Meaningful New Hire Connections

is formed much, much sooner.  In fact, like so many other things in life, your greatest opportunity to build trust and excitement about your organization is likely with the very first impression you make.

So, what’s your organization’s first impression?

Is it a thick new hire packet full of brochures and forms mailed to the home of a future employee?  Is it a live orientation that is delivered inconsistently  - with a great HR presenter in one location and a less than compelling/knowledgeable speaker in another.  Even worse, is that PowerPoint presentation given over the phone to new employees in remote locations?

Many of our customers have come to us with this problem: “We’re doing a lot of hiring this year.  Our new hire orientation process is resource intensive and not representing our organization’s culture or employee value proposition effectively. Help us!”

This is the type of problem that the multimedia web was created for.  Here are some important ways that web multimedia can help your new hire orientation process:

• Establish a meaningful connection with new hires.  Retire the static new hire packets and long PowerPoint presentations.  By leveraging web video you can build excitement and convey the unique and dynamic culture that exists in your organization.
• Provide a consistently rich experience customized to your company.  By moving to the web, employees and families across the globe have access to the same compelling new hire orientation experience.  It’s consistent and it’s available on demand.
• Reach them before they even get into the building.  Studies show that making a new hire feel welcome and comfortable from day one is imperative to their long-term success.  This is best accomplished by having a new hire spend time with their new team, working on real projects. Enable this to happen by reducing or even eliminating time consuming orientation meetings. Provide pre-boarder access to your online new hire orientation and have employees show up on their first day already informed about deadlines, benefits, etc. and ready to get started in their new role.
• Save time and money.  The web offers you the ability to reduce resource intensive live new hire orientation meetings and packets, binders and other paper materials.  Something tells me you won’t miss those overseas new hire orientation meetings at all hours of the morning and night…

Benefits Communications Turn Risk Into Opportunity

As the economy improves, the tide may be turning once again according to several new studies.   Here are some key findings:

• Up to 60% of top performing employees plan to leave their organization within the next year
• In October 2010, the number of employees voluntarily quitting their jobs surpassed involuntary terminations
• Employees will be giving more serious consideration to new job opportunities than they would have in the past
• Employee engagement is at a historical low – some employees spend up to 50% of their time looking for another job

Think: risk and opportunity.

It’s time once again to use benefits as a strategic tool to keep your best employees and get new stars in the door. And don’t forget, your success is as much about how your benefits are communicated as the benefits themselves.

Consider for a moment the staff time and dollars go into facilitating New Hire Training and Open Enrollment each year.  Many companies we’ve met with offer half-day New Hire orientations on a near weekly basis.  Not to mention the time and effort that goes into the creation of the stacks of paper that employees receive on their first day.  Open enrollment presents a similar situation.  Each year, HR staff offer a collection of live seminars to explain benefits changes, often preceded by brochures, mailers and the like.  Despite all of this effort, nearly 80% of employers believe that their employees do not have a good understanding of their benefits.

Many employers have asked us how they free up their valuable, and in many cases shrinking HR staff to work on strategic projects while improving rates of benefits understanding among employees.  In addition, finding ways to communicate effectively has become an even higher priority as employers prepare to make difficult announcements about cutting programs and/or asking employees to take on a greater share of health care costs.

Our answers to such questions naturally start with what we know to be true about today’s employees:

• First, given the trend of increasingly distributed workforces and the importance of family decision makers, on-site seminars fail to provide reach
• Next, given the explosion of web multimedia and sites like YouTube, employees have become accustomed to rich, short-form content.  The busy professional of today simply does not have the attention span to thumb through lengthy benefits documents.

GuideSpark’s Benefits Learning Center modules embrace these trends to provide a modern and engaging multimedia solution capable of reaching your distributed workforce and their families.  This online solution automates open enrollment and new hire training workflows to free up valuable resources.  Employees have on demand access to a library of multimedia benefits presentations, allowing them to direct and personalize their learning experience.  In addition, these modules offer custom checklists for open enrollment and new hire on boarding, so that employees can conveniently track their progress.

Please take a look at the New Hire Training and Open Enrollment demonstrations on our site to better understand the power of these new modules.