Digital onboarding, more than just a crisis solution : A case study on the opportunities and challenges of digital onboarding

The process of integrating new hires into their new workplace, onboarding, has undergone big changes since the Covid-19 pandemic. Previously, onboarding was mainly considered an on-site process. With the effects of the pandemic however, along with many other things, the process had to go remote. Today the world has mostly gone back to how it was before, but remote work strongly remains. This makes remote onboarding – more commonly referred to as digital onboarding – still relevant. This study aims to examine how employees who have undergone a digital onboarding process experienced it, with the goal of acquiring a deeper knowledge of the phenomenon. The purpose is also to provide the studied organization with these insights so they can further enhance the process. Through qualitative interviews with seven employees who were recruited during 2020 and 2021, these experiences were explored. Topics such as information structure, social support, culture, and influence were discussed and showed various results among the participants. Where one had positive experiences with a topic, another could only express negative. This, among other things, shows that the experiences are heavily individually based and have to be treated as such. Our goal with this study is also to provide this insight into the employee experience to help further research within the subject.