Onboarding with Ease: A Tool for Settlement Organizations Onboarding New Employees
DFP Student Team: Atieh Razavi Yekta (PhD, OSOT, UBC); Chelsea Palmer (MA, iSchool, UBC); Faqia Iqbal (MSc, Computer Science, UBC); Kim Correa (MA, iSchool, UBC); Michael Yin (MSc, Computer Science, UBC)
Faculty Consultants: Suzanne Huot (Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy, UBC)
Options Community Services (OCS) is a non-profit settlement agency headquartered in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia that provides social services such as career networking, language learning, and housing aid. Settlement agencies such as OCS tend to have a high turnover rate, as well as an ever-changing list of resources and technologies, making standardized employee onboarding a difficult task. Therefore, we aim to develop a new onboarding workflow for OCS that would make onboarding for new employees engaging, interesting, and fun. We used a methodological toolkit that supported flexible activities that adapted to our clients’ input, moving from participatory, to generative, to visual communication. We designed three activities done collaboratively with OCS employees during a co-creation session to understand the important components of onboarding – the emotions, activities, and goals for new hires that they should experience during their onboarding. Using this information, we collaboratively designed an onboarding workflow for OCS based on the ideal “perfect week”. To support this workflow, we developed a prototype of an onboarding module to assist and enable the onboarding experience. Our product is an online modular-based system to help new employees in the process of acclimating to the team, the platform, and the technologies used at OCS. Our prototype demonstrates a subset of the product, showing an example module that teaches employees how to use Zoom at work. The module provides information about how to use the software in a professional setting through videos and textual displays, and a user completes the module by completing certain tasks at each screen. In the future, we hope that OCS and other settlement organizations can use this modular system for their own unique onboarding needs.
Great job of identifying the client’s success markers (the 5 C’s). I could see how the final product was based on these markers for success.
I think I heard that one end user was brought in to test or identify their needs in the onboarding situation. I would have really liked to have seen the other conversations you had with other end users, that defined what they needed to see (or what they didn’t like to see) to have their needs met – I saw the research provided by the company on what they wanted from the process overall, but it would be great to pair that with the experience of using a website to onboard. (i.e. “I don’t like video tutorials to onboard me,” or “I like everything on one screen” etc.) It would have been interesting to understand how you arrived at the design choices you made from the perspective of user experience, not only from surveys about *what* they want to feel, but also in *how* they want to experience it.
Great work on this project!!