How to onboard new employees using Clearspace
Are you hiring a bunch of new employees? Want to get them up to speed quickly, and give them an opportunity to make a real difference in your company? I’ve had a few conversations with folks who want to accomplish this. These are some loose guidelines we came up with. Feel free to add your own!
Configuring the Clearspace User Experience
Create these in Clearspace:
Space: New to [company name]?
Group: I’m New Here (or whatever you want to call your new-hire group). Make it a Moderated Group, which forces people to join in order to write anything - they can read everything without joining. A sense of membership is important here.
Widgets to add to the Overview page of the “New to [company name]?” space:
- Formatted Text widget “Welcome!”: welcome-to-our-company message.
- Formatted Text widget “Important Information”: links to important information for new hires.
- Formatted Text widget “Ask for Help”: links to the communities for IT, HR, Products, and Services, etc.
- Formatted Text widget “I want to:”: links to:
- “update my profile” - same as clicking edit my profile in your profile
- “find someone” - same as selecting Browse -> People
- “ask a question” - creates a new discussion in the space
- “write in my blog” - creates a new blog post, or takes them to screen to create a new blog
- “create a document” - brings up the “where to you want to create it?” screen
- “customize my homepage” - puts their homepage in edit mode, showing widget palette
- RSS Subscription widget that displays a feed from the I’m New Here Group.
- Recent Blogs widget, scoped to the entire Clearspace site.
Your Onboarding Team
Get Legal involved
Collaborate with them to create your organization’s social computing Terms & Conditions (lawyers like T&Cs better than some namby-pamby “guidelines”). They can calm their fears of employee harassment lawsuits and more by using their extraordinary CYA language skills. You can configure Clearspace to pop that sucker up and require agreement for everyone who logs in the first time.
Ask HR, IT, Product, Services etc. to monitor the space
These folks could designate one “help the N00b” person each week. They’d be responsible for answering new employees’ questions in the space. Maybe give them some sort of spiff for participating. Have them subscribe to the space, either using email or an RSS feed reader. Using email is better, though, because they’ll be able to simply reply to the email notification with their answer.
Find your cheerleaders
These are your mavens, energizers, advocates - the people who love where they work, and what they do. Get them to blog and whatever else they want to do in Clearspace. They will impart a positive sense of your culture, and help new hires feel really good about joining your company.
Onboarding Recipe for Hiring Managers
Tell the new employees’ managers to follow this recipe for onboarding:
- Show them their space. “Here’s where you can ask HR questions, product questions, services questions, IT questions, anything! There are people in all of those departments who are monitoring this space for your questions, and they’ll - get this - answer them!”
- Show them their group. “Here’s where you can talk to other new hires, and discuss whatever you want. Keep in mind that everyone can see what you talk about. If you decide to make a separate private group or whatever, don’t tell me about it. Heh.”
- Show them your cheerleaders. “Here are some people you need to follow. They’ll give you a sense of how things are done around here. You might want to label them with something so that you can keep track.”
- Show them their accidental mentors. “Here are some more people to follow. Read their stuff, and you’ll feel like you’ve been working here for years in just a matter of weeks. You might want to label them with ’smarties’ or something, just so you can manage your connections list better.”
- Show them how to customize their homepage. “I suggest you use the Connection Activity widget, because it will show you what all those people you are following are creating and commenting on. It’s a great way to cut down on the noise. Be sure to add the Recent Blogs widget too, because then you’ll get to hear from everyone in the company who blogs. The Your Groups widget is a good one, too. And finally, be sure to add and use the Status Update widget. It’s a great way to let folks know what you’re doing right now.” (Hint: Have your system administrator create a default homepage layout that shows all of these.)
Business Value Statements for your Muckity-Mucks
(Yes, I know I said these were a waste of time. I meant for me. ;)
Need some new-hire-flavored language to convince your management chain of the bennies of social software? Try these:
Talent Acquisition: bring potential recruits into an external Clearspace community where they can “meet” senior employees. This accomplishes two things:
- it gives the senior folks a chance to vet the recruits. They can provide feedback to HR about who’s good, who’s not;
- it gives the recruit a chance to learn about your culture, job expectations, day in the life, and whether they’d be a good fit.
New Talent Retention: provide new recruits a social software networking environment where they can:
- maintain ties with their peers;
- follow the content of senior employees, which would potentially accelerate their time-to-value (make them more productive faster).
This would complement existing mentoring programs. Possibly use a Facebook look and feel to encourage more rapid adoption and participation among new hires.
Centers of Excellence: provide senior employees a web-based community where they can:
- field questions from their peers and new hires, thereby significantly reducing one-off email and phone requests. Answering a question once for all to see significantly increases a senior employee’s productivity, enabling greater focus on their day job;
- share work with their peers in a permission-controlled place that enables more detailed conversations to take place that typically occur via email and the phone, where only the participants benefit. These workplaces would capture those conversations, thereby providing deeper context for any documents that eventually are checked into a content management system.
Let me know how it works!
