Onboarding during Covid-19 : Effects on newly graduated engineers in Sweden

Abstract: Background: The global pandemic caused by the virus Covid-19 provided an exogenic chock to the world’s businesses. Governments all over the globe issued various restrictions or requests for all inhabitants that can, to work from home. Due to this, many companies ordered their employees to work from home. Working from home and working virtually became the new normal for many, including their newly hired staff. Objectives: The study examines how the adaptations Swedish engineering companies made to cope with Covid-19 have affected their onboarding processes and the time to productivity. Methodology: Through a survey sent to 327 Swedish engineering businesses asking questions about how their onboarding process and the results thereof has changed due to the adaptations to the pandemic. On top of this, ten interviews with company representatives from the invitation list was performed to try and deepen the understanding of the survey results and to find out if there are any specific onboarding processes or activities that are of extra significance during and after the pandemic to ensure an effective onboarding process. Results: In total, 74 responses for the survey were collected. The study finds that working from home and the use of digital tools and ways of working for onboarding have increased significantly during the pandemic and is expected to remain at an increased level after the pandemic as well. Working from home is expected to be lower than during the pandemic, but higher than before. The change to virtual onboarding appears to have had little or no prolonging effect on time to productivity. Due to the fact that the evidence points towards time to productivity not being very affected by the changes made by the companies during the Covid-19 pandemic, it is hard to know if the themes and actions identified in the interviews as being the most important for an effective onboarding actually have an effect on time to productivity. The most common activities that the interviewees identified as important was mentoring time, structure, information transfer methods and follow ups. Conclusions: The Covid-19 provided an exogen chock to the Swedish engineering businesses that caused them to change their way of working and way of onboarding. Days working from home increased, and so did the use of digital tools and ways of working for onboarding. The results regarding which onboarding activities that affected time to productivity, our results are inconclusive. Recommendations for future research: Several of the interviewed mentions that a part of their staff seems to suffer significantly more than the general staff from working from home and being isolated socially. Further studies into this area could focus on why this group suffers so much more, and how to mitigate this issue. Further studies could also look further into which mechanisms or activities that has the most effect on time to productivity. Our findings were not conclusive on this point.