From my experience onboarding means showing you where the bathroom is, giving you credentials for your new emial account, pointing you to a company wiki and introducing you to your new team and then you are at the mercy of your team to "get you up to speed".
Stories of some fun activities sound like some sort of novelty to me.
"onboarding" has become somewhat of a UX term. It refers to the process of taking a non-customer and turning them into a customer that understands and can use the product.
There's actually a website that gives examples of different company's "onboarding" experiences: http://www.useronboard.com/
"Signing up" implies creating a few database records and logging someone in. When I say "onboarding", I mean a deliberate attempt to transition somebody into the workflows and uses of the product.
Then... there is onboarding with your enterprise. And that is all about compliance and benefits. It's still "really not about you". It's about HR, Legal. All important functions of the enterprise, but only very loosely related to the job you're hired for.
It boggles my mind how companies do not take onboarding seriously.
This is the best opportunity you have to set your people up for success, bar none. Plus, many of the things your company should do to build a great onboarding experience can also be leveraged to make it easy to do things like "move people between teams", "expand into a new office", and "hire great people".
"New potential customers," I guess. I'm familiar with onboarding as a term for what you do to new hires and was quite confused by this article until I figured out it's about marketing emails.
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