Nine out of ten new hires don’t mind quitting a job within the first month.
As if finding the right person for the job isn’t already difficult enough, HR professionals must go the extra mile in making new employees feel welcome by the company. They need to ease their anxieties and provide them the comfort they need to thrive in the position.
That’s only one part of the onboarding process.
The other part includes the transfer of knowledge. The HR needs to train new hires for future success by cultivating their skills and helping them adjust to a new work environment. The company’s collective know-how must be passed on in a time-efficient and personalized way.
Here’s how to streamline this process and foster a happy and successful workforce.
1. Automate Onboarding Using LMS Software
One of the reasons onboarding fails to integrate a new member within a company and its culture is lack of consistency. In organizations, both large and small, HR professionals are usually using a variety of training methods. This can be very confusing to new employees.
LMS and employee training software offer a better alternative.
These are some of the benefits of using LMS for onboarding:
- It delivers training material (company guidelines and online courses) quickly.
- It helps new employees achieve compliance (safety, HIPAA, or HR training).
- It facilitates communication and collaboration between employees.
- It allows for real-time performance tracking and actionable insights.
- It saves time, money, and energy by automating administrative tasks.
By improving knowledge retention rates in employee training and making the onboarding process more engaging, LMS and online training software solutions affect the company’s bottom line too – they help eradicate turnover and boost employee satisfaction and success.
2. Move Onboarding to the Online Environment
Even new hires lose interest in training very quickly.
In a surprising number of modern-day organizations, HR and L&D professionals still rely on outdated training techniques such as classroom sessions, thick training manuals, and VCR videos. What they don’t realize is that technology-based training is far less expensive in the long run.
The following stats prove the supremacy of eLearning online training:
- eLearning typically requires 40-60% less employee time.
- It increases retention rates by 25-60%.
- Employees learn nearly 5 times more material with eLearning.
- Online courses boost employee engagement by 18%.
- eLearning ensures 26% higher revenue per employee.
A lot of companies start implementing eLearning with their HR teams first, by using online HR training software. This gives them an opportunity to discover and establish the most effective practices before they start offering the same benefits to their new employees.
3. Make Onboarding More Flexible & Engaging
eLearning won’t transform your onboarding process by itself. It’s your HR team’s responsibility to discover common pain points in new employees and apply technology in the most effective way. It’s helpful that employee training software allows them to address these challenges.
The biggest problems all hires face are the lack of time and motivation, which means that you need to make your onboarding more flexible and engaging.
Flexibility is achieved with 24/7 access to training material, as well as mobile-responsive designs that allow courses to be taken on smartphones and tablets. That way, employees can participate in the onboarding program wherever they are and whenever they have time to spare.
This is why eLearning requires 40-60% less employee time.
To boost employee engagement, you should make the onboarding process more interactive. Online training software solutions offer course authoring tools for creating various content formats, from traditional text-based material to infographics and video guides.
Some other transformational onboarding techniques include:
- Gamification of training
- Social learning and collaborative courses
- VR/AR simulations of real-life scenarios
4. Keep It Personal and Make Them Feel Wanted
Online training software can also help you personalize your onboarding process and cater to all the special needs of your new hires. With course authoring tools, you can custom-craft their learning paths based on their roles, learning needs, and personal preferences.
But personalized onboarding goes way beyond that. The general idea here is to make every new employee feel welcome and appreciated so that they can integrate within the new environment as soon as possible. Unlike hard skills training, the face-to-face approach is crucial for developing soft skills and building team cohesion.
Here’s a couple of tips to get you started:
- Personally introduce new employees to their teams.
- Include them in team-building activities from day one.
- Assign them a work buddy to help them with integration.
When it comes to helping new hires adapt to the company culture, every member of the team must participate in onboarding. The process starts with the receptionist who needs to greet them warmly in the morning and ends when the security guard escorts them out after work.
5. Help New Hires Set and Achieve Their Goals
You cannot hope to retain great hires if you don’t keep providing them with opportunities to move up and thrive in your company. Because of that, L&D experts often insist on the idea that onboarding is a continual practice that drives new hires forward from day one.
The best onboarding programs help employees set and achieve their goals. You should do so by helping them understand your company’s objectives, expected key performance indicators, and promotion system. Give them an overview of their potential career path within your organization and keep them in the loop with their performance progress.
Wrap Up
According to industry data, 91% of hires are willing to quit within the first month if the job doesn’t match their expectations. With these five steps to better onboarding, your company doesn’t have to be wary about this shocking stat. On the contrary, it can grow with every next hire.
