3 fun onboarding games that impress new hires

Onboarding new team members has never been harder. New employees are joining from all over (the globe) and struggling to feel comfortable and productive in their new roles. While there are some fundamentals to cover before thinking about something like games, adding them to your onboarding plan can greatly spice up the experience for everyone involved. Who doesn’t want to have a bit of fun right? Not to mention that, when actually studied, gamification can increase learning.

We here at Aboard would like to present a few, easily implemented games that you should consider working into your onboarding plan for new employees. These will help them get to know your company, or people, while also having a bit of fun early in their tenure with your company!

1. Company Bingo

We all know Bingo right? The game where someone at the front of the room yells out the result from a magic number selecting machine. If you have that number on your card, you mark it down. If you get a full line, you yell “BINGO” and win!

So how do we play company Bingo? Well instead of numbers, you fill out each square with something unique to someone in your organization or team. These could be something like “Has travelled to the most countries”, “Can do a kickflip with a skateboard”, or “Speaks 5 languages”. Ask for unique skills, traits, experiences, achievements, etc. It then becomes the new hires objective to inquire and learn about who has done each of the stated items in each square.

Unlike in bingo, instead of winning after completing one full line, get your new employee to go all the way and get the name for every square. It’s an easy icebreaker and helps people get to know one-another.

2. Scavenger Hunt

A scavenger hunt? In this climate? Sure, the idea of having someone run around a physical office taking note of where certain people sit, where the kitchens are, or how many emergency exits are on the 3rd floor may not be easily attainable, but what most people can still do is a virtual scavenger hunt.

Maybe you have a digital product you sell to customers, right? While a product demo is a nice way to educate new employees about how the app works, why not send them on a scavenger hunt to figure things out for themselves. Examples could be “How do you add a user?”, “Update this report to this name”, “Start a new campaign for yourself”. We have new Aboard employees take screenshots when they’ve reached certain milestones.

Likewise, a virtual scavenger hunt could extend to finding & linking specific materials stored in your Drive, Notion, YouTube Channel, etc. Get as creative as you want in encouraging your new employees to seek out and find information for themselves.

3. Name Game

This one is a bit of a doozy, but if you’re up for it, it’ll pay dividends for your company.

The name game is an #AboardOriginal. The objective here is to personalize the remote onboarding experience. You (with permission) get a profile picture from each employee at your organization or team (pro tip: you can go download them from LinkedIn). You then have new employees guess (or learn) the name & title of each individual. This turns people’s names into human faces. Bonus points if you merge this with our Bingo idea (👆) from earlier and have the fun facts associated with the faces as well.

Sure everyone may end up on a video call eventually, but humanizing the people you work with can come in many forms and there is no time to start than during onboarding.

With these fun games, your new employees will enjoy their onboarding even more and learn about your company. What do you think? Feel free to comment and share your own ideas!

Interested in how we help organizations implement these for themselves? Grab some time and we’ll happily show you!

‍