Thematic Virtual Onboarding That Recreated an In-Person Induction

Most organizations that moved induction online lost something they could not quite name. The information transferred perfectly well, and what disappeared was the day itself, the sense of arriving somewhere and being shown around by people who were pleased you had come. For most employers that loss is regrettable. For an entertainment company it is a contradiction, because the business exists to produce exactly the feeling its own onboarding had stopped producing.

One of the biggest entities in the global entertainment arena asked our team to solve that. They wanted an induction program that replicated their previous in-person version, orienting new employees to the company history, policies, procedures, and the career growth opportunities open to them. The program went on to win a Brandon Hall Group Bronze award for New Hire Onboarding Program.

The Challenge

The requirement was not simply to move the induction online. It was to create a larger than life experience of the kind employees at an entertainment organization are used to witnessing in their working lives every day.

That raises the bar in an unusual way. New hires at this company spend their days around productions built to impress people, so an induction that looks like standard corporate eLearning would tell them something about their new employer before a single module began. The design had to earn credibility with an audience whose everyday standard for experience was set unusually high.

How the Solution Was Built

The approach hinged on recreating the magic through the induction training itself rather than adding polish to a conventional course. Our team partnered with the client’s L&D teams to replicate visual themes aligned with the company’s primary lines of business, and then built a fully gamified solution around those themes.

The company’s own venues as the map

The program is structured as a journey through an illustrated map of the organization’s venues, with each destination corresponding to a part of the induction. Locations stay locked until the learner reaches them, and everyone starts at admissions and entry, which is where a visitor to one of these venues would start as well.

Using the company’s own estate as the navigation is what makes this more than a themed skin. A new hire learning the business while moving through a representation of that business is being taught the geography of the organization at the same time as its policies, and the two reinforce each other.

Learning formats placed inside real settings

To create relatable learning experiences, various learning formats were used and embedded in real-life visual settings. The clearest example is a cinema hall that plays a learning video, with the learner seated in the audience among other silhouetted figures while the film runs on the screen in front of them.

The choice matters more than it first appears. A video player dropped onto a slide asks the learner to watch something. A video playing in a cinema puts the learner somewhere, and for a company whose business is built on that exact effect, the difference is the whole point of the brief.

Gamification carrying the journey

Gamification runs through the program rather than sitting on top of it. Progress unlocks the next location, the sequence has a beginning and an end that read as a visit, and the journey structure gives a new hire a sense of having been somewhere by the time they finish. Scenario based learning, social learning, and next generation strategies sit alongside, with personalization applied across the experience.

The Strategies Behind the Design

Seven strategies power the solution.

• Gamification
• Microlearning
• Video Based Learning
• Custom illustration
• Virtual Training Transformation
• Immersive Learning
• mLearning

Delivery combined microlearning, mobile learning, virtual training, and personalization served through the client LMS and LXP, so new hires could work through the induction on whatever device they had to hand during their first weeks.

The Impact

Learners confirmed increased awareness of the concepts covered in the post-training survey, which for an induction program covering history, policy, procedure, and career paths is the basic requirement rather than the headline.

The stronger result is completion. The program recorded 19 to 20 percent higher completion rates than comparable training programs at the organization. Induction completion is usually taken for granted because it is mandatory, so a gap of that size against similar programs indicates new hires finishing because they wanted to see the rest of it.

The organization also began considering customized versions of the induction for different country-based rollouts. That is a useful signal in its own right, since an internal decision to extend a program to new markets is a judgment about the original that no survey response can substitute for.

Build Onboarding That Feels Like Arriving Somewhere

Virtual induction loses its effect when it delivers the information and abandons the occasion. This one worked because the journey ran through the organization’s own venues, because learning formats were placed inside settings the learner could recognize rather than presented on slides, and because the gamified structure gave new hires the sense of having visited rather than completed. If you need onboarding that gives new joiners a first day worth remembering, Liberate can help you design it. Get in touch to talk it through.

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