“Make new joiners feel included, fast” - Impressions from the launch of Benivo’s new book

The Garage is a modern event space in Deloitte Digital’s Buckley Building in London’s Clerkenwell area. Its colorful seating and subdued industrial chic are the perfect backdrop for big business and innovative technology companies to meet and exchange ideas.

We at Benivo were delighted that our friends at Deloitte invited us to The Garage to celebrate the launch of our latest book “The Value of Welcome - Employee Experience for New Joiners” in this welcoming setting.

Why did we write a book about Employee Experience in the first place? 

We at Benivo want to Make Every Employee Feel Welcome, no matter their seniority or paycheck size. This is our company mission. Employee Experience is an increasingly popular term that covers many aspects of what we call a Company Welcome Experience.

As the latest Deloitte Human Capital Trends report highlights, Employee Experience is on top of HR, Recruiting and Global Mobility leaders’ agendas. They recognize it as a fundamental concept for attracting and retaining the best employees, because if you won’t offer a great Employee Experience to new joiners, your competitors will.

Given the recent ubiquity of the term, we have decided to explore Employee Experience in depth. After the huge success of our first book “Attracting and Retaining Talent in Times of Brexit”, a second book was the best medium to give this topic the space it deserves.

We asked experts in companies large and small, as well as leading academics, to share their thoughts on the topic of Employee Experience. The focus was to be on practical applicability. Instead of lofty concepts, we wanted to give our audience actionable advice and a long list of ideas they could start implementing right away.

Benivo’s CEO Nitzan Yudan opened the round of short talks by reminding the audience that, just as consumers have become used to instant gratification with many products and services, employees expect higher standards from their employers, especially during the first days on the job.

 Several of the book’s contributors then provided insight into important elements of the New Joiner Experience:

• Lital Zigelboim-Dvir, Senior Technical Recruiter at Facebook, discussed how her company reduces the stress factor for new joiners. As she said “no one enjoys being the new kid on the block.” One way to make new joiners feel included is by providing a box or bag of goodies that makes them feel part of the organization. Another is to have all people in a cohort start work on the same day to increase camaraderie.

• Rumi Das, Deloitte’s Global Workforce Transformation Director, talked about the dip — the mood low experienced by most existing employees after the exhilaration of a location transfer. The framework that helps Deloitte overcome that dip consists of four pillars — paying attention to Personal Wellbeing; Professional Engagement; Financial Welfare; and Operational Support. Kevin Frewin, Global Workforce Director at Deloitte, then emphasized the need for design thinking, for example in the area of gathering real-time feedback through a dedicated app, instead of running surveys long after the fact.

• Finally, Ben Whitter, CEO of the World Employee Experience Institute and dubbed “Mr Employee Experience”, talked about the Net Promoter Score as a means of measurement. However, he pointed out that there’s a big difference between the hypothetical “Would you refer us?” question the NPS asks, and the actual instances that employees recommend their employer to their network, the latter being much more important. He mentioned a company in the Philippines who has 82% of their new employees joining as referrals from existing employees.

Benivo Strategy Director and FEM Founder Brian Friedman rounded off the event by reminding the audience that the most common question on a new joiner’s mind is “What do people like me do?”. This applies to work activities but also to personal circumstances: Where do they live, how have they arranged their lives? A move can be traumatic because, in all of these basic ways, you have to start redesigning your life from scratch. Benivo’s Welcome Experience for early career employees is a scalable way of helping employees during this difficult time, without breaking the budget. (Just schedule a call with one of our team to learn more)

The ~50 attendees, fortified by coffee and breakfast courtesy of Deloitte, asked incisive questions and, book in hand, left inspired to implement some of the ideas they have heard.

A special section of the book discusses how to quantify Employee Experience. Qualitative concepts are difficult to pin down, and answering a question such as “is our Employee Experience for New Joiners better today than it was last year?” is far too often answered through a veil of anecdotes and subjective impressions.

How do we propose to objectively measure Employee Experience? Go find out!

Fill out this form and apply to receive a free copy of The Value Of Welcome, or buy it here on Amazon. Alternatively, you can wait for the eBook version to be released on <DATE>.

Thank you so much to our friends at Deloitte for hosting our launch event, and to our speakers Lital, Rumi, Kevin, and Ben.

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