It's no secret that the onboarding process is important. Companies with effective onboarding programs see a remarkable 82% increase in retention and a boost in productivity exceeding 70%. 

The typical onboarding process for new hires—or those new in a role after internal moves—often centers heavily around processes and paperwork. But what’s often missing in the mix is a deliberate social process for integrating employees into the company culture. Without support in fostering connections, building employee networks, and developing the skills to thrive, organizations miss a crucial onboarding opportunity to set employees up for long-term success.

With the early days of an employee’s tenure being closely tied to engagement, retention, and performance, there’s no room for companies to fumble the ball in onboarding. 

10KC’s Onboarding Solution integrates new hires or transitioning employees into your organization through a connected, engaging experience that accelerates peformance and directly supports your business priorities.

Let’s dive into why a social onboarding experience is crucial and how 10KC helps.

The importance of employee onboarding

Employee onboarding goes beyond just an initial impression. The ripple effect of onboarding can have a significant impact on short and long-term business performance.

When onboarding is effective it:

• Boosts employee retention: As much as 80% of new hires who experience poor onboarding plan to quit their roles
• Promotes productivity: According to a Glassdoor study, strong onboarding can shorten time-to-performance and boost productivity by over 70%.
• Elevates employee engagement and job satisfaction: Exceptional onboarding experiences have been tied to a 2.6x increase in employee job satisfaction.
• Increases employee performance: Reports have found that over 50% of new hires would go above and beyond for their company if they had a successful onboarding experience.

Despite the importance of employee onboarding, only about half of employees feel happy with their onboarding experience. This staggering discrepancy highlights an opportunity for organizations to establish onboarding experiences that better align with employee expectations and business objectives.

What makes a successful employee onboarding experience?

We know there's a ton of important (and legal) processes involved in onboarding that require necessary organizational effort—HR paperwork and tech setup, to name a couple. But these technical processes alone aren't enough to genuinely set your new hires up for success, propel your organizational goals forward, and meet employee expectations in today's competitive talent market.

Effective onboarding approaches integrate social networking (33% of quality programs) and buddy programs (speeding up productivity for 87% of companies. 

A successful employee onboarding experience:

1. Accounts for an employee’s unique needs

No two employees or roles are exactly alike. So when all new hires go through the exact same onboarding process, they’re often missing key information and connections they need to perform in their roles.

Every onboarding experience should be tailored to an employee’s unique needs while aligning with your business objectives. For example, a junior employee needs a different onboarding experience than a VP, just as a marketing hire needs something different than an engineer. Each role requires access to different internal knowledge, levels of support, and connections with colleagues across the organization. 

The most successful onboarding experiences also leverage a mix of learning formats—from formal training to leader-led learning sessions—that can accommodate each individual’s learning styles. 

Personalized onboarding not only helps employees become productive and high-performing in their new roles, supporting your business goals, but it also makes them feel valued and supported. At the end of the day, you want to ensure your employees can do a great job, are engaged, and want to stick around.  

2. Integrates new employees into company culture

Joining a brand new team is the adult equivalent of being the new kid in school. It can be incredibly daunting when everyone already has existing relationships with one another, they’re familiar with each other’s working styles, and there’s an established workflow. This can easily leave new hires feeling isolated and create silos that can be difficult to break down in the future.

Successful onboarding gives employees the tools to understand your company culture, values, and norms, rather than leaving them to fend for themselves. Providing employees with connections to their peers off the bat ensures that integration isn’t left to chance while promoting inclusion and belonging. 

Over time, this translates to better team communication, collaboration, and innovation.

3. Facilitates the transfer of critical institutional knowledge

One of the biggest challenges and costs that come with bringing on a new hire, or moving someone to a new team or project, is that they lack the institutional knowledge and context that allows them to perform at their best. The good news is that this knowledge already exists within your workforce. It’s simply a matter of unlocking it and ensuring the right conversations are happening to transfer information. 

Sure, knowledge is often shared organically over time, but leaving it up to chance can create unnecessary delays in performance and productivity. It's also impossible to expect new hires to know who possesses the context or knowledge they need.

When you intentionally open the doors to these conversations in the onboarding process, you help employees gain valuable insights and best practices that they’d otherwise be stuck figuring out themselves.

4. Establishes a foundation for long-term success 

Too often, onboarding is seen as an initial checklist to complete, rather than a crucial investment in an employee's lasting success. 

A startling 54% of all employees feel completely alone and don't know who to turn to for career development support.

Onboarding should establish a foundational network that fuels long-term success and growth. These early connections are crucial for navigating the company culture, understanding unspoken norms, and accessing resources efficiently. 

From knowing who to approach with technical questions to having internal advocates for career advancement, these early connections become invaluable as employees progress within the organization. The onboarding phase is a prime opportunity to lay the groundwork for a thriving internal network that supports not only professional development but also career mobility, overall job satisfaction, and performance. 

Elevating employee onboarding with social learning

When we consider the factors that contribute to onboarding success, there’s one common thread: social interaction and connection-building.

Yet, the majority (58%) of organizations say that their onboarding programs focus primarily on HR and technical processes. While these technical and legal processes are no doubt crucial this leaves social onboarding as an after-thought.

What most employee onboarding processes are missing is structured social learning—where employees develop their skills and knowledge through interactions with their peers.

Through dedicated social onboarding experiences, you can ensure employees quickly become integrated into the corporate culture, attain and retain institutional knowledge critical for their roles, and build the internal network necessary for continued success at your organization. 

One of the most common examples of social learning in onboarding is onboarding buddies or mentors, where established employees are paired with new hires to show them the ropes and connect them with peers. Mentoring in onboarding has been shown to improve new hire satisfaction by 36%, further solidifying the value of social onboarding. 

This is a good start, but it’s not enough. Employees need to extend their networks beyond a single mentor or buddy in order to unlock all the benefits of social onboarding experiences.

The challenge with most social learning formats is that they can be difficult to execute at scale. They often require manual matching and offer limited insight into learning outcomes, which is why organizations tend to shy away from social onboarding approaches.

‍10KC solves for the lack of visibility and structure traditionally associated with social onboarding by providing insights into the quantity, quality, and outcomes of relationships. Standalone programs, such as mentorship or onboarding buddy programs, are paired with other social learning experiences—including networking and group learning—to deliver a holistic onboarding approach that accelerates time to productivity.

‍READ MORE: How 10KC Powers Social Learning at Scale for Increased Productivity, Innovation, and Performance

How 10KC’s employee onboarding program develops high-performing teams

Here are a few ways 10KC’s Onboarding Solution and social learning tools help deliver high-impact onboarding experiences that boost retention and shorten time-to-productivity. 

1. Implement personalized onboarding pathways at scale

Historically, social learning methods have been difficult to connect to key business objectives. 10KC’s curated Learning Pathways enable you to create tailored onboarding programs for specific talent groups that address key development and knowledge needs.

Our suite of social learning experiences—including development programs, networking, and group learning sessions—accelerate the onboarding process, minimize new hire ramp-up time, and boost employee morale from day one.

“Any of the Pathways that you see in our library, they're really made up of three main building blocks. We have our Development Programs, which could be a mentoring program that you're running. In this case, it's our Onboarding [Buddy] Program. These can be run either one to one or in groups. We then have Group Learning Sessions. Those are usually small events that are led by a leader or subject matter expert. That's where you're going to be focused on topics like the company vision and strategy, or learning about different functions within the organization. These are really an opportunity to have more of an interactive group discussion than you usually would get in just sort of a day to day business meeting. And they're really focused on building that exposure between the leader and that new group of employees. And then finally we have Networking, where employees can network within their function or within other groups in the organization that they may not otherwise get a chance to meet or interact with on a regular basis.” - Alexandra Paquette, VP of Product, 10KC

WATCH ON-DEMAND: Driving Performance with Social Learning Technology

With 10KC, you can easily package the right mix of social onboarding experiences based on talent groups, like:

• New hires: Help new employees understand the unique culture, values, and norms of your organization and connect them with the right stakeholders to accelerate onboarding and improve role effectiveness.

• New in role: Facilitate seamless transitions into new positions by connecting employees with relevant teams, leaders, and resources, ensuring they quickly build the knowledge and relationships needed to excel in their new responsibilities.

• Early talent and new grads: Onboard and develop early talent by providing them with the right networks and resources  they need to build new skills and advance in their careers. 

• Boomerang employees: Alumni hires possess institutional knowledge that can reduce ramp-up time. Get boomerang employees back up to speed on company culture and processes, so they can easily re-integrate back onto your teams. 

• Return from leave: Help returning employees align on responsibilities and cultural nuances that might have changed while they were away, so they can return to their role without skipping a beat.

• Culture onboarding: From accelerated growth to restructuring and M&A, help employees build better relationships with their peers and align on organizational culture.

2. Connect new hires with the right employees through smart-matching

While some new hires might be comfortable proactively introducing themselves and building new relationships, most are more introverted or might not know where to begin. This leaves relationship building up to chance, susceptible to bias, and hinders the onboarding process.

10K’s customizable smart-match algorithm creates connections for new hires by pairing them with seasoned peers, based on organizational attributes and skills. This ensures that employees have access to the networks they need to build relationships, ask questions, and develop skills throughout the onboarding process. 

For instance, Horizon Media needed a solution for fostering deeper connectivity, building relationships, and learning in their dynamic hybrid work environment. They turned to 10KC to implement the THRIVE mentorship program. THRIVE initially started as a solution for building connections turned into so much more.

“I met with someone who was just hired. She was expressing that, before utilizing Introductions, she felt like, ‘I don't know where to start. I don't know how to meet people.’ She was overwhelmed at the thought of how she would start to build relationships as a new hire at Horizon, and her manager pointed her to the 10KC platform.” - Fatima Winfrey, Vice President of DEI and Belonging at Horizon Media

Not only did their program spark connections with a 98% conversation rating—it also helped foster meaningful relationships between employees (including new hires) that may never otherwise have occurred.

‍LEARN MORE: How Horizon Media Scaled an Enterprise Mentoring Program Employees Love

3. Promote business-critical knowledge sharing with intentional conversations 

It’s not uncommon for new hires to experience information overload. While preserving institutional knowledge is critical, throwing too much information at them at once hinders their ability to retain the key information they need to effectively perform their roles.

10KC helps keep conversations focused and aligned with strategic objectives through carefully curated curriculums and discussion guides. This ensures that employees access the right expertise and knowledge at the right time while fostering a culture of continuous learning. 

As a large, globally dispersed organization, PwC created the Connection Central program on the 10KC platform to build intentional connections and conversations between employees—new and existing—and support their people value proposition.

“We wanted to build meaningful connections that superseded historic silos or proximity barriers. We wanted to drive connections that were human-led and tech powered, and 10KC allowed us to do that. The platform has helped us bring intention into conversations, which can be challenging in a remote or hybrid environment.” - Chris Dulny, Chief Digital, Data & Innovation Officer at PwC

In just a short period of time, PwC was able to garner brand recognition that attracted new hires and retained existing ones. They hosted 170+ small group events and created 20,000+ connections with 96% favorable ratings from partners and employees. 

PwC’s success in boosting employee engagement highlights the significant impact that relationships and connections can have during the onboarding process and beyond.

LEARN MORE: How PwC Built a Connected Workforce in the Hybrid World of Work

4. Turn social onboarding experiences into measurable ROI

We’ve established that building relationships, networks, and enabling internal knowledge-sharing is essential for successful onboarding. However, the impact of these efforts is often difficult to measure, driving organizations to rely on completion-based modules and onboarding checklists. This is far from ideal—you want to be able to understand and communicate how your social onboarding experiences are stacking up to business goals. 

With 10KC’s Data Dashboard, you can extract the value of every interaction and quantify the impact of social onboarding on key business metrics, such as productivity, retention, performance, and innovation. With real-time actionable insights, you can be confident that the right knowledge and skills are being transferred throughout the onboarding process and beyond.

“Being able to make this investment requires a clear ability to talk about the ROI. [...] And so tech enablement through platforms like 10KC make measurement and monitoring pretty seamless in how we do the work.” - Jarvis Sam, Former Chief DEI Officer, Nike

5. Make onboarding a part of your existing workflow

Onboarding is a time and resource-intensive process for everyone involved. 

10KC enables social onboarding experiences within the tools you use every day to make building connections, diving into discussions, and sharing knowledge convenient and accessible. Seamless integrations with your HRIS system eliminate the administrative hassle of social onboarding and make adding new employees to onboarding pathways a breeze.

Accelerate time to productivity and engage new hires with 10KC’s Onboarding Solution

Through intentional relationship-building initiatives, 10KC's Onboarding Solution reduces time-to-productivity and fosters a positive employee experience from day one. 

Stronger bonds create robust support networks where colleagues readily share knowledge and collaborate to solve problems, accelerating both individual and team performance while driving innovation and efficiency.