The Welcome Box as a Social Onboarding Tool

The Welcome Box - an arrangement of company-branded clothing, food or other items that are oriented around welcoming a new hire - is increasingly becoming a table stakes part of a great employee onboarding process. 

While the Welcome Box is typically thought of as part of company onboarding, it can also be an important part of social onboarding. This is because the right kind of swag can do a lot to kick start conversations and build a sense of social belonging to a team or organization. 

To help build a Welcome Box that actually drives social connection amongst your team, we’ve collected 7 principles to guide your curation of what to include.

Principle 1: Clothing Over Consumables

Clothing can have an almost magical impact in helping one feel part of a team or group. In fact, evolutionary psychologist Dr. Robin Dunbar specifically identifies uniforms as one of the “group badges” which create a “sense of belonging to a community of friends.” Showing up to work in a company t-shirt or hoodie, and seeing other members of the team wearing the same item, triggers the same psychological mechanisms as showing up to a game in the home team’s jersey by signaling “you’re one of us”. For this reason, when deciding how to allocate your Welcome Box budget, bias for clothing over other consumables, such as snacks or notebooks. Items your team can wear will produce the best bang for your bonding buck. 

Principle 2: Quality Over Quantity 

While clothing can be a powerful catalyst to bonding, it only works if the garment is an item your team will actually wear on a regular basis. The most reliable way to achieve this is to invest in the quality of the piece - choose brands that are high quality, even considering known brands like Patagonia or Helly Hansen that offer corporate apparel. While these may cost more, they ensure that your investment in gear actually pays a return by not immediately ending up in the donation bin. Shopify, a company famous for its high quality welcome swag, sends an [insert brand] sweatsuit to every new employee. While more expensive, the gear has created a kind of unofficial uniform that the team actually wears.

Principle 3: Use Cohort-Driven Designs

Cohort-based onboarding, where groups of new hires are onboarded together in time-based cohorts, is an effective technique to streamline onboarding efforts and build social connections amongst new team members. Welcome swag can mirror this approach by deliberately connecting the branded items you give away to a certain cohort or group of cohorts. Xero, a cloud-based accounting software company based in New Zealand, introduces a new t-shirt design on an annual basis and sends one to every employee. Owning an older t-shirt has become a point of pride for veteran employees and a connection point to others who were there for key moments in the company’s history. Including an easily updatable item as part of onboarding swag, such as a high quality t-shirt or hat marked with a year, creates automatic cohorts with a “graduating class” feel that helps form bonds with others who joined during the same period.

Principle 4: Use Team-Specific Designs

For larger organizations (typically 1000+ people), where each functional team is often 50 - 100 people, membership in the functional team, as opposed to the larger organization, can be an important source of social belonging. In these circumstances, consider including a swag item that socially integrates the new hire into their function into the Welcome Box. Atlassian, for example, is a remote-first team of over 10,000, spread across dozens of countries. While Atlassian’s Welcome Box includes several items tying the new hire to the broader organization, many teams also send a team-based item.

Principle 5: Include Items That Can Double as an Ice Breaker 

Swag items can do more than signal that a new hire is part of a team. They can also double as activities that spark conversations and help a new hire display a lighter side of their personality. This is especially helpful for a remote-first team, where new hires have fewer opportunities to have these sorts of informal conversations with their peers.  Some examples:

• Share your drink. Include a gift card to Starbucks or another local coffee shop. Include a note to “take a coffee break” after an intense onboarding week. Include an added request to take a selfie with your drink and post it to a team channel to share your favourite drink.
• Share your sweet tooth. Share a gift certificate to an online sweet delivery service like justcandy.com. Have the new hire choose their favourite candy or chocolate, and post it in a team channel.

Principle 6: Offer a “Swag Shop” 

Many online swag suppliers offer customers the ability to set up “swag shops”, or simplified stores where new hires can choose the swag items that best suit them. Giving new hires a choice not only increases the chance the new hire will actually use the swag, but also creates an easy ice breaker conversation when meeting new teammates: “what did you choose as your swag item?” Answers evoke lighthearted debate, banter and bonding, like an unofficial “sorting hat” for your team.

Principle 7: Think Beyond the Physical

The word “swag” generally conjures items of physical gifts for new hires. But as teams adopt more distributed work, and become more conscious of the environmental impact of physical gifts, make sure you keep digital options in mind as a way to help colleagues bond at a distance. This can include coffee cards to incentivize virtually coffee chats, or virtual swag like a Welcomepage which drives conversations and connections.