First Impressions Matter
By Justin Mass
First impressions matter. But what follows a first impres-
sion, the repeating pattern that emerges, is where expectations
are formed. Individuals, teams or organizations will, through
their behaviors and actions, have an opportunity to show what
they are made of, what they are committed to, or what they
are capable of. First impressions, therefore, are either validated
or disproved by what follows them.
One can assume an individual who has just accepted em-
ployment with an organization has formed a positive first im-
pression of that organization. The company is then challenged
with validating and sustaining that first impression. At Adobe,
we know that the orientation experience can help define our
standard of excellence and, ultimately, demonstrate how much
we value the employee experience. As such, we sought to
design an innovative and exceptional orientation experience –
we call it Adobe Life Orientation.
Context
Adobe succeeds only if our workforce is intelligent, creative,
digitally savvy and engaged. Naturally, we commit to hiring
people with these talents, competencies and characteristics.
These individuals have an appetite for rich experiences and
often want to be engaged in ways that evoke their senses and
emotions. Joining a global organization such as Adobe, they
want to feel connected to other employees across the globe.
They also want to engage with their senior leaders to further
validate that they’ve made the best career decision by joining
us.
We believe it is important that new employee experiences
are consistent across our global footprint to ensure a shared
understanding of our core values, processes and guidelines.
We want employees to assimilate the company’s core values
into their day-to-day work life, vocabulary, and interactions
in a way that is meaningful to them within the context of their
local office.
Adobe Life Orientation, our signature new employee ex-
perience, was created to combine the expectations of our new
employees with the company’s desire to deliver a consistent
message and engage efficiently and effectively.
Digital solution for a digital enterprise
When thinking through the design constraints of an
immersive, digital orientation experience, one of the most
fundamental pieces was determining the right platform. We
wanted a platform that could accommodate a multichannel
approach to learning, interactivity and engagement, while also
bridging personal connections all in a digital environment
that reflected the innovative edge of the Adobe company and
brand.
It was natural to leverage our own technology as a platform
for Adobe Life Orientation. The decision to use Adobe
Connect, our web conferencing, digital/virtual classroom,
and collaboration platform, tells a powerful story. It provides
firsthand experience for new employees on how we work
together virtually across offices and time zones. It also is the
same platform all employees use every day as they engage
with their peers, partners, and customers, both internally and
externally.
A digital-first design
For most of our new employees, their first impression and
introduction to Adobe was through solutions they’ve used in
the past. For example, collaborating on a PDF using Acrobat
or developing rich digital media using Creative Cloud. In tak-
ing a digital approach to orient new employees to the compa-
ny, we are introducing, or reintroducing, our new employees
to the breadth of our solutions, brand, and global reach.
Orientation is delivered every week in North America and
is designed to be timely and relevant. Reusing the digital
environment each week gives our program scale and enables
us to deliver a highly-repeatable, consistent experience. We
also make updates to Adobe Life Orientation, evolving the
content and experience over time. There is only ever one ver-
sion of the program because we’re designing and delivering
learning in the cloud via Adobe Connect.
6 July 2017