By: Tammy Godby, Global Manager, Organizational Development | 02/1/2021 |

We hear and talk a lot about the Effortless Experience constantly – What it takes to create and sustain this experience for our clients and customers. At Percepta, we take it further.  Here, our employees are customers too. We believe the employee experience drives the customer experience.  It’s simple in theory, foundationally sound and worth every ounce of effort we put into it.

We begin our efforts prior to day 1.  We want our new hires to know they are valued even before they officially begin.  Our Talent Acquisition department works hard to make sure the hiring process is painless, we even measure it through a pre-hire survey.  Today, I want to focus though on Day 1 and the first week of employment.

Typically, on Day 1, you’re introduced to your team, your manager, shown where the breakroom is and where the coffee is kept.  You’re thrown into meetings where you don’t know the topic or desired outcome and asked to take notes. You might get your computer up and running and end the day wondering who you work for and hoping no one quizzes you on the names of the people you met during the day. But that’s usually it, just one day of onboarding. We realized the struggle is real.

Here at Percepta, we don’t have a typical week 1.  We want it to be more so we decided to turn onboarding on its head and see how we could make it better…an effortless onboarding experience for our new employees that lasts more than a single day. 

We listened to our employees and found that although they felt welcomed and were excited to begin their journey with Percepta, there were a lot of questions, uncertainties, new technical issues, and knowledge gaps that hindered their ability to fully focus on their new positions, especially during this all-virtual time.  Here in Organizational Development, our goal is to be the Flagship for Culture of Service.  Knowing we could do more to make a new hire experience effortless, we implemented a new 1-week virtual onboarding program.

I’m so excited to share this because not only is it a good idea for new employees to feel more comfortable with their new organization, but we are demonstrating the experience we want for our clients and customers right from the beginning.  We also want to set our new employees up for success by preparing them to have the skills and tools to dive into their job without competing priorities.

Onboarding is now a fully interactive week of technical and cultural learning, with an emphasis on relationship building. We cover things like logins and passwords, systems testing, tool overviews, company overview and strategy, market differentiators, meeting team members from all departments, watching videos from our leadership team, identifying your team members and champions (we call it finding your people), all in a safe and supportive environment.  There are presentations from each new employee, allowing them to practice in their new environment while learning vital information about Percepta.  Every day we have morning and afternoon check-ins We provide facilitator-led and eLearning elements, assign self-paced modules with knowledge checks, and are committed to engaging and supporting our new employees on a daily basis.

I could talk about this all day because it’s such a passion of mine, but I’ll be concise.

Creating an effortless experience is not limited to our customers and clients.  In fact, the effortless experience our customers and clients receive is the direct result of the effortless experience we are continually working to create for our employees.