What is employee onboarding?
Hiring suitable talent is winning only half the battle. Onboarding new talent is one of the most critical steps in ensuring the new talent remains productive and content with their jobs. Employee onboarding is a process designed to help newly hired talent adjust smoothly to the new job and work environment of an organization.
Why does an organization need employee onboarding?
Effective onboarding programs can change the entire onboarding experience delivered. A good onboarding experience helps attract, engage and build trust leading to organizational growth and improves the employee turnover ratio.
Where does eLearning fit into the picture; can it improve the onboarding experience and yield a better ROI?
Organizations should not underestimate the value of onboarding programs since they create an engaging experience for new employees. Having an effective onboarding process can help save on training costs and efforts, retain quality talent and improve their productivity. All these advantages ultimately lead to a better Return on Investment.
Most organizations still provide outdated courseware on slides handed out to every employee joining, no matter their function or role. Employees are expected to understand the organization and its functions from this irrelevant courseware.
Employees are given a stipulated time period to complete the onboarding process, this process lacks any feedback mechanism or interactivity and it ends as soon as the employee completes the course material. This is a waste of time and it is an opportunity lost for organizations. If lesser time is assigned for the onboarding process and formalities perhaps organizations can train employees and assign regular job tasks quickly.
Organizations need custom onboarding programs which can yield better ROI by delivering a better experience, interactive learning, better scalability, easy upgradability. This is where eLearning fits into the picture.
Organizations can partner with digital publishing platforms to convert legacy content into interactive and device agnostic digital content. With learning management systems they can deliver training or onboarding modules as per the needs.
How to improve the employee onboarding process to deliver the best onboarding experience?
1.Reduce time and efforts:
With robust digital learning based onboarding program, L&D and HR teams can deliver the relevant onboarding material which is segmented and created especially for particular functions and designations. This reduces the time and efforts invested by new employees and the HR managers while delivering and consuming the content.
2.Deliver interactive content:
Legacy content in older formats had limitations of device compatibility and interactivity which led to its ineffectiveness to deliver necessary information ensuring retention. Employees for the sake of completing the onboarding process, just skim through the content without taking efforts to retain. With the functionalities offered by digital publishing platforms, content can be made device agnostic and interactive by adding multimedia, AR-enabled content, quizzes and much more. All this ensures delivery along with quicker consumed and retention.
3.Offer relevant content:
With the benefits of online learning and digital content the L&D, HR, Training managers can create separate modules for different subjects. These modules can be segmented according to designations, roles, tasks, and functions. Content being in digital formats is scalable and can be delivered to a large number of employees going through the onboarding process.
4.Track through Analytics:
Each learning module delivered through an onboarding program or a Learning Management System can be tracked through Analytics and its metrics. The HR L&D teams can track, report and gain insights into the content consumption of new employees; also set up quizzes at the completion of modules to know about the knowledge retention of an individual employee.
5.Device Agnostic Content:
With the help of digital publishing platforms, content can be converted to formats like ePUB, which is compatible with most devices and also offers functionalities to integrate interactivities. This compatibility can become an advantage for tech-savvy individuals allowing access to course material at the time and place of their choice.
6.Make it engaging:
All the onboarding courseware should be created aiming at maximum engagement and an effective onboarding experience. Course designers can add engagement by integrating gamification, multimedia as well as AR-enabled content which make the onboarding programs engaging.
7.Enable social and collaborative learning:
A collaborative approach to onboarding encourages new joiners to interact with their colleagues. Encouraging social interaction helps new joiners create relationships amongst colleagues leading to healthy communication, acclimating and quicker knowledge retention.
Guide:
The Smart HR Professional’s Guide to Employee Onboarding
8.Blended learning:
It is a method to deliver digital content along with traditional learning methods like instructor-led classroom learning. This method can be an effective method to create a better onboarding experience. Along with delivering content via LMS or onboarding programs instructor-led training allows one to one interactions.
9.Include storytelling:
New employees should be given a chance to freely interact with superiors and leadership. This builds trust in the minds of the employees. Features like chat forums enable doubt solving at instance; videos embedded into the content gives a realistic experience to employees about their job tasks and their senior’s take on the same.
10.Emphasize on the Company culture:
Information about the work environment, values, mission, vision, ethics of the brand can help employees understand organizations expectations from them.
Conclusion:
A robust employee onboarding process-driven on digital platforms can change the onboarding experience for the new hires. The most effective way to an engaged and productive workforce is having an onboarding strategy in place.
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Snehnath Neendoor
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