Case · Herning Municipality
You do not need the parental leave rules in your first week
7,700 employees, more than 150 workplaces, over 90 professions — and
new people every month. The information already existed. It just arrived far too early.
7,700employees in the organisation
150+workplaces, one shared onboarding
2–3 minper film, each one stands on its own
From the onboarding material for new employees.
The task
The challenge was not whether information for new employees existed. It did.
The challenge was that each manager had to find the time and a way to introduce new employees to the shared knowledge they needed.
From “everything you need to know” to “what you need to know — when you
need it”.
What was built
- A welcome with real voicesNot a polished branding film, but employees
from the municipality answering honestly about what is best about working here, what you typically
run into, and what you do when something is not working.
- Short films instead of long documentsHoliday, absence, pay, senior arrangements,
parental leave — 2–3 minutes each, and they work as self-contained units. Nobody has to watch them
all at once, and they can sit on the website, on the intranet and in the LMS alike.
- A module on what people are actually unsure aboutMay I accept a bottle of wine from
a citizen? What about a Christmas hamper from a supplier? The subject sounds simple and is not —
that is exactly where the uncertainty sits.
Why it is layered and not bundled
Anything presented too early competes with what the new employee is actually
occupied with in the first week. It gets clicked through and forgotten — and then it is gone on the day
it becomes relevant. So the material is built with free navigation, so people can choose the order themselves, and the questions behind it were: what comes up in the first week, what is relevant
after a month, and what should you be able to find six months later?
The client’s words · translated from Danish
“We wanted to give a nuanced picture of the many different tasks we handle as a
municipal workplace, and at the same time signal that taking a job with Herning Municipality
does not just employ you at a single workplace — you are also part of something larger.
It was equally important to us to show that through concrete examples rather than by
presenting the new employee with large organisational charts.”
Jane Bitsch Kehlet, Herning Municipality
What we cannot claim
We have not measured whether new employees get going faster, or whether fewer drop out.
What the case shows is a different way of distributing the information — not an effect of it.