The challenge: make an onboarding workshop as dynamic remotely as face-to-face

Support and onboarding within the company are taken very seriously at Société Générale. In overall, Sylvaine likes to support new hires in two main ways:

• A meeting with fifteen speakers who each tell the new employees about one different aspect of the profession, the premises and the company,
• A treasure hunt, which takes place in the Société Générale towers, and whose main goal is to help participants get familiar with the premises.

These special days are very important for Sylvaine and her team, especially since they enable them to welcome up to 90 participants at once! They organize two of these days annually.

Obviously, due to the health crisis in 2020 they could not hold these days for employees on site. But Sylvaine and Société Générale still wanted to set up a 100%-online alternative that could be as close as possible to the original concept.

It was a daunting challenge for Sylvaine. Straight up, she decided to use Klaxoon and its wide range of associated activities to provide a fun, dynamic and user-friendly onboarding workshop. She bet on Klaxoon to help her create a true connection between the speakers and the participants, despite them being so far apart.

The solution: a series of activities, sessions and games using Board

Once the decision has been made, Sylvaine picks Klaxoon Board, the visual workspace to create a one-week journey. Instead of one full day dedicated to this onboarding event, the new version will be spread over a one-week workshop. Every morning, participants will have a short workshop led by a speaker. They will also meet up to spend time together and share their respective experiences in the early afternoon.

In practical terms, how does she deisgn this Board?

It's very simple. With her own idea in mind, Sylvaine decides to construct the Board herself without using one of the pre-existing templates. Starting from scratch, she simply places a map of France and a map of the world on a shared Board. These two maps will be used when she asks participants to “travel” to another destination (i.e. to another speaker or activity).

Beforehand, Sylvaine asks each of the participants to log in at their end to share their profile picture. With this simple request, she can check:

• That everyone has created their account on the actual day,
• That everyone can log in, regardless of the media used (computer, tablet or smartphone),
• And most importantly, that the participants have familiarized themselves with how to use Board, share an item, launch an idea and move it on the dedicated workspace. That’s all they need to do a great deal on Board!

On the actual day Sylvaine starts by using the “Synchronization” feature to lead the way through the visual workspace, bringing everyone with her as she moves on the Board. She reaches a shared space where everyone agrees on the golden rules that will ensure the remote event runs smoothly throughout the week.

Then, the onboarding workshop begins!

Everyone has direct access to a variety of information on the shared Board:

• A detailed program of sessions for the week,
• The topics dealt with during the sessions, with a program, summed up very simply for each of them, by two very simple questions to discuss.

In the spirit of continuous improvement, every participant is invited to give their opinion on each session. Getting feedback is very simple with Klaxoon: one “Like” from a participant is all it takes to find out whether the topic discussed was useful. If not, participants can go further and express their opinion easily with the Question tool, which can be used to directly address the speaker concerned, or with the "Dot-voting" feature to distribute a given amount of tokens and vote for favorite ideas. 

In addition to the sessions, Sylvaine and her team prepare all sorts of fun and interesting activities, such as adding content via short videos or missing word quizzes and word searches.

From a practical point of view, Sylvaine and her team choose to sort the participants into groups where a facilitator takes over using the screen sharing option, while all participants actually interact through the tool.

Throughout the week, the different days of activities are summed up using the Klaxoon Mission tool. This tool enables them to see projects progress in real time, all together. Another benefit is an added feeling of accomplishment, which is pleasurable and great fun, as the pathway gets completed!

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The result: more than 90 new hires welcomed to the company remotely

The result for Sylvaine is extremely positive! The new hire onboarding was a great success!

• Sylvaine and her team managed to provide a series of fun activities for several groups of 90 participants. It was quite a challenge for them, but with the help of Klaxoon they succeeded with flying colors!
• Remote learning was no problem for the participants, as Klaxoon and its visual workspace provided a seamless experience regardless of the complicated situation. 
• Preparation time is vastly reduced in the long run. For the next onboarding workshops, all Sylvaine has to do is duplicate the Boards she created and she’s ready to go!

Sylvaine highly recommends Klaxoon and Board to all companies looking for a way to work more efficiently remotely, and face-to-face too! Only Klaxoon can create a connection between people however far apart they are!