Commsor Blog
Automate and Personalize New Hire Onboarding with Meetsy
Meetsy eases the manual effort required from your People team and managers and makes remote onboarding a smooth experience for new employees.
Shivani Shah
You’ve gone through hundreds of applications, interviewed dozens of candidates, and made an offer. Your new hire has signed their contract and is just weeks, maybe even days, away from coming onboard as a full-time employee. You’re now getting ready to welcome them to the team — setting up their onboarding period, those crucial initial weeks where you help them assimilate, connect with the right people, and learn how you put your values into practice.
“An employee’s onboarding experience sets the tone for their broader employee experience and has a significant impact on retention,” says Stacey Thompson, Former Director of People at Commsor.
In fact, surveys have shown that companies that provide employees with a robust onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and increase the likelihood of 69% of employees staying with them for at least three years.
With statistics like these, it would be reasonable to expect that companies are going out of their way to provide their new hires with a well-thought-out onboarding experience — but it turns out that only 12% of employees think their company did a good job onboarding them.
Why are so many companies losing out on this opportunity to make new employees excited to be part of the team?
“Onboarding can be challenging for companies,” says Stacey. “Doing it well requires significant planning, organization, and time investment from many different stakeholders such as their manager, new hire buddy, tech team, People team, and cross-functional partners.”
With remote onboarding comes the added challenges of helping new hires build relationships and understand how their team communicates, all through a computer screen. Without the right tools and processes, it can be tricky and time consuming for everyone involved, leading to a frustrating onboarding experience for your new hire. Meetsy eases the manual effort required from your People team and managers and makes remote onboarding a smooth experience for new employees.
How to use Meetsy for remote onboarding
1. Build specific Match Programs to help new employees integrate into the company
Match Programs are exactly what the name suggests — programs that ‘match’ employees together for a call. You decide what criteria will match two people together — which year they joined the company, which team or department they work in, where they’re located, their interests, etc. — and Meetsy will do the rest.
Setting up Match Programs specifically for new hires means they will automatically be connected to the right people, removing any burden on them to reach out to their new coworkers.
New hire buddy program
Pair new hires with a colleague (aside from their manager) who has been at the company for over a year. New employees will have many questions as they learn more about your company, culture, and processes, and a buddy can answer these questions themselves or direct the new hire to the person with the answers. This gives new hires a specific point of contact and a friendly face to help ease their transition into life at your company.
Mentorship program
A mentorship program can be invaluable to early career employees, helping them develop new skills, grow in their roles, and build one-on-one connections with experienced teammates. An added bonus? Being a mentor gives current employees higher job satisfaction, too!
Cultivating mentor-mentee relationships in a remote company needs to be intentional, since there are fewer opportunities for the serendipitous connections an office setting provides. You can set up a mentorship program to pair mentors and mentees based on the criteria you choose, and you can even set agendas and question prompts for each meeting to remove friction on how to move forward.
Cross-department matching
While employees will work closely with members in their department, they may not have much occasion to interact with people in other teams. You can set up a Match Program that connects people working in different departments so new hires can meet people outside of their team who they might share common interests with.
Connections within the new hire’s department
You might also find it worthwhile to connect people within the same department, especially in a large organization. Two employees might work in the same department but on different projects, never having the chance to make a meaningful connection beyond team meetings or standups. And if they work closely together? Their Meetsy call is a time for them to chat and get to know one another beyond the projects they’re working on.
2. Use group discussions to connect multiple employees with a shared goal or interests
You can set up one-time or recurring group conversations where your employees can gather to meet new people, learn from each other, build relationships, and support one another. Encourage new hires to browse and join groups of interest as part of their onboarding process.
Group orientation
You can set up group discussions to onboard cohorts of new hires, saving you the time it would take to onboard each person separately. It will also help new hires connect with one another as they navigate the early weeks of their journey with your company together. Some group onboarding sessions could include discussions about company values and culture, compliance and policy information, communication and collaboration processes and tools, benefits, and a Q&A session to answer any specific doubts people might have.
You can set these discussions to private and share the links with the new hires (and any other employees who’ll be presenting) who will need to attend them.
Employee Resource Groups
Your organization’s Employee Resource Groups (ERG) can also meet in Meetsy, and you can set these up to be recurring group discussions. Share a list of ERGs with a new employee and invite them to join whichever groups they feel passionate about. If there are private ERGs, you can send an invitation link to the new hire so they can join the ERG and connect with like-minded coworkers.
3. Enable Personal User Guides so employees can share how they work
Personal User Guides (or PUGs, as we call them) are a place for employees to share their working and communication styles, as well as their interests outside of work. You can customize the information you ask employees to share in their PUG to suit your company’s policies and values.
You can make PUGs part of the new hire’s onboarding checklist to encourage them to complete it within the first few weeks of joining the company.
Review team PUGs
Every employee’s PUG acts as their profile and is accessible to the entire company. Create a task where the new hire should review their coworkers’ PUGs to learn more about their team. This will also help them understand how to fill in their own PUG to help their teammates learn more about them.
Create a PUG
Once the new hire has completed the team PUG review, the next task would be for them to fill in their PUG. Encourage them to block out a time in their calendar for this so that it’s part of their work day, and not in addition to their daily work-related tasks.
Have a one-on-one PUG review
The next task after the new hire has filled in their PUG is to set up a review with their teammates, including their manager. Build a level of trust around this step so the employee knows this is an opportunity to be transparent about how they work, and that there are no ‘wrong’ answers.
4. Connect new hires directly to key staff members
In addition to the teammates they meet through Match Programs, new hires can be directly introduced to other people in the company — think core working team, managers or direct reports, company leaders. The onboarding period is a good time to set up these personal introductions so new hires can meet the employees they’ll be working closely with in their roles.
5. Create an onboarding checklist
Once your new employees are in your company’s Meetsy group, there are some steps they should take to make it work for them. Add these tasks to their onboarding list in Meetsy so they can set themselves up to build connections with their teammates.
- Sync their calendar and set meeting time preferences
- Review how Meetsy works
- Sign up for optional Match Programs they might be interested in
- Sign up for Group Discussions of interest
- Fill in their Personal User Guides
6. Use the Welcome Message section to help new hires find their bearings
When an employee signs in to your Meetsy group, they’ll find themselves on an Overview page where they can see upcoming introductions and group discussions. There’s also room on this page for a Welcome Message, which you can use to say hello and give your employees — newbies and veterans — the information they need to use your Meetsy group.
Company values
Having these prominently shared on your Meetsy Overview page means employees will see them each time they log in to Meetsy. No more hunting for company values on your website or company handbook — they’ll see what your company stands for each time they log in to Meetsy.
How to use Meetsy
Our Match Programs will automate introductions regularly, but that doesn’t mean employees — especially new hires — shouldn’t explore the other connections possible through Meetsy. Encourage them to check in regularly with Group Discussions and Match Programs to join any they might be interested in.
Match frequency
Be upfront about the cadence of your Match Programs so employees know what to expect. If they can adjust the frequency — or pause a Match Program — let them know this too! New hires will likely be adjusting to a new tech stack at your company — transparency will help make adopting Meetsy a breeze for them.
Not using Meetsy yet? Book a demo.
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Sources:
- The True Cost of a Bad Hire – Brandon Hall Group
- Employee Engagement Strategies for New Employees – O.C. Tanner
- Career benefits associated with mentoring for mentors: A meta-analysis – Journal of Vocational Behavior
