Digital onboarding magazine for warm first impression.

Onboarding new employees independent of place and time

The Risk Management Directorate of the Safety Region Utrecht (VRU) attaches great importance to a warm welcome for new employees. In this way, new colleagues can quickly land at the new workplace and are actively involved in the organization from the first day at work. Several onboarding initiatives exist within Risk Management, but a central overview of the most important basic information was lacking. Moreover, many training courses were time-dependent and it could happen that an important training session took place just before a new employee started.

The Risk Management Directorate was therefore looking for a digital solution to provide new employees with the most important basic information about Risk Management and VRU. This way, new colleagues feel supported in their new workplace from day one.

Online magazine with interactive sections

The first few weeks at a new organization can be overwhelming due to a flood of information. Therefore, the digital onboarding should not be too stressful for new employees of the Risk Management Directorate. They should be able to follow the onboarding in parts, without being required to go through all the content from start to finish. This led us to the idea of a magazine: with a magazine, too, you often read a separate article and then put the magazine away for a while, only to read through another article later. We continued the metaphor of a magazine throughout the onboarding: from the “turning” of the front page to the table of contents to various familiar magazine sections.

The onboarding includes several interactive exercises that motivate and give participants fun while picking up the first important basic information. From a quiz on attitude and behavior in the workplace to a memory game with the most important abbreviations to best kept secrets from colleagues. Onboarding at Risk Management thus becomes a varied and surprising voyage of discovery for participants that they will not soon forget.

The onboarding magazine is approachable to follow and contains a lot of humor and winks. In this way, the tone-of-voice of the module is fully in line with the atmosphere within the VRU, and new employees know right away that atmosphere and team spirit are important components of their new work environment. In combination with the other components of the onboarding program, the digital onboarding magazine forms a soft landing spot for new employees of Risk Management.