I met with Caroline Jost a few years ago as we were working on a joint project. I was charmed by her passion and her vision. I spent a few hours with her for discussing on iNNERSHIP, an innovative plateform for onboarding and professional development.
Caroline, would you introduce yourself and tell us about Innership?
With pleasure. Well, I’m passionate about talent management, continuous improvement and innovation. In my career in HR at the international level, I’ve systematically found that employees experience difficulty navigating HR tools, taking charge of their own development and actively driving their career forward. Even more so during changes or transformations: people wonder about what will happen and what contribution they can or wish to make. They can easily become disengaged and don’t know where to turn.
At Rio Tinto Alcan, where I worked with my colleague Thomas d’Hauteville, there were a lot of good talent management practices in place but it seemed clear to us that there was not enough space for everyone to be supported in the success of their professional next step, in connection with their aspirations.
We joined together in late 2013 and developed a first prototype in 2014 with a first client, and a first funding exercise in 2015, with the aim of making professional achievement easier, more engaging, and accessible to all.
Today iNNERSHiP is:
-A mission: to make each individual take the lead on their professional development
-A full-stack team of 10 people spread between Montreal and Montpellier, and a wide network of partners
-25 programs that engage individuals at every stage of their career. These 3 to 6-month programs include a digital pathway, individual coaching and collective workshops. Among the courses available: Succeeding in my new position, Developing my leadership, Succeeding in my career mobility project, Successfully returning from expatriation, Reahing professional fulfillment as a woman, Retraining, Strengthening my health at work, Getting ready for retirement. . .
-Enterprise customers in North America, Europe and Asia who want to increase their employees’ commitment and performance.
You’ve developed a program specifically for employee onboarding. Can you tell us more?
Onboarding is a critical step in the employee’s journey. The onboarding experience says a lot about the company and its culture. It’s a crucial first contact. Yet it’s very rare that it constitutes an engaging and well-executed experience. For example, a friend in Montreal told me recently that she had lunch alone every day on her first week, and that she was asked only 10 days after her arrival to replace a person who would be absent for a month. The stories on this theme are unfortunately all too frequent.
We work with an illustrator—Étienne Appert—to illustrate the before/after of our programs. Here is the before/after illustration of a new employee’s onboarding:
With iNNERSHiP, for example, the person’s first day is prepared upstream (“red carpet” approach where the employee is expected in advance and onboarding begins at the signing of the contract). The employee’s program guides him/her step by step over a 3-month period (or more, depending on the customer’s wish) in order to avoid that everything happens in the first 10 days, and is done with the help of a team of “companions”.
More specifically, how does it work?
When a customer contacts us to review the onboarding experience provided to new employees, we work together to draw up an engaging experience, based on the three components of our programs:
1) The digital pathway that guides the employee as of the contract signing: It is adjusted to the vocabulary, reference documents and company culture. Customizing this course is a very important thing. It takes 2–4 weeks to adjust the digital journey and the questions participants must answer. For example, one of our clients has a glossary document containing all the terminology one needs to know in its domain, or some will have golden rules on health & safety, or a reference document on the company’s 5-year vision of the business. . . These elements are integrated in the process so that the new kid on the block is well positioned in relation to this information and that a discussion may begin.
2) The accompaniment: each person will be accompanied either by a coach, a mentor, a “godfather/godmother”, the manager and/or a buddy. The people who will accompany the new employee are chosen according to the culture of the company. The recruiter, who is often a privileged contact of the newcomer prior to arrival, can also play an important role in maintaining this link after the signing, and this is much appreciated.
3) Collective workshops: again, it depends on corporate culture. Some companies want very formal workshops on health and safety, HR, etc. Others will want to organize a Pokémon Go party to find the printer and the canteen! Others will promote networking between newbies and with group leaders during a day of integration. Others favour site visits, etc.
Once the target experience is designed and the players’ roles have been established, we launch the program as a typical project and offer full support to train mentors/sponsors/buddies, if necessary, to accompany the new employees.
Your platform is quite interactive. What kind of feedback do you get from employees (mentees and new)?
Newcomers can move forward in their integration journey at their own pace and at any time using their computer, tablet or smartphone. They like the intuitive nature of the platform and the interaction with the people who accompany them. This makes the process more personal. It allows them to build a special relationship with their mentor/godfather, etc. They may even choose to add other people, such as other newcomers, to a group workshop, to share the best practices they discover. Beyond the integration experience, our customers often look to introduce their new employees to new technologies, and iNNERSHiP is also ideal for this.
One of the strengths of the program is that it allows for satisfaction and integration levels to be measured anonymously. For example, we were able to tell one of our customers that 75% of newcomers had no knowledge of integration day: they were able to reinforce communication on the subject. The program is itself a vector for continuous improvement of the approach. The experience improves with time and after the first month, the benefits are felt throughout the organization.
Here are a few visuals of the experience via a smartphone. Note that we will gladly offer a demo to any interested person.
How much does it cost to use the platform?
We come from Talent Management world, and one of the great pains I felt in the business was to only be able to select a few names out of hundreds or even thousands of people and have them benefit from a given program or development initiative. And for a few high potential candidates, the cost to the business was very high. Our wish with iNNERSHiP was to make all our programs accessible and affordable so that our clients can offer them to as many people as possible.
That’s why our programs cost between $190 and $250 CAD per person.
You may add to this, certain costs for coaching, training of internal mentors or personalization, depending on the chosen format, but the price will always remain very competitive and allow for a maximum of people to join in.
Do you think that, even today, onboarding is still underestimated during the hiring process?
Absolutely. But it’s also a very simple thing to fix. There are several important issues around onboarding that we have taken up in this article. First of all, keeping in touch with the newcomer until the first day to avoid Day 1 anxiety. It also makes it possible to personalize the greeting process: all newcomers will not have the same expectations and needs, so a good practice as an employer is to personalize each person’s arrival.
Then you must make sure that the onboarding process is spread over time to gradually integrate the person in his/her position and not demotivate him/her.
And last but not least, you must make the person think. No one likes to be “force-fed” like a goose, having to go through an infinite number of PowerPoint presentations and pdfs without exchanging on the specifics of their position. For us, this last point is crucial, and our process allows for progressive appropriation of the company culture, without restraining newcomer initiative and reactions, since we feel their outside perspective is precious.
If you don’t do all of this, you run the risk that the person will be poorly integrated, unmotivated and therefore less efficient, and you spoil the efforts you did make and waste your “good recruitment’ investment.
Here, on a one-page sheet, are details that show the onboarding program we propose.
Thank you Caroline!
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