How AI chatbots can help create „human“ connections during onboarding that ensure new hires feel welcomed, included and committed.
At the center of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is that most famous image: The hand of God reaching out to Adam, and vice versa. The most primal and profound moment of connection, immortalized and rendered in paint and plaster, it reflects so well the fact that the moment of connection is so important to us, as humans, as individuals.
The same is true in our day-to-day interactions when we’re out and about. We connect. Yet many businesses fail to understand that the most important moments of connection between an employer and a new employee occur in those oh-so-fleeting first interactions before they have become fully assimilated into the business. The first few hours and days during onboarding — when an applicant transitions to a new employee — define how a new team member perceives the rest of the company and as studies show, set in their mind how long they are likely to stay.
In a recent survey of more than 1,000 full-time employees, 86% firmly agreed that onboarding is important for their future success. 49% even went so far as to say that they’ve been tempted to leave a new job after a poor onboarding experience, such as unprepared managers or excessive paperwork.
When a new employee feels unwelcome, unimportant, or simply neglected, it can form such a poor impression of their employer that they never recover.
So how can businesses do a better job of those essential first few days? How can a business reduce the stress on a new hire, make the onboarding smoother and more efficient, and, in effect, offer a more human connection?
As in so many other places in the business world, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is offering some solutions that successful businesses are already quickly adopting.
One of the biggest challenges to delivering a smooth and welcoming onboarding experience is simply that the people tasked with it are often already overburdened with other activities. Bringing on a new hire becomes a last-minute fire drill versus a hand from the corporate sky reaching out to form new connections. Individuals are too swamped with managing existing teams or dealing with myriad other processes to devote the time and energy to looking after the fledgling employee when, sadly, they likely need it the most.
Enter the latest round of conversational virtual assistants. Or, more colloquially, chatbots.
Inserting AI-driven chatbots into a process that is already lacking human warmth may seem like a poor idea.
