ARG (alternate reality game) which
- Keep people engaged
- Explain roles
- Be fun
- Involve others
The whole concept needs to be company specific especially on the branding. Nevertheless, the whole idea of getting people in a funny way on boarded, get them rewarded by finding the "holy grail".
The game will save costs in reducing the turnover. The engagement of employees will be high from the first day experience onwards. The costs creating a game are not as high as the costs for recruiting.
The majority of employees make their decision to stay with the company in the first three month of joining.
Problems are almost:
- Employees that aren't engaged earlier are less productive and will stay shorter.
- Not Engaging new hires between day of offer and day of joining can increase pre-join churn and time required to post-joining induction
High turnover that occurs in the first 30-90 days
The core components of the solution are to build a serious game. This includes content about:
- History
- Vision
- Products
- Branding
- Culture
- Initiatives
- Policies
The game will be built as kind of a map, where you can walk from one point to another virtually and real. Think of the history and background of a company. The inner world is changing the outer world. The company world is making your life magic, inspiring, existing. Let it make it with you
- A game which simulate to be not a game (you feel as you are in the game (ARG approach))
- A history which bonds you
- Solve riddles, see the company’s world, find the right way to your workplace, enjoy the different way of exploring the company
- "In-gaming" environment
- Provides challenge, context and purpose
- Creates engagement and mystery
- It is collaborative (you can interact with other new employees)
- They support active learning
- Problem-based, experimential, authentic
- They’re lo-fidelity
- Encourages use of range of technologies
- Less development effort to produce and extend
- They use ‘actual reality’
- Enables orientation in the real-world
- Uses the best of each medium
- Links to community and other organisations
The change of need for HR is to see first that new technology can help them to enhance the onboarding topic. It might be not needed to get an individual onboarding anymore as onboarding gamification can mainly be used for every new employee.
Recognize that this will save time and will optimize as well the new role of HR to be a partner and guider instead of an operational exporter.
As soon as people read about gamification, it might that they want to play it straight away. It is obvious that big companies need to change their “dusty” onboarding process. One major problem is that newcomers are not feeling integrated. If they can be connected in a game with each other and learn about the company values even before they start their job. They might come more motivated, enthusiastic and already now the kind of complexes structures in the company they start for. HR has to change their attitude to be responsible for the onboarding process alone. Their action would be to support and enlist they game. The outcome can be proofen after 2 years. (see Aberdeen group http://www.aberdeen.com/Aberdeen-Library/8373/AI-talent-acquisition-gamification.aspx)
The major problem is to get rid of old process and to let a company see the added value of gamification. Still gamification is not a tool which is seen serious in learning. The main topic of e-learning still provides old fashion kind of approach. Gamification instead reaches out to instinctive based, intrinsic motivational parts of our behavior. Everyday situations can be played via a role game and people have to feel like:" Yes, this situation I know." and they will play further. A company has to life this approach and as well has to stand behind this new technology based solution. It is a culture change and might take some time if companies see the added value. So a slow and structural approach, with first some prototype could convince the organization.
Design Thinking! One approach could be to start with a design thinking on the following topic: How might a new onboarding gamification for this organization could look like. At least with 10 persons cross functional
- Get an understanding and a point of view (2 hours)
- Generating ideas which needs to be in the onboarding game (2 hours)
- Start to build a paper based prototype including 3 scenes (1 hour)
- Present and Selected the best prototype (1 hour)
- Build this prototype (3 weeks development)
Budget depends on the development around 10K for a prototype.
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