Social Onboarding 101

What is social onboarding?

Social onboarding is the aspect of new hire onboarding which focuses on welcoming the new team member and helping them meet and build relationships with their colleagues.

Social onboarding is one workstream of a broader onboarding program, which typically contains three separate workstreams, each with their own goal and activities: 

• Company onboarding: Company onboarding focuses on introducing the new hire to the company or organization's mission, vision and values, as well as any important cultural norms and practices. Company onboarding also includes all of the administrative items to get a new employee up to speed, like signing employment agreements, reviewing key organizational policies, and setting up IT. 
• Functional onboarding: Functional onboarding focuses on providing new hires with the knowledge and skills needed to perform their job duties effectively. This may include training on specific tools and processes used in their function, shadowing experienced colleagues, and setting goals and expectations with one’s manager.
• Social onboarding: social onboarding focuses on helping a new hire build relationships with their colleagues and feel a sense of belonging within a new team. 

Why is social onboarding important?

Why do high performing companies invest so much time into social onboarding? Because investing this time up front has tremendous ROI - not only in terms of the happiness and wellbeing of your workforce, but also on the bottom line. 

Social onboarding impacts organizational importance through a straightforward chain reaction, where a strong social onboarding program accelerates the social connectedness of your organization, and this social connectedness has a powerful impact on workplace performance and employee retention. 

The second link of the chain - that social connectedness impacts key business metrics - is a well known dynamic of organizational behaviour. Specifically, social connectedness has been shown to have a direct link to performance, attendance and retention:

• Performance: Employees with high social belonging are associated with a 56% improvement in performance. 
• Attendance: Employees with high social belonging take 75% fewer sick days
• Retention: Employees with low levels of social belonging have a 313% stronger intention to quit.  

One estimate in the Harvard Business Review associates these impacts with an annual savings of over $50MM for a 10,000 person company. 

What isn’t as widely appreciated is the first link in the chain - that onboarding represents a unique moment to dramatically accelerate social connectedness. As this guide will explain, the onboarding period is a short window of time which, when done right, can catalyze social bonding and trigger an emotionally contagious cycle of trust and connection. Alternatively, when social onboarding is ignored or neglected, it can leave a new hire feeling isolated, alienated, and remorseful about their job decision. Importantly, once the onboarding window has closed, and the brief moment when an organization pauses to greet a new employee has passed, it cannot be reopened, and the catalytic opportunity is lost. Don’t miss it. 

A heightened challenge for remote and hybrid workplaces

This is especially true in the post-COVID world of work, where (as of spring 2023) 65% of workers able to work from home have moved to hybrid or fully remote working arrangements. While the strongest teams have always invested heavily in social onboarding, in the “before times”, social connection was the easiest area to drop and let human nature fill in the gaps. Even without a deliberate social onboarding program, companies could rely on daily interactions in shared spaces, regular shared meals and self-appointed culture carriers to integrate new team members. With time spent in these spaces now significantly reduced, companies must invest more deliberately in creating opportunities for social connection. A recent survey by BetterUp surfaced that 60% of workers feel that organizations aren’t doing enough today to facilitate these connections.

A solid social onboarding program is not a silver bullet for driving a culture of social connectedness - building and maintaining social bonds at work is an ongoing and multi-pronged effort - but onboarding represents a unique moment for your organization to accelerate relationship building, and demonstrate in an actionable way on day one your commitment to connection and culture.

Guiding Principles for Social Onboarding

Before diving into how to build a social onboarding strategy, there are several guiding principles that inform all of the activities discussed below. Regardless of what you decide to include in your own social onboarding strategy, keep these principles in mind. 

Principle 1: Flip the Focus

Unlike company and functional onboarding, which focus their activities around helping the new hire learn about the organization, social onboarding flips that focus, and is designed to help the organization learn about the new hire. In fact, the best social onboarding programs invest significant time - often up to an entire day of onboarding - on getting to know the personal interests and working styles of the new employee. 

 A recent study reported in the Harvard Business Review illustrates the impact that flipping the focus of social onboarding can have on the bottom line. In 2011, Indian technology giant WiPro ran two parallel onboarding programs. In one, onboarding focused on the new employee learning about the company values and culture. In another, the focus was flipped, and employees were asked to spend time sharing about themselves, and how they could employ their personal strengths on the job. The second group, where onboarding “[was] focused on individuals’ authentic identity”, had 33% greater retention during their first 6 months on the job, and their work was associated with greater customer satisfaction.

Principle 2: The Buck Stops with the Manager

It’s worth making a quick comment on the role of the manager during the employee’s social onboarding, because it isn’t always obvious - especially to newer managers onboarding an employee for the first time. 

As the manager, you are responsible for your new hire’s social onboarding. While HR, a social committee or even self-appointed team “culture carriers” may do a lot of the work of organizing activities and making the onboarding experience fun, as their manager, you are ultimately responsible for your new hire’s success in their role, and this includes their social onboarding experience. Don’t expect anyone else to look after this for you.

This doesn’t mean that you have to be extroverted, or love socializing, or be the person who coordinates the team outings or events. What it means is that you acknowledge that you are the one responsible for monitoring and overseeing the new hire’s social experience, and ensuring it is as successful as possible, including all of the “gap” experiences that may fall in between any specific onboarding activity. 

Here are some examples of gap experiences that should be on your radar:

• Who will be there to greet the new employee on their first day? If you work in person, and there is no “front desk” at your company, then you better be sure it is you. If you work remotely, and the person starts on Slack or Teams, then it is your job to make sure that the first Slack message comes from you.
• It’s day 3 of a new hire’s first week. Your new hire was given a stack of training videos to watch by HR as part of company onboarding, which was supposed to take them “a couple of days”. How are they doing - have they finished the videos and are waiting idly for their next task? Or are they still engaged and occupied? It is your job to oversee their capacity and ensure they aren’t overloaded, or waiting around for more instructions. 
• It's the end of the day on Friday of their first week. The new hire is feeling simultaneously energized, tired and a little self-conscious: how did my first week go? Am I making progress? Do people like me here so far? As the manager, it is your job to step in proactively with a message or end-of-day visit to their desk to summarize the week, lay out the plan for next week, and validate that everything is on track so far (or if not, discuss any issues). 

Of course, your new hire is an autonomous and intelligent adult, who can advocate for themselves and make decisions throughout their onboarding journey. The important point is to remember that as their manager, the employee’s experience - including their social experience - is ultimately your responsibility, and the buck stops with you. 

Deep Dive: Building a Social Onboarding Strategy

Determining the right “model” for your strategy

The first step in building your social onboarding strategy is determining the “social model” of your organization. To do this, map your organization along the following two axes:

1. Size. How many people work for your organization? The smaller your team, the more social interaction and cross-functional collaboration you get “for free” through the natural rhythms of work. In a small startup, for example, a new employee might be part of a daily standup which includes the CEO, or find themselves in regular discussions with most people at the company. In contrast, at a larger company, a new employee may struggle to meet people outside of their team without significant effort or support.
2. Shape. What is the working model of your organization - does your team work entirely in the office, entirely remotely, or some form of hybrid? While social onboarding is an important part of any onboarding process, an organization where everyone works together, in person, 5-days-a-week can often get away with a less structured approach, leaning on shared spaces, unplanned interactions and socially-oriented team members to help welcome a new team member. In contrast, a fully remote, hybrid or distributed team (in person, but spread across multiple offices) must be more deliberate in ensuring a new employee does not spend their first weeks or months alone by default. 

Combining these factors, what emerges is three “models” for the type of social onboarding program your organization requires. For a small, fully in-person organization, a few simple activities to catalyze the new hire’s integration into the company social fabric is usually all that is required for effective social onboarding. In contrast, a large, fully remote company will need a comprehensive program to help new employees feel like they belong. And a hybrid company of varying sizes will likely need something in between. 

Against this backdrop, think of the following playbook as a menu, where your organization can pick the activities that best suit your size and shape. At the end of this guide, we also provide a recommended “set menu” for each of the three models, with a preset list of activities that fit each model well. 

What follows are a list of social onboarding activities for each phase of onboarding:

• Phase 0: Post-Offer / Pre-Acceptance (“POPA”)
• Phase 1: Pre-Boarding
• Phase 2: Onboarding

At the end, we discuss various ways to measure the success of your social onboarding program.

Phase 0: Post-offer / pre-acceptance (“POPA”) period

Post-Offer / Pre-Acceptance, or the “POPA” period, is the window of time after an organization makes an offer to a candidate, but before the candidate accepts it. The POPA period may sound like an unusual time to start social onboarding, but it can be a powerful opportunity to simultaneously demonstrate the supportive environment of your team and increase your chances of closing a new recruit. In fact, social onboarding during the POPA period is a common practice in some of the most competitive recruiting environments, such as management consulting and corporate law - because it works. 

Here is our favourite POPA technique - the Group Hug:

The Group Hug

What is a Group Hug?

The Group Hug involves all of the interviewers in an interview circuit emailing the candidate, shortly after the recruiter formally makes the offer. These emails are short, informal and enthusiastic emails, which convey the following points:

1. Congratulations on securing the offer
2. Enthusiasm on the prospect of working together - ideally referencing something specific from the interview 
3. Offer to chat at any time to answer any questions 

The emotional experience of receiving a job offer, followed by multiple welcoming emails by your potential future team members, sends a strong message out of the gate about social support structure of your organization. It becomes immediately clear to the new recruit that this is a team that values and supports each other, recognizes the new recruit’s unique skills and abilities, and is excited to welcome them to the organization. For a candidate who cares about culture and connectedness, and is debating between multiple offers or opportunities, this strong social impression can often tip the scales in your team’s favour. 

Even for a recruit who decides not to join, this simple exercise is one that gets them referring friends and colleagues to your organization, because “the people were so awesome.”

For a detailed playbook on how to implement the Group Hug exercise, check out our guide on running a great Group Hug.

Phase 1: Pre-boarding

The Pre-Boarding Debate

Ask a room of HR and organizational leaders for their thoughts on pre-boarding, or onboarding activities which start before the employees first day, and you’ll often find that people fall into one of two camps. 

In one camp, you’ll find leaders who think that engagement and communication before the official first day can help new hires feel welcomed, informed, and prepared, reducing first-day jitters and fostering a sense of confidence from the outset. They also feel it is a great time to get laborious paperwork out of the way, so that the new hire can hit the ground running on day one.

In the other camp, you’ll find leaders who think that work activities begin on day one, and no sooner. These leaders are concerned about blurring the boundaries between work and personal time before the job even starts, and inadvertently creating stress for individuals who are trying to wrap up obligations at their previous jobs or enjoy a break before starting a new role.

We think that social onboarding provides the healthy middle ground in this debate. Restricting any pre-boarding activities to social onboarding activities only can help ensure the new hire feels welcomed and expected, and provides basic line-of-sight into what to expect on day one, without hoisting any actual work on a new hire before their official first day. 

Below are several social onboarding activities that are particularly well suited to the pre-boarding period. 

The Manager Intro Call 

The manager intro call is what it sounds like - sometime before the new hire’s first day, and ideally within a week of the new hire accepting the offer, the hiring manager sets up time for a short phone call to catch up and set expectations for the first day. 

This call is not a replacement of the formal onboarding email, typically sent by HR, which summarizes the most important things the employee needs to know for day one, such as their start time, IT setup and office location if appropriate. This call is a supplemental activity, focused on social onboarding. 

See our guide on how to run a successful manager intro call for a practical deep dive on the process, including the most important goals and anti-goals, an email template for how to reach out, and a script for how to facilitate the call. 

The Welcome Box

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. Specifically:

• Sending branded clothing (as opposed to food or other branded items) can trigger our evolutionary psychology in a way that helps us feel one of the group. 
• Cohort-driven designs can automatically integrate a new hire into a group of other employees within a cohort, becoming an enduring marker of connection and pride.
• Thinking beyond a physical box, to digital gifts and experiences, can create powerful new ways for remote, hybrid and distributed team members to connect. 

For more guidance on how to build a Welcome Box that supports social onboarding, check out these 7 principles to building a Welcome Box that actually builds social connections.

Phase 2: Onboarding

A new hire’s first day is when social onboarding really begins. No matter our age or seniority, showing up to a new group of people, introducing ourselves and gaining social acceptance is scary, and the reception we experience during our first days and weeks can define the trajectory of our integration into the team. Early social experiences have the potential to either accelerate the bonding and trust building that leads to high performance and retention, or to frustrate this process and leave a new hire feeling isolated and alone.

What follows are a number of simple social onboarding practices that can begin on day one and which simultaneously demonstrate to the new hire that they are a valued member of the team, while also providing them with a platform to build social connections with their new colleagues.

Start with an "Enterview"

An Enterview is a powerful ritual performed on a new hire’s first day on the job. Originated in innovation consulting firm IDEO’s San Francisco office, and popularized more recently by No Hard Feelings, a 2019 book on workplace emotions by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy, the Enterview involves preparing a digital or physical card for a new hire, contributed to by everyone on the team who met them throughout the interview process.

Similar to the Group Hug, each member adds a note to the Enterview card about why they are excited for the new person to join, and the value they bring to the team. The result is a burst of welcoming energy on a new hire’s first day, countering the first day jitters and reminding the person of why they joined. 

The Enterview works because it leverages a powerful psychological phenomenon called Emotional Contagion, where the emotional state of others triggers your own emotional state, kicking off a “contagious” upward spiral of warmth and connection that spreads across the team. 

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To learn more about emotional contagion, and how to use it as part of your own Enterview  activity, check out our guide: The Enterview: A Secret Hack to Trigger Emotional Contagion. 

Introduce the new hire with an employee blog

A new hire intro is any activity that enables a new hire to introduce themselves to the organization in a one-to-many format. The goal of this exercise is to provide a new hire with the opportunity to share the aspects of their personal and professional background that they feel will help their colleagues understand them, and provide the conversation fodder for initial relationship building. Is the new hire a passionate soccer player, and hoping to find fellow fans on the team to play a pick up game after work? Or do they have unique career experience that will influence their work, which they’d like their team to know about? Whatever they new hire would like to share about themselves, the new hire intro is the way to do it. 

Providing a new hire an opportunity to make this introduction is important because, done right, an effective introduction can be a significant accelerator to relationship building on a team. The reason for this comes down to our evolutionary psychology, and the way we instinctively build connections with others. Evolutionary psychologist Dr. Robin Dunbar (author of the famous Dunbar’s number, or the finding that humans can support a maximum social group of approximately 150 people) found that humans use 7 personality signals to identify potential friends and connections. By providing a new hire with a platform to share these signals with their peers, it is much easier, and significantly faster, for co-workers to find social connection and belonging.  

There are many approaches to helping a new hire introduce themselves and share their story with their new teammates, although not all are created equal. The diagram below organizes these approaches along two axes: length of introduction, or how much information the new hire shares with their team, and whose “voice” the information appears in - i.e. is the new hire introducing themselves in their own style and voice, or is an existing employee, such as a manager or HR representative, introducing the new hire on their behalf. 

As illustrated above, organizing New Hire Intros in this way reveals four distinct types of introductions:

1. The Manager Blurb
2. The Company Survey
3. The Employee Blurb
4. The Employee Blog

While each format has its strengths and weaknesses, the Employee Blog significantly outperforms all other formats as a means of accelerating social connection at an organization.

To learn more about how to create a great New Hire Intro ritual, check out our guides: How to Introduce New Hires and our deep dive The Employee Blog: The Best Way to Introduce Yourself to a New Team.

Establish an onboarding buddy program

An onboarding buddy program is a program whereby new hires are assigned a co-worker to help orient them through the first weeks or months of onboarding. Unlike a manager or HR representative, who are responsible for a new hire’s formal onboarding and training tasks, an onboarding buddy provides informal guidance about everything not mentioned in the organization’s onboarding checklist: unspoken rules or cultural practices, important players or personalities, and even obscure company acronyms or argot. 

A buddy program strengthens all three branches of onboarding, as these informal relationships help new hires assimilate into the company culture (company onboarding), understand functional responsibilities (functional onboarding) and build social bonds (social onboarding). 

That being said, a buddy system plays a particularly important role in social onboarding, by creating a venue for automatic time investment, and helping a new hire be exposed to their buddy’s internal social network. 

For a deeper dive on how to set up an onboarding buddy program as part of your social onboarding strategy, check out our guide. 

Set up introductory 1-1s

Introductory 1-1 meetings are what they sound like - private meetings between a new hire and an important co-worker or stakeholder. 

Unlike 1-1s with one’s manager, which are typically recurring, introductory 1-1s are usually one-off meetings to help a new hire get oriented, gather context about their role and get to know important co-workers or stakeholders. 

Introductory 1-1s are important opportunities to gather knowledge and make a positive first impression, actually running them can be difficult. Fortunately, most introductory 1-1s follow a consistent (although unstated) agenda, and a few best practices can help transform them from awkward and wandering to fun and effective. 

For more on introductory 1-1s, see our guide on How to Run a Great Introductory 1-1. 

Give the new hire a "First 30" project

A “first 30” project is a small project or deliverable that the new hire completes within their first 30 days on the job. While completing a work project may seem like a counterintuitive way to socially onboard someone, our research with new hires has consistently found “doing the work” to be a primary way that new hires build relationships and become more socially comfortable on a new team. 

There are several reasons why prioritizing an early work deliverable can help drive social connection:

• Collaboration drives connection. Most work isn’t done alone, and requires some degree of collaboration with a peer or manager. This collaboration requires a time investment, which - while the primary focus is work - is normally also peppered with small talk, laughter, and all of the positive social aspects of group work. As a result, simply doing work with a colleague can be a reliable way to help a new hire accrue the synchronous time with their peers required to build a relationship.
• Celebration and appreciation. The completion of a new hire’s first deliverable is an opportunity for celebration by their manager and peers. Being appreciated and valued for your contribution is a quick way to help a new hire feel part of the team.
• Social confidence from providing value. At work, our social confidence is often a function of our professional confidence; when we know we are succeeding at the work we were hired to do, we feel more at ease, which helps us reach out and connect with our peers on a social level. “I find calm from doing the work,” shared a VP we interviewed, in describing her recent experience onboarding to a new role. “When I know I am adding value, and everyone can see it, I feel more secure, more comfortable, and then I find myself able to relax and be myself socially. But it always starts with the work.” 

Including a First 30 project to your onboarding checklist doesn’t mean that a new hire needs to “hit the ground running”, or that their onboarding should be rushed in favour of getting into the nuts and bolts of the work. It just means that a good social onboarding experience isn’t necessarily one where all the focus is on socializing. Sometimes doing the work, even on a small task, is an effective way to accelerate social connection.

Summary: The menu

Here is a “menu” of recommended activities, based on which of the three models your organization falls into. Every organization is different, so consider this menu a starting point which you can tailor to your needs, rather than a fixed template that your organization has to apply exactly as written.

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Measuring social onboarding

Measuring the success of a new employee’s social onboarding is difficult. On the surface, it may seem straightforward - send out a survey, or ask the employee as part of a 30 or 90 day check-in how integrated they feel within the team. But in practice, most new hires will not feel comfortable sharing that they are lonely at work, or feel socially disconnected from their teams - at least not so early in their tenure.

Because of this, the success of your social onboarding program must be measured observationally at first, and can only move to more direct measurement after the new hire spends more time at the company. 

To learn more, check out our guide on how to measure the success of your social onboarding program. 

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