Reboarding: Why Returning to Work Takes Many Forms

Remember going back to school after those endless summer months? Finding your footing again in what should have been a familiar setting always took a little time and effort, didn't it? Work is much the same. In our professional lives, we aren't only newcomers when we join a brand-new organization. We feel like beginners every time we have to navigate a new situation or role — and that's when we need support, whether a little or a lot. That support is exactly what reboarding provides.

– "The biggest mistake organizations make with employee reboarding is assuming the employee already knows everything they need to. It's the 'nothing has really changed, have fun!' mindset. But reality changes — and so does the employee," says Tim Sackett, an HR expert with more than 20 years of experience and author of "The Talent Fix: A Leader's Guide to Recruiting Great Talent." Following his lead, today we'll talk about how to plan re-onboarding when the world around your people shifts, or when they come back after an extended break.

What is reboarding, and how is it different from onboarding?

Onboarding is the process of bringing a brand-new employee into the organization. But what about people who are formally employed by the company yet, for one reason or another, have been away for an extended stretch? Their knowledge needs a refresh, and so do their team relationships. That's exactly who reboarding is for: the process of re-introducing someone to the company culture, the responsibilities of their role, and their team.

Both processes share a common denominator — the 4C model (Compliance, Clarification, Culture, Connection), which helps you build onboarding and reboarding paths alike. Onboarding, however, is easier to standardize, while re-onboarding calls for more personalization.

Returning to work comes in many forms — so when are we actually talking about reboarding?

Coming back after extended sick leave

Health problems are stressful enough on their own, so it's worth making sure that returning to work after a long medical leave doesn't add more tension. Tailor the entire re-onboarding process — and those first weeks back — to the employee's current health and individual needs. In some cases a change in working arrangements may be necessary, such as more work from home or temporarily stepping away from night shifts.

Returning from parental or extended family leave

Parental leave usually means a career break of anywhere from a few months to a year. Some parents also take extended leave, which can last up to two more years — so the total time away after a child is born can stretch to as long as three years. In that time, practically everything in the organization can change: leadership, company policy, the team, even the returning parent's direct manager. Without effective reboarding, it's hard to find your footing in a workplace that's familiar and yet entirely new.

Returning to a former employer after time at another company

The classic "boomerang" comeback also calls for reboarding the old-but-new employee, whether the gap lasted a few months or several years. A company is a living organism — it changes constantly on many levels, including its people. The team where a returning employee once spent years may now look completely different, not to mention the entire organizational structure and the procedures that go with it.

Moving from long-term remote work back to on-site or hybrid (or the other way around)

A change in working mode can also require onboarding into a new way of doing the job. Shifting to remote work often means adopting new online communication channels; an employee may benefit from training on additional tools or apps and a primer on remote-meeting etiquette. On the flip side, some employees who joined during the pandemic may have barely set foot in the office, if at all. When they return to on-site work, the support of a buddy will go a long way in helping them settle into a new physical workplace and learn the office's unwritten rules.

What are the goals of reboarding?

Reboarding, like onboarding, aims to bring an employee to full productivity and build their engagement with the company's work.

To get there, keep a few additional, intermediate goals in mind:

Aligning knowledge about the organization

During a break, few people keep up with company newsletters, chat channels, emails, or the internal intranet. Over a longer absence, the department structure, a manager, even the office location or promotion paths can change. In short, almost anything can. Don't leave returning employees to fend for themselves — make a point of updating their knowledge of the organization. That way they won't fall behind their colleagues and will find it easier to slip back into the company's day-to-day.

Rebuilding relationships with colleagues

Even though an employee is returning to an organization they already knew, coming back after a long time can bring a sense of alienation — all the more so when the work friend at the next desk has moved to another company and the former manager has been promoted. A new boss, new faces on the team, new unwritten customs — adapting to all of that is one of the biggest challenges a returning person can face. This is where Connection comes in, one of the four areas of the onboarding 4C model (the others being Culture, Clarification, and Compliance). Reboarding should support building and refreshing relationships with teammates and managers. Without that foundation, effective communication across the whole team is hard to come by.

Can reboarding even be standardized?

We now know the most important goals of re-onboarding, but the path to reaching them can differ depending on each employee's situation. People returning after a few months away for health reasons, people changing roles within the organization, employees sent to a different branch — each case brings somewhat different challenges. You may also face the need to re-onboard an entire team, something many companies grappled with during post-pandemic returns to the office. Reboarding can be standardized, but only up to a point.

All right — so how do you build a reboarding process?

1. Assess the needs

In every case, start with a thorough assessment of returning employees' needs and opinions. Those should be the starting point for everything that follows.

Three questions will help you design the process:

• Who needs reboarding, and why?
• What do we want to achieve with it?
• How do we plan to do it?

2. Define the goals

If you have an employee changing roles and joining a team that's new to them, the goal is the fastest possible adaptation. Here the solution is a training plan in which the employee meets the team members, learns their roles and the goals set for them, gets comfortable with the work tools, and understands the individual processes.

Reboarding an entire team returning to the office after pandemic restrictions looks different. Here the goal is preserving productivity and motivating employees through a tough situation — and the solution is a well-communicated plan, sharing best practices, and training on new tools and procedures, such as online apps.

3. Split the process into universal and situation-specific components

Once the needs are clear, you can divide the building blocks of the process into the universal ones (the Culture elements — onboarding into the organization's culture — and Compliance, i.e., formalities) and the ones that will vary somewhat by situation or role (the Connection elements — onboarding into the team — and Clarification, i.e., onboarding into the scope of responsibilities).

4. Standardize and automate what you can

Some of these steps will be repeatable, so when you design your target processes you can lean on reboarding paths. How? Design a few standard processes suited to a given situation, then top them up with personalized elements as needed. Onboarding automation tools, which support the efficiency of the entire process, will help here.

One such tool is our Gamfi Onboarding app, built on a mechanism of workflows — onboarding paths you can create for a specific position, department, role, or situation. The individual actions within a workflow are triggered automatically, saving HR teams and new hires' managers a tremendous amount of time. The employee, in turn, is guided step by step through the entire reboarding process until they reach confidence and full productivity in their new-old role.

What absolutely cannot be missing from a reboarding process?

To wrap up, we've put together a reboarding checklist to help you cover the most important parts of the process.

A virtual knowledge base

A returning employee already has a solid foundation when it comes to strategic and operational knowledge, and a sense of the employer's values. They're certainly far more independent than a newcomer, and often it's enough for them to refresh or fill in the most important information. Instead of role-specific training or comprehensive onboarding into the organization, it's enough to share a virtual knowledge base they can browse on their own, whenever it suits them. It should include information on:

• the tools and systems used across the organization
• company culture
• the current organizational structure
• remote/on-site/hybrid work rules
• promotion paths
• the current list of benefits available to employees
• the rules for awarding bonuses

How do we know? Because our clients already use solutions like this. Our Gamfi Onboarding app works as a hub that gathers the most important information about a given organization. Its user is educated step by step, but also has access to a ready-made knowledge base about the company.

Buddy support

Returning to work after a long absence can be stressful and come with uncertainty. Reboarding, like onboarding, should make room for buddy support. The buddy's job is to introduce the employee to the team and share the freshest behind-the-scenes knowledge about company life — simply put, to help them feel at home in the workplace again.

Two-way feedback and satisfaction surveys

The belief that a returning person has no questions or concerns because they already got to know the company is an illusion. Just like a brand-new employee, they may feel stress, have doubts, or be dissatisfied with how the organization runs. To catch warning signs and respond in time, build regular pulse-check surveys and one-on-one meetings with a manager or HR into the reboarding path. Pay attention to the employee's feedback and create space for them to share their observations after coming back.

A welcome pack

A welcome gift is a lovely gesture and a clear signal that the employer was genuinely waiting for the employee. A returning person will surely appreciate a personalized welcome pack and feel "at home" right away. To streamline the whole process, it's worth preparing or designing gift sets suited to the occasion in advance — for example, for parents returning from leave or employees coming back to their old stomping grounds.

Setting up the workspace and access

A lack of equipment, access, or a place to work is the perfect recipe for making an employee feel like they've dropped in unannounced on a company that wasn't expecting them. Setting up a workspace and smoothly handing over equipment and access sends a returning person a clear signal that they're a welcome guest.
See how to automate ordering and handing over equipment for a new employee >>

Want to set up a reboarding process in your organization? We'd be glad to help! Our Gamfi Onboarding app will re-introduce your employees to their professional roles — whether they're new parents returning from leave, former employees coming back after years at other organizations, or whole groups adjusting to on-site work after pandemic home office. Let's talk!