How to Leverage Visuals to Create the Best Employee Onboarding Process

The best way to make sure the onboarding process is effective is by providing suitable materials, which means informative, engaging pieces of content. But also, how we design these materials is crucial to a successful onboarding process.

You may provide all the information your new hire needs to succeed, but if your content isn’t properly designed it won't help. 

Visuals are proven to increase engagement, retention, and understanding, so in this article we’ll look at four kinds of visual content that will boost your onboarding process. 

Infographics in the welcome kit

To start the onboarding process, prepare a welcome kit that will allow new employees to familiarize themselves with the company.

The welcome kit can cover fun facts about your company, what you do to bring employees together, and more technical information on activities, training, courses, and benefits. It’s also the place to highlight company policies - working hours and days, overtime - an organizational chart, and performance expectations.

To make the welcome pack a little more fun, consider including some company goodies - mugs and bags are always great gifts and help spread brand awareness.

Whether you’re creating a physically printed playbook or a digital ebook, provide visuals such as an infographic to create more engaging and easy-to-understand pieces of content. 

Here are some general topics that are worth covering in your welcome kit:

• General: Mission, values, policy
• Cultural: Vacation time, perks, dress code
• Case-specific: Including items such as company policies and disciplinary procedures
• Processes and procedures

Visual job aids

Though job aids can’t replace on-the-job training, they provide clear instructions on how to do work-related tasks. They prevent mistakes and help employees on how they should complete tasks efficiently. A job aid should be brief and easy to understand, so people can quickly check and get instant assistance. It’s not used to teach employees how to do a task, but to remind them of the best way to do it. 

That's why, most of the time, a job aid is as short as one page or less. This way, they support training by leaving employees confident they’ll have a reminder when the need arises. Concise copy and great visuals are key to effective, engaging job aids. 

There are a few different formats to choose from, such as infographics, flowcharts, and checklists, depending on the task you want to support. For example, a flowchart is great if you want to support step-by-step processes and decision-making, while a checklist will help employees to remember all the tasks involved in a workflow. 

In addition to being excellent support for a new hire, job aids facilitate communication, and can be quickly shared through newsletters, as printed materials, posters, or made available via various communication tools.

Employee handbook

Your new employee will have several questions during their first month on the job. To create a smooth onboarding process, consider providing them with an employee handbook that covers FAQs from previous new hires. 

An employee handbook can include details about the company's workflow, organizational chart, and everything employees might need to know, like software and management or communication tools. In the employee manual, you can also present a strategic map, set expectations, and more.

Onboarding checklist 

The onboarding process consists of many variable steps that involve several departments. To make sure everything runs smoothly and covers all the necessary steps to integrate new hires, a good checklist is a must.

It will also help to keep processes on track and can cover everything from hiring to setting expectations and are very useful, especially during a new hires' first few days. 

Since an onboarding process begins before you post the job, creating an onboarding strategy that covers all the questions that might arise is a good place to start. 

Final thoughts

Using the right visuals will help you to make the onboarding process an engaging, valuable experience that truly integrates new employees into your company culture. 

The onboarding process can vary a lot depending on the role and the company, so after putting your strategy into practice, ask for feedback from your employees and keep adapting and improving to make it fit your organization's needs.