“This is going to be very cool. I know I’m not a new employee, but I want to attend!”
– Employees after hearing about the new employee orientation program about to be developed.
I’ve heard a sentence very similar to this, many times, over the past month or so as my team and I have spoken with key leaders across our organization to gather information and completely overhaul our existing new employee orientation.
Following is a brief case study on what we did, why we went in this direction and how we put it all together.
No Comprehensive New Employee Orientation
Until about three years ago, my organization didn’t have any sort of comprehensive new employee orientation program that would introduce new staff to our various departments. It was up to each hiring manager to orient his or her new staff members to the rest of the organization.
In January 2014, I began to work with our HR and administrative staff in order to line up a series of presentations from each department across the organization on an every-other-month basis. For three years, that has been our new employee orientation program: a series of 30- to 90-minute presentations from representatives of each department, spraying a fire hose of information at people who have been on the job anywhere from 1 day to 2 months.
Last fall, I pulled together some HR staff and leaders from across the organization to listen to their feedback about our current program. Some felt that there were some good presentations and some not-so-good presentations. Others felt that the entire program felt disjointed, with some staff repeating information from earlier presentations, and often there wasn’t a clear connection to how various departments interacted or impacted one another. Some came right out and said that this 3-day program just didn’t provide much value for their staff.
A New Employee Orientation Game
Taking this feedback into account, I spent some time thinking through a better way to introduce new staff to our organization, our mission, and our culture. I decided that we should have a series of panel discussions in order to eliminate the uneven and disconnected nature of the presentations that teams were delivering. I also felt we could have a series of activities to simulate what various operations teams did around the office and an immersive game that would connect new staff to our mission.
Unbeknownst to me, two other colleagues were also in the process of trying to re-design this new employee orientation program. By chance, I mentioned what I was planning to one of them, and I stumbled upon their plan. We came together to see what we could all come up with.
“Drop the panel discussions,” one colleague suggested. “I think the whole thing should be an immersive game.”
We decided we’d come together and create a 2-day new employee orientation game which would include simulations of what each team does on a daily basis and how it’s all connected to our mission. When one person heard the phrase “immersive game,” she suggested it could be like the movie Jumanji.
This was our solution:
Creating the New Employee Orientation Game
Before we began the actual design and build out of the program, we took a day off-site and watched several videos for inspiration:
- Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk: Gaming can make a better world
- Kahn Academy: Pixar in a Box
- Jumanji
Then we began to brainstorm how to make our Immersive Game idea work. Here are several initial sketches:
We designed a new employee orientation game that had two distinct parts. As you navigate around the perimeter of the game board on Day 1, you need to complete a series of challenges simulating every day tasks that each team does to move our work forward.
We are an eye bank (as in cornea transplants). Every time a team successfully completes a challenge, they are awarded corneas. Our mission is to eliminate corneal blindness around the world, so when each team has completed their journey through each of our domestic departments, they can use the corneas they’ve accrued to try to overcome barriers to entry in eye banking across various regions in the developing world.
Following each activity, there is a short period of Q&A with a representative from each team as well as a short debrief to ensure participants can connect the new employee orientation game experience with what actually happens across the organization.
