the context to be able to judge the relevance of what they find. If they need to find specific expertise, then their first thought will be to bring up the subject at a team meeting rather than play ‘hunt the expert’. They will of course also have external networks that they have developed over the course of their careers and they might wish to bring this expertise into projects they are working on. This often brings up issues of adding contacts external to the organisation into social networks.
Use Slack-type applications The major challenge is not connecting the employee with internal experts but making their expertise known around the organisation. Asking the employee to create a CV is of limited value outside of the employee feeling pleased with themselves! This is because they may not be able to disclose specific projects they worked on, or expertise they have gained. In addi- tion, it could be that projects where their experience might be helpful may also be behind a security firewall. This is where a Slack-type application is invaluable. Requests for support can be posted and then the employee can make up their own mind whether to respond or (for whatever reason) decline to do so.
The final category of onboarding that is often overlooked is the promotion or transfer of an employee to a different role, department, division or country. It is often assumed that because they have been in the organisation for a number of years, they will be able to sort out finding and sharing expertise without any assis- tance from a manager or a technology. The challenges they face may well include working in a second language, where internal reports and policy docu- ments may be in a language that they do not read well. This is where enterprise search applications can be very help- ful, but they need to have multilingual metadata and a careful consideration of local jargon. In the UK the employee may have hunted down the travel expenses application but in Germany (as in much of Europe) they may be using the SAP Con- cur application. Will a search for ‘expense claims’ find the Concur application? Good quality machine translation applications will be invaluable. The comments above on making their expertise known around their new location and responsibilities also apply here.
Importance of onboarding personas My recommendation would be to create a set of onboarding personas, and for each to work through the information and knowledge individual employees will need to support both their career progression and the development of the organisation. From this a basket of technologies can be developed. One of these personas would be the leaver, though as with onboarding
44 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL April-May 2021
there are a number of different situations. Then of course there is the challenge of onboarding a collection of new employ- ees across all the personas as the result of an acquisition or merger. Onboarding processes do not easily scale and using technology to overcome this issue will have a significant impact on the already
fragile good-will of the new employees. All this leads me to say that onboarding has to be seen as a core area of competence for HR, KM, Line-of-Business and IT managers, and the sooner staff with these responsibilities get around a table and come up with a set of good practices for onboarding the better.
James Robertson is one of the global experts on intranet strategy and design.
He is the author of Essential intranets: inspiring sites that deliver value, What every intranet team should know and Designing intranets: creating sites that work, the three best-selling intranet books in the world. He has also written over two hundred articles and a variety of best-practice resources, including the Intranet Roadmap.
He is the founder and managing director of Step Two, a vendor- neutral consultancy located in Australia. In this role, he has helped high-profile organisations to develop intranet strategies, both within Australia and internationally.
James: It’s widely recognised that lasting impressions are created by the first days and weeks that a new starter experiences at an organisation.
As already outlined by Martin, there are many challenges to overcome, from the basics of actually receiving a laptop and phone on day one to trying to work out who does what. This can be seen through a lens of human resources, people man- agement, or knowledge management (as explored by Martin).
In modern organisations, it’s equally important to consider the digital employee experience (DEX) of new-start- ers, through their initial days, weeks and months. In my work at Step Two, we’ve
had the opportunity to provide a common definition of DEX as follows:
“Digital employee experience (DEX) is the sum of the digital interactions within the work environment.”
If this seems like an overly broad defi- nition, it is, deliberately so. It clearly takes in the experience that employees – the ‘humans’ in the system – have with the digital solutions provided by the business. Beyond this, it also con- siders how digital tools and experiences help employees to communicate, share and work with each other.
“…huge issue with digital employee experience.”
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