Cadbury Dairy Milk-maker Mondelez India has started an immersive onboarding pilot project for new employees to give them a digital taste of their key locations in India, including the head office, the global R&D centre, innovation centres and manufacturing facilities.
To do this, the company sends Meta’s Oculus Virtual Reality headsets home to its new employees for the first 2-3 days for them to view pre-filmed tours of these offices, although the onboarding process may be much longer, stretching to the tune of 90 days.
“You can travel to the SriCity plant, which is our biggest plant in India, our technical centre in Thane and the head office in Mumbai. You can listen to the leaders speak and get an immersive experience instead of sitting in presentation after presentation,” Mondelez India Head HR Shilpa Vaid told Business Today.
The firm said it is experimenting the initiative with 50 new hires and will scale it up across all new hires irrespective of the role. She did not say how much money is being invested into the pilot.
While the pandemic forced the organisation to experiment with virtual hiring and onboarding, it lacked the personal connection that comes with a physical onboarding, Vaid says, adding that the immersive experience tries to restore some of the pre-Covid experience in interacting with and inducting new hires into the teams.
On the post-Covid significance of this project, especially as several organisations have leaned more towards getting employees back to office as the Covid-19 infections have abated, Vaid says it will help employees experience the organisation in a more consistent way irrespective of their role.
“The onboarding process is segmented and gets defined by the nature of the role. The roles based in the head office may have chance to meet with the leadership. With this, people even in frontline roles would get an opportunity to hear directly from the leaders and see the head office. Sometimes, when you are in certain roles, you are not able to connect with the big picture of what a plant looks like and what it feels like to work in one.”
Further, it also helps the company earn some brownie points with the younger and tech-savvy hires, especially as Mondelez is hiring for digital roles in e-commerce and analytics. Besides, it can also come in handy for deeper engagement in a virtual team concept, she adds.
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