TL;DR
As Diligent rapidly expanded through acquisitions and global growth, we partnered with leadership to reimagine onboarding as an immersive, week-long experience. Through storytelling, physical artifacts, simulations, and shared rituals, we helped thousands of employees understand the company’s mission, build relationships across teams, and feel part of One Diligent from the start.
Diligent
Client
Merger and acquisition onboarding redesign
Description
Systems Design, Employee Journey, Production Management
Contribution
This work was nominated for the Stevie Awards for Great Employers: Achievement in New Employee Onboarding.
Award Recognition
Challenge
In less than a year, Diligent grew its workforce by 50%, acquired multiple organizations, and expanded beyond board management software into a global Governance, Risk, and Compliance platform.
This was not simply about onboarding hundreds of new employees. It was about helping people from different companies, backgrounds, and time zones feel like they were joining the same organization.
Insight
New employees needed more than information about what Diligent did. They needed to understand why the work mattered and begin forming meaningful relationships from day one.
But onboarding hundreds of employees across different time zones created a practical challenge: a facilitator-led experience could not depend on people working around the clock to deliver the same information repeatedly. We needed to rethink how new hires could access content in a way that felt personal, engaging, and consistent, regardless of when or where they joined.
A week of live presentations would communicate the facts, but it would not scale or create a shared experience. So we designed a journey that combined self-guided storytelling with moments of live connection.
Designing the First Week
Rather than compressing onboarding into a single day, we reimagined it as a five-day story that unfolded over time.
New hires were grouped into small virtual cohorts and began and ended each day together. These shared bookends created a consistent rhythm for the week, giving participants dedicated time to connect, reflect, and build relationships with colleagues from across the organization.
Each morning, a new item from the welcome backpack helped kick off the day. Every item came with a short message from the CEO, turning the physical kit into a daily moment of surprise and connection. The experience blended storytelling, reflection, collaboration, and play, making onboarding feel less like orientation and more like joining a community.
The client chose an astronaut and space theme to represent the idea of setting out toward new horizons together. It gave the experience a shared sense of adventure while reinforcing that progress depended on teamwork: every new hire was beginning a journey, but no one was expected to navigate it alone.
A Multi-sensory Experience
Because every participant was remote, we designed the experience to engage more than the screen. The week combined digital expression, audio storytelling, physical materials, and hands-on simulation to make onboarding feel tangible, social, and memorable.
A physical companion guide gave each participant something to hold, annotate, and return to throughout the five days
Standardized training content became a custom podcast that participants could listen to during screen breaks, with prompts encouraging them to step outside and take a walk
Custom virtual backgrounds and digital emotes gave participants shared ways to express their identity and signal that they were part of the same cohort
An immersive simulation placed cohorts in the role of board members, asking them to use Diligent’s products to navigate realistic governance scenarios and experience the platform from a customer’s perspective
Daily cohort check-ins created space for conversation, reflection, and connection
The result was not simply a remote training program. It was a multisensory journey that moved between listening, walking, making, discussing, and doing—helping participants understand both what Diligent does and why it matters.
Building Rituals
The week culminated in “The Great BBQ Challenge,” where teams explained Diligent’s mission, as if they were talking to friends or family at a BBQ. It turned product knowledge into something more personal, memorable, and easier to share. Cohorts embraced the challenge with more enthusiasm than could have anticipated, with teams dressing up in costume and performing skits, songs, and other presentations. What could have been a typical knowledge-sharing exercise became a lively, collaborative moment that brought out people’s personalities and gave everyone a chance to participate.
Culture grows through the moments people experience together, and the cohort connections were designed as repeatable rituals rather than one-time activities. Together, they helped people build relationships, practice Diligent’s values, and leave the experience with stories they could continue sharing.
Scaling a Shared Culture
As Diligent continued growing through additional acquisitions, pieces of the onboarding evolved into One Diligent, a week-long hybrid experience connecting employees around the world.
Self-facilitated cohorts brought together people across regions and functions. New activities, including customer simulations, collaborative exercises, and Modern Governance for Kids, gave participants fresh ways to understand and communicate the company’s purpose.
What began as new-hire onboarding became a shared cultural experience for the broader organization.
Results
Over its course, the program reached thousands of employees and created a consistent experience across regions, functions, and newly acquired companies during one of the fastest periods of growth in Diligent’s history.
Survey feedback consistently highlighted three outcomes:
A stronger understanding of Diligent’s mission and products
Meaningful relationships across teams and acquired companies
Greater excitement and confidence heading into new roles
Participants described the experience in deeply personal terms:
“I’ve never started a job where I felt as welcomed as I did this week.”
“I sit here on Friday, and I’m able to be myself.”
“It felt like getting a hug from your mum.”
By giving people more than information, the experience created a shared starting point and helped employees feel that they belonged to One Diligent from the beginning.