REIMAGINING THE SAFETY
ONBOARDING PROCESS
The background.
This multinational warehouse and logistics company is one of the world’s most recognizable brands. With incredible growth experienced during the global pandemic, the organization looked to transform their onboarding processes into an impactful human experience.
The challenge.
While simple on paper, our challenge was incredibly complex — to redefine people’s safety experience from their very first day.
This challenge was even more complicated, as new starters had a lot of content to sift through. For us, we had to look at how we could deliver all of this practical knowledge in a way that actually helped people to learn and remember. And, to top it off, the organization was also going through unprecedented growth during a global pandemic. So the safety onboarding experience had to be completely reimagined, especially for those who have the biggest influence on health, safety, and wellbeing: frontline leaders.
At the same time, we needed to consider the broader impact of our work. After all, this would speak to people spanning different cultures, languages, and regions with varying regulatory and legislative requirements.
The APPROACH.
Human-centered design was the basis of our approach, providing us with the structure for a robust yet rapid redesign of the WHS Onboarding experience — in just four months!
So we conducted a deep analysis of the current experience. This allowed us to unearth opportunities to reconstruct the process, reconsider content, and put people at the heart of the experience.
Once we spotted these opportunities, we could then be more strategic with how we would communicate. This allowed us to offer a more blended approach to help build people’s capability:
11 self-led online micro-learning courses for frontline leaders.
A toolkit developed specifically for the managers of those taking part in the experience.
A series of structured job-shadowing activities.
The impact.
By embracing a human-centered approach to our communication strategy, our new onboarding experience has made safety an integral part of the company culture.
The impact was beyond even our high expectations. Firstly, we were able to capture people’s sentiments of the onboarding experience through a Net Promoter Score. While 0 is considered a good score and high is 3 or above, we achieved 6.3.
We were also able to help the business reduce the hours it took to onboard frontline leaders by 50%.
This wasn’t just good for business, but also good for the learners, as this led to a reduction in cognitive load — helping to improve learning and retention.
Strong employee engagement:
95% believe the topic is relevant to their job
93% found the course easy to navigate
92% considered the content valuable
86% felt confident that they could integrate the concepts into their standard work
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This is a huge step forward in terms of content, details and expectations in leading and managing safety. It’s truly a success story.
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