INDUSTRY:
Healthcare
CLIENT:
GroupHEALTH
YEAR:
2021
EXPERIENCE:
Instructional Design, Web Development
New Employee Onboarding
about.
Due to COVID restrictions, GroupHEALTH, a group health benefits company, faced the challenge of onboarding new employees in a completely remote environment.
The L&D team not only created a New Employee Onboarding portal, but a gamified learning experience that engaged learners to complete milestones and tracked progress for managers. To achieve this, the portal was developed using WordPress with integrations for an Azure Active Directory and the company LMS.
challenge.
Because the organization had no previous remote onboarding solutions, our team had the opportunity to develop something completely new that would communicate corporate culture in an engaging, memorable and most importantly fun experience.
Initially, I was hired with the challenge of developing a web-based virtual reality experience to help new employees experience the company culture from a remote perspective. Our team designed some UI mock-ups to see how this could look.
result.
The Pivot to Gamification
After user testing the first prototype, our team soon realized that employee engagement was better suited to gamification elements compared to a simulated environment. To achieve this the site was redesigned and developed on WordPress emphasizing a more “flat” and intuitive experience, and incorporating community management functionality.
To create a low-barrier to entry in the onboarding process, the portal was divided into 4 main sections – First Day, First Week, First Month, First 90 Days. Each milestone hosted content from various HR stakeholders that was to be communicated to each new employee from a remote location. The team integrated a PBL (Points, Badges and Leaderboard) gamification feature to help move new employees along each milestone to complete the onboarding process in a timely manner. This feature was developed to be “re-skinned” allowing for the application of different themes while maintaining the overall framework of our PBL methodology. Our first theme was “The Taco Challenge” that encouraged new employees to earn points and gain badges that represented taco ingredients to ultimately build a delicious taco.
In addition to creating rich learning experiences for new employees, we also considered an intuitive method for delivering weekly reports to managers tracking the progress of new team members. This method needed to be connected to the employee database and deliver an automated email report that was easy to understand an most of all, not “spammy”.
