Nowadays, quite often we find new hires going through digital onboarding on their first day, all by themselves. Hitherto, Companies chose a specific day as new hires joining day for HR resources to physically onboarding every new hire. With the advent of digital onboarding setting in, we have overcome this limitation We are living in an experience economy, and we are also living in the digital economy. Experience is something that leaves you with memories of the past or which gives you great satisfaction during usage. Experience can also be about implicit trust and faith in something like a brand due to continuous good experience gained over time. But then, the experience can be gained from another person or digitally gained by using a gadget or website or a service on the web. As a universe, we seem to weigh good digital experience as equal as personal experiences, if one must conclude from the popularity of social media. Else, the least we conclude is that digital experience is becoming an acceptable norm in the absence of direct personal experience possible. Companies that adopt digital on-boarding to their new hires must create them with experience as the backbone. They want their new hires to enjoy the digital experience and gain positive emotions, beliefs, and motivation for the purpose and people in the Company. New hires digital onboarding experience can also set the right motto of the company’s drive towards “Digital First & Digital Always,” right from day one. I have often advocated digital onboarding as a tool to know and gauge digital familiarity of new hires and chart a course of training needs for their improvements. After all, the world is turning digital, and if we cannot coach our employees to be exceptionally digitally savvy, we are not going to be strong in the marketplace. An enterprise that is multi-location driven but has centralized human resource services have no choice but to adapt to digital on-boarding to take care of new hires joining at remote locations. This way, digital onboarding helps to break the geographical barriers. Some enterprises use digital onboarding as a smart HR tool to simplify the creation of employee profiles invisibly by the new hire themselves. Whatever be the reason an enterprise adopts, the moot point is whether it can create the same personal touch as doing a direct physical onboarding? Let us, for a moment, look at theatre plays and movies as an analogy. While movies have outgrown as the best entertainment medium than theatre plays, all of us have been mentally adapting to proxy presence as something which we enjoy. In the film, dialogue, voice, and scenes create all the emotions. Akin to this, if the digital content can be engaging with good narratives, a soulful voice with good moderation and an elegant portrayal of enterprise core values and other content that is relevant to onboarding, it is possible to achieve the same impact like a physical onboarding. While there is no doubt that human-to-human contact is superior to anything pseudo, the digital is not too far in catching up with its innovations of delivery. But if you desire strong standardization in your delivery of new hire onboarding experience, I ought to advocate that digital is the best medium to adopt. When we designed Retail ViVA, we gave the utmost thrust to digital onboarding as creating the best first impression. Hence, we developed a flexible, fully digital onboarding module, that a citizen user can create and configure. Digital acceptance is more than ever now, and possibly, COVID-19 has accelerated its adoption across generations by default. With the remote workforce growing and becoming a new-normal, digital onboarding is the way to go and considered normal-normal rather than new normal. Written by (Ragu)nathan Kannan
